Quote:
Originally Posted by legion
Good science fiction allows a generation to work out its hopes and fears before they are realized. Asimov, Bradbury, etc. were working through where all of the progress with technology would lead us. Many of the issues they first envisioned are being realized now.
Baby boomers were optimistic about technology. So was their sci-fi.
Us Gen Xers are more pessimistic. We like "burning trash can" sci-fi. That's what you're going to get for a few more years.
|
I agree...generations change. Heck half of Star Trek has come to pass besides the warp drives and food processors. We know so much now, so many things that were written up as "amazing and impossible" is normal for us (look at the cell phone and internet). Hell, we have Navy ships using rail guns, and anti aircraft systems using laser. As a kid I thought we'd be landing on planets and have colonies but I now know why, thanks to scifi...space is too darn giant.
What classic old school scifi taught me about space is simple. Without a faster than light engine and a faster than light shield for space dust space is gonna be pretty boring. We got probes all over the system but we can't go anywhere cool without lots more speed.
Back to books.. you have to throw in what individual's are looking for. Me for example, I've been a scifi nerd since I was a pup in the 70's. Then you throw in my twenty years of active duty military and I lean that way in my books. They talk my lingo with common words and play out a world that sound's familiar. Honor, duty, sacrifice, with some adversity and space battle. It all needs to be in the books that are the most fun for me to read.
I could crank out list's of fun military scifi.-WW
ps. As I mentioned in a scifi post a few weeks ago, for me the best military scifi series I've read is Jack Campbell's
Lost Fleet.