Why is it that contemporary artists have a hard time imagining utopias, or that

audiences don't seem to be interested? Why is futurist fiction now overwhelmingly

dystopian? (self.DarkFuturology)

submitted 1 year ago by ruizscar

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Those who took Utopia down from the light blue skies of Russian fantasy into
living experimentalism enriched the revolutionary process. They invented and
contrived, tried and erred, innovated and lived their innovations in what they
believed to be the central spirit of the revolution. They attempted to bring the
theory alive in a physical setting. The merging of practical need with experimental
striving in the revolutionary years is striking in its incidence and density. The
practitioners viewed these experiments not as the "impossible dream," the well-
known Quixotic leaning of the Russian intelligentsia, but as the only antidote to
the impossible reality. The irony of their effort and their fate has brought
sarcastic smiles and disapproving shrugs from commentators ever since. Yet what
they deserve is empathic laughter, sympathetic tears and an occasional burst of
applause for their courageous, outlandish, and at the same time hardheaded view of
reality and their determination to affirm what is best in the human condition. The
German philosopher Ernst Bloch, the most brilliant and touching commentator on
Utopia in our century, called this whole tendency the "principle of hope" without
which man cannot remain sane and survive in a world beset by the madness of our
times.

Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian

Revolution. 1989 by Richard Stites
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[]TellMeAllYouKnow 1637 points 1 year ago

Back in the 60's, when we all thought we were going to die and felt helpless to
stop it, we imagined ourselves a kind of heaven: a future where everything is okay,
where there's no need to fight, where we can be free and live in peace and the only
questions left to solve are philosophical ones. A lot of shows (of all kinds) in
the cold war era showed this kind of severe optimism; just look at Adam West's
Batman, or MacGyver.

We've gradually come to the realization that we're probably not all going to die in
one big nuclear war, and now we don't know what the future will hold. It's scary to
think of the future now that we know we have one. After the cold war ended, a lot
of fiction moved towards gritty and dark and serious, something that we're still
struggling to overcome today. In part, that came from our realization that things
we thought were true are less than true: the President is not infallible, America
is not the greatest nation on Earth, we started some wars where it was murky
whether we were in the right, or if there even was a right. And in addition, now
that the cold war was over it was safe to face those fears. Nuclear holocaust
became a bigger theme. Radiation, mutation, the destruction of humanity, it was no
longer a very real possibility so it was easier to think about.

Now in the 21st century, I think things are moving away from both optimism and
pessimism, more towards realism. We see what's happening now, and we extrapolate. A
future that's like now, but with marketing extrapolated forward. A future that's
like now, but with technology extrapolated forward. A future that's like now, but
with the environmental crisis extrapolated forward. And the problem with that is
that we don't feel so great about the world we live in now. We see the present as
partially dystopian, so we tend to extrapolate that forward into a dystopian
future.

A big part of this is that we're fulfilling the 60's sci-fi visions with technology
but not with social progress. It was taken as read that when everyone can contact
everyone else at light speed, when we all have all the world's knowledge at our
fingertips, there's no need for conflict. But we have those things, and there's
still conflict. We've been disappointed.

But don't fret! Look at all the apocalypse books written during the 40's and 50's.
They moved on from that. It's a cycle, and it will come back around.

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[]pasabagi 838 points 1 year ago*

I'd go for an alternate explanation. There's a problem with your periodization - a

lot of dystopian sci-fi came out in the 80's, which is before the cold war ended.

Up until the 70's, on every scale, the world was getting better. Economic growth
was fast, technology was progressing at an unprecedented rate, and best of all,
this was really improving people's living conditions. Relative wages were at the
highest they have ever been, and man's technological mastery and sense of social
responsibility was both achieving unimaginable achievements, like the moon
landings, and ending ancient social malaises. Disease, hunger, and war all looked,
for the first time in the history of mankind, to be solveable problems.

Then came the financial crash, then in response to that, Reaganomics. Suddenly, the
great programmes like space exploration became too expensive. Mentally ill people
flooded the streets as society decided they could not care for them. The west
turned away from manufacturing, from technical mastery, towards financial services,
and places like Detroit started turning from Utopian dreams into dystopian
nightmares.

It became apparent that technology would be used in the future, not to eradicate
smallpox, or to end hunger, but to observe and control people en masse. So
Cyberpunk. That technology would be used to create horrible poisons and plagues. So
Post-apocalyptc fiction. That technology wouldn't end the insanities and outrages
of human society, but rather just allow us to perform them on a far greater scale.

PS: I've actually been thinking about writing an analysis of the TV show 'Doomsday
Preppers' on this line - the interesting thing about this show is you get a good
idea of the living conditions of people wholly engaged in a fantasy apocalypse. A
disproportionate number of them started engaging in 'prepping' after a financial
catastrophe, a failure of government, or some kind of traumatic shock. In a more
turbulent financial environment, these events happen more often, so you get more
'preppers'.

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[]jvalordv 139 points 1 year ago*

I wrote a research paper on dystopian science fiction films for a graduate course,
and I would bring it back about a decade before Reagan. Of course, forms of
dystopian film and literature existed before then, but I contend that this marks
the true turning point because 1. the genre was for the first time taken seriously
by wide audiences, 2. filmmakers had more control over their work than they ever
had had in the past, and 3. these films brought to life a dark future, but also
reflected contemporary societal ills.

Downfall of Censorship and Rise of the Auteur - In the late 60s, US filmmakers no
longer had to worry about the US production code, also called the Hays code. This
was essentially a series of morally-based guidelines that amounted to censorship.
Abandoned in 1968 and replaced by an early version of today's rating system, the
first X rated movies were soon released. The first popular one was Midnight Cowboy
with Dustin Hoffman - but the X rating would a few years later go to another
decidedly more dystopian film, A Clockwork Orange.

This period also saw a new rising group of filmmakers, which has typically been
college educated and closer to the rising youth and counter cultures than the
filmmakers who came before. Known as the New Wave, they brought with them new
socially conscious themes and novel forms of style and cinematography. They were
able to flourish in this period, both as a result of the end of the production
code, and because the studios were willing to give much more leeway. Movie
attendance had been quickly dwindling since the war, as television became the
medium of choice.

From Space Ants to Space Stations, Legitimizing Science Fiction - Stanley Kubrick,
one of the key auteurs, who I would argue more than anyone ushered in and
represented New Wave filmmaking, is also singularly responsible for legitimizing
science fiction to general audiences. Before Kubrick, scifi amounted to giant
monsters made from radioactive fallout or aliens in flying saucers. By and large,
they were B-flicks considered trash by the general public. Then came the Monolith.

2001 Space Odyssey changed everything. Originally met with mixed and uncertain
reviews after its release in 1968, word of mouth quickly popularized it. People
from all walks of life were curious about it, saw it, were confused by it, and
discussed it. It also became particularly famous among contemporary counterculture.
LSD had become prominent, and the trippy last scenes of the film expanded the
potential audience to people who might not have been interested in a "serious"
film.

A Dystopia of the Future or the Present? - There are too many films to name, so
I'll just gloss over a few. 2001 had some dystopian elements, like most notably the
computer that attempts to murder everyone. But I think that ultimately, the film
has a positive vision of the future. However, throughout the 70s, new science
fiction films by and large depicted dark futures. A Clockwork Orange, another of
Kubrick's works mentioned before, presents a future where crime is rampant,
particularly among the youth. Yet despite all the "protagonist's" horrifying acts,
we the viewer become even more shocked with the state's solution - to remove his
free will. A depiction of runaway youth and counterculture juxtaposed with devious
yet authoritative government.

Other forms of these late 60s-70s dystopian scifi take place after worldwide
disaster, typically nuclear. The parallel to fears of nuclear conflict,
particularly post-Cuban Missile Crisis, are obvious. 1968 also saw the release of
Planet of the Apes (you blew it all up!). Some fans of George Lucas might know of
THX1138 - a student film he made starring Robert Duvall trapped in a dystopian
post-apocalyptic future. Omega Man is the story of Charlton Heston trying to find a
cure for a disease that has wiped out most of humanity - a disease spread through
world-wide biological warfare.

Other prevalent themes focused on the results of overpopulation and a deteriorating

environment, like Logan's Run and Soylent Green among many others. These directly
reflected the prevailing concerns of the time. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is
considered to have pretty much started the modern environmentalist movement in
1962, when she explored the effects of various chemicals like pesticides on
animals. The Population Bomb was a sensationalist 1968 book about how millions
would starve to death when there would be too many mouths to feed in a few short
years. It was a best seller. Anti-nuclear movements had already been exceedingly
popular, but now the new concern was the destruction of the environment, mass
famine, and death. It wasn't helped byby such things as rivers and lakes catching
fire, one of which being featured in Time magazine in 1969. Under great public
pressure, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. These
environmental themes have remained in dystopian fiction ever since, through the
gritty industrial settings and cyberpunk universes to the lush planet of Avatar's
Pandora.

And, things were only to get worse. 1973 brought the Yom-Kippur War and oil
shortage. The US spiraled into recession, and the postwar Golden Period of US
history was over. In 1974 Nixon was impeached, embroiled in national scandal. In
1975, 11 years after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and US military operations in
Vietnam, Saigon fell to the North.

If there's enough interest, I might continue with more films resulting from the
emerging national crisis of confidence in the mid-70s, go into some more sub genres
(Alien and Blade Runner and other corporate dystopias) and mention the rise of the
blockbuster movie, which ended the New Wave and created a new mass market brand of
scifi (ET, Close Encounters, Star Wars). But, since I've been typing all of this
while at work, I should probably stop for now.

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[]lawtard 26 points 1 year ago

From a strictly film perspective, Kubrick was deeply convinced that the western
world was slipping into authortarianism while grandly proclaiming that it has been
defeated.

Consider, Clockwork Orange, the film is vastly different from the book. Choices
like using the 9th rather than the 5th. The question is why? Well my thought on it
was what the 9th represents - its historical connotations with the 3rd Reich. The
marching music of facism perhaps? The question of the Ludiviko treatment itself -
did it work at all? I cannot say, since at the end we see our unreliable narrator
is more than willing to play the game the gov't has set in motion.

Kubrick also fled the US after "Dr. Strangelove" brought him in the sights of the
commie hunters. I think that deeply influenced his work.

I've always thought 2001 was a journey to free one's self of the burdens of
technology. Even though it allows us to do these amazing things, it also acts as a
streight jacket against us reaching our full potential. Everyone has theories about
this movie. I've got a bunch but that's the least radical lol.

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[]ElijahBrowning 4 points 1 year ago

I recall reading in an interview of Kubrick that one of the central themes of

Clockwork Orange was political extremism, and how that the state in that movie
represents the far-right and the paraplegic writer who ends up corrupting Alex
represents the far-left. I think a clue as to why the ninth symphony was used is in
the lyrics of the last movement, commonly known as "Ode to Joy," but first let's
turn our attention to the scene in Alex's room after his big night of delinquincy.
IIRC, Alex blasts the second movement of the ninh while on a hallugenic drug trip--
one whose visions include such visions as an avalanche, a vampiric Alex, and a
hanged bride amoung other grotesqueries. Now, look into the lyrics of "Ode to Joy"
and you'll see, in all its Romantic glory, almost hallugenic notions of world
peace, brotherhood, spiritual unity, etc. all of which starkly contrast to the
scenes in Alex's head. What's more, it is the finale of "Ode to Joy" which plays at
the very last scene, the one where Alex supposedly recovers and returns to his old
convictions. What we have here, I believe, is a clashing set of polar opposite
visions: spiritual unity and the like agianst malice toward humanity, which
parallels the polar opposite war to exploit Alex between the far-right and the far-
left. To add to OP's discussion about dystopian film, I sort-of interpret this as
an pseudo-libertarian Orwellian warning Kubrick style, that the state may play the
music we all want to hear, but what it does can only deteriorate humanity (as
represented by Alex's behavior and the society he lives in).

Also, to further answer your question about why the ninth and not the fifth, i
think it's because the fifth has strong connotations to WWII. For example, the
symbol "V" Churchill would make with his two fingers isn's just symbolic for
"victory," but also because in morse code, V takes the form of the first four notes
of the fifth symphony. Not only that, but the French also used the opening movement
of the fifth and gave it lyrics to write a song about peace and solidarity in 1941.
Compare this to the scene of the Nazis used in the movies theater. As you might
have wondered, why would a government that represents the far-right dissuade Alex
from violence by using the most far-right regime in history? I think the answer
might be that the state is just trying to re-brand itself, by metaphorically saying
it's a new brand of far-right as opposed to the old order far-right. This is why
the fifth symphony is predominantly absent--because it goes back to the notion of
abstaining from the old-world and its symbols, as the state, for either party, must
always make itself seem revolutionary and new to appeal to people unsatisfied with
the current order (Think "A Change We Can Believe In" back in 2008). This also goes
back to the ninth symphony, as the lyrics of "Ode to Joy" discuss, in a way, is a
New World Order based on spiritual unity and all that jazz, again symbolising
government propaganda taken to absurd lengths.

source

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[]Panzerdrek 6 points 1 year ago*

http://www.kubrick2001.com/

Honestly, this is the best explanation I've ever encountered. I had my own view of
the whole thing (I interpreted the Monolith as being a literal "blank slate," which
informed my views of everything else that happened in the film, but it's purpose is
much more literal), and was skeptical of this at first. Then I read the book, which
was written simultaneously with the script for the film, and realized that yeah,
this interpretation is pretty much dead on.

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[]pasabagi 15 points 1 year ago

This is interesting - I'm not sure if Hunter S Thompson's a good source, but here's
an interesting quote about periodization:

" There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up
the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks
anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was
right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handlethat sense of inevitable victory over the forces
of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didnt need that. Our energy
would simply prevail. There was no point in fightingon our side or theirs. We had
all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and
look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark
that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I guess the major accademic anti-utopian moment was when the rejection of modernism
became the dominant orthodoxy, and a lot of the arguments hinged around the idea
that the old utopias had led people into the horror of Auschwitz.

The interesting thing is, in some senses, hippies like Hunter S Thompson were anti-
utopian figures, since they were extremely disdainful of traditional 'progressive'
organisations.

I guess the interesting thing about recent years is that it's become almost
impossible to imagine writing, for instance, a concept like Star Trek. Then again,
have you ever read something like Olaf Stapeldon's Last And First Men? Because a
lot of his 'utopias' sound totally horrendous.

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[]api 3 points 1 year ago*

I'm not sure Star Trek feels completely utopian these days. All the stories are
from the point of view of high-ranking basically military men, and the society
looks very much like a socialist dictatorship of some kind. Art and culture seems
very, very bland too, very devoid of personality or "spice." It sort of looks like
what Chairman Mao might have dreamed about for the future of his brand of
Communism, and it seems very stifling to any notion of individual self-expression.

But I agree that it's far more optimistic than, say, Bladerunner, Total Recall, the
Alien universe, Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, etc.

One factor I haven't seen mentioned here is the demise of our faith in central
planning. All the old utopias were based on the idea that well-intentioned,
rational, and wise men in togas or white coats could centrally plan a utopia. What
we discovered is that this is deeply implausible for all kinds of reasons-- social,
economic, even mathematical (game theory, iterated prisoners' dilemma, etc.). We
also watched as every attempt at central planning, from Communism to urban renewal
in the USA, met with disaster.

In the political sphere this greatly empowered libertarian ideology of various

forms, everything from hippie anti-civilization/neo-primitivst anarchism to Ayn
Rand. But I think people have always had this sense (with some good reason) that
libertarianism leads to dystopian futures where everything's either fallen apart or
is now owned by authoritarian mega-corps. Hence cyberpunk and its relatives...

The only utopian fiction I see these days tends to be back-to-something fiction...
back to pre-industrial times, back to pre-civilizational times, etc. Usually it's
both post-apocalyptic and utopian, all about people re-discovering a mythic past
once civilization has melted down.

That being said, I hate this state of affairs. I hope the tide turns a bit in the
future. These things usually do. Maybe if we can get a handle on some of the
problems we face, that will be reflected in our fiction.

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[]pasabagi 2 points 1 year ago

I guess the vulcans are pretty much the epitome of the paternalistic utopia which,
as you say, kinda foundered in the 20th century. However, I guess the reason why I
always find Star Trek to be pretty sunny and cheerful is because, at the most basic
level, people in that universe are capable of solving problems. Our own social
situation, and dystopic fiction in general, is characterised by the intractable
problem - the problem which is a priori impossible to resolve. We all agree hunger
is bad, but we feel powerless to prevent it - indeed, we have a whole load of
arguments (and I think game theory is pretty culpable here) that rule out several
putative solutions. Whether through lack of will, or (in the darker universes, like
the Lovecraftian ones) lack of technical possibility, dystopia is almost always
about the powerlessness of humanity in the face of horror.

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[]Tallain 5 points 1 year ago

Is there any way you could post the research paper online to read? That would be
pretty great.

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[]jvalordv 7 points 1 year ago*

I might do that. I just graduated in May, but now have a job that has nothing to do
with the field and have considered polishing one of my term research papers to see
if it might be good enough for submission to an academic journal (it's about 25
pages if I recall). Extra feedback would be pretty cool.

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[]megablast 2 points 1 year ago

That would be great, and I would love to hear about more films.

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[]moreelen 2 points 1 year ago

Please post it up as it would make a very interesting read. Congratulations on

graduating and the new job!

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[]alexjean 4 points 1 year ago

Yes, I am interested in hearing about more sub genres and mass market scifi. Veeery
interested!

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[]TheBrainSlug 4 points 1 year ago

Some fans of George Lucas might know of THX1138 - a student film he made
starring Robert Duvall

Small correction: THX-1138 wasn't a student film. It was a proper feature film,
distributed by Warner Brothers. It was, however, based on an earlier (1968) student
film called Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB.

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[]eaton 140 points 1 year ago

Don't overlook the fact that there are cycles in the genre itself -- influenced by
the broader culture but also formed in reaction to previous styles and influences
in the genre.

Scifi is a pretty young genre, relatively speaking: you had the pulp era in the 20s
and 30s, the golden age in the 30s and 40s, and then the New Wave era in the 60s
and 70s, where the quality of the literature was kicking up, more experimental
writers were taking a stab at futuristic stories, and you started to see a split
between "soft" futuristic stories and "hard" science fiction. The latter turned
into a parade of military space opera during the new wave period.

Then you had the cyberpunk movement that kicked off in the 80s as a deliberate
reaction against new wave scifi and its cliches. (http://cheap-truth.blogspot.com/
is a newsletter that a bunch of now-famous scifi authors published pseudonymously
during that time, when they were just schlepping short stories to Omni magazine and
having arguments about how space opera sucked. It's an interesting peek into the
mentality of a rising movement).

Cyberpunk, of course, accumulated a bunch of cliches of its own over the next
couple of decades. But one of the things it definitely did was make a lot of the
space opera and utopian science fiction look naive. It also anchored the idea that
"edgy" scifi could be rooted in the gritty reality of urban life and projection of
modern social trends -- not just far-flung space empires thousands of years in the
future.

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[]pasabagi 57 points 1 year ago

Yeah, my analysis is basically simplifying an incredibly complex matter - I mean,

the best methodology I've ever seen is the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's, who came
up with a complex system around the notion of 'fields', which accounts for
everything from local institutional cultures, to counter-cultures, broad economic
pressures. The basic problem with action-reaction accounts of cultural movements is
that there are many ways to react to a given genre (say, space opera) but they have
varying degrees of success. I mean, the dominant form of anti-space opera could
have been the lovecraftian twin, where intrepid explorers venture into the cosmos
and discover the universe is insane and horrifying.

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[]Wholly_Shnike_Eaze 35 points 1 year ago

Interesting return to the scope of possible literary reactions. Also, your mention
of the motif popularly used by Lovecraft reminded me of J. Conrad's Heart of
Darkness. In turn, the juxtaposition of these two narrative-vectors (inward- and
outward-travelling) then reminded me of that quote by Pascal from his essay on the
"religious wager":
 When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity
before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of
spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The
eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

Anyway, thanks for the t(r)ip!

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[]pasabagi 49 points 1 year ago

There's a fair bit of lovecraft-inspired space opera knocking about - sadly, most
of it's pretty crap. But it really would work - I mean, Lovecraft can pretty easily
be read as writing about the anxieties of the colonial enterprise. The real
innovation of his horror is that he develops a new realm of the frightening - while
previous horror novels essentially worked on a christian axis (werewolves,
vampires) or were horrors of science (frankenstein), Lovecraft is unprecedented in
that his monsters are neither good nor evil - they are prior to both. They are
primordial; if 'in the beginning there was the word, and the word was God' is the
defining christian statement that the universe is one of order, not chaos,
Lovecraft's monsters are before the word. In many pagan societies, Gods represent
the various powers at work in the cosmos - Lovecraft's Gods are of this kind. His
Gods express the anxiety that the real principles of the universe are not phyiscal
laws, but rather lawless and mad deities. Lovecraft's racism, his depictions of
black people and arabs, all fall around this idea of pre-rational, pre-ethical
madness - and the anxiety of his stories (and, from his letters, his personal
anxiety) is that these 'primordial' people are actually the ones in tune with the
universe, and that they, not white civilisation, will be the future.

It so happens that this was more or less how colonists, including Conrad, dealt
with colonialism in Africa. Colonists didn't think of Africans as irrational, they
thought of them as pre-rational. (Won't get into the political reasons behind this
belief here). I guess, in a sense, what I'm groping towards is the conclusion that
what Lovecraft was really afraid of, was actually the Heart of Darkness.

Now, the traditional space opera is a colonial fantasy. You explore an infinite
universe, bereft of troublesome natives - an infinite west with no native americans
to displace, ready for commerce and exploitation. Putting Lovecraft's monsters out
in the darkness between the stars would complicate that nicely.

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[]Snatch_Pastry 23 points 1 year ago

Sooo... The Warhammer 40K universe? I can't vouch for the quality of the books that
are out there, I only know it from the game, but it's a near perfect example of the
colonial/Lovecraftian melange you're talking about.

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[]pasabagi 34 points 1 year ago

Yeah, pretty close I guess, but from what little
always seems pretty christian, except everyone's
Lovecraft's monsters are amoral. They don't want
They want to kill you because they have an alien
your insides. They're evil by accident.
I know about it, the morality
an asshole and God is dead.
to kill you because they're nasty.
curiosity about the texture of

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[]Snatch_Pastry 23 points 1 year ago

but from what little I know about it, the morality always seems pretty
christian, except everyone's an asshole and God is dead.

Fuck me, I'm at work and I have tears in my eyes from trying not to laugh out loud.
I'm not sure I've ever seen something so complex described so succinctly yet
accurately, while at the same time being completely incomprehensible if it were out
of context.

Well done.

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[]tobi-saru 5 points 1 year ago

As a huge fan of the books that knows little of the tabletop games, it seems pretty
close to me. Especially regarding the chaos gods.

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[]lotsofsyrup 6 points 1 year ago

what would you say are the best 40k books to start with? sounds fun.

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[]WombleCat 6 points 1 year ago

Aaron Dembski-Bowden: Soul Hunter. Something i read quite recently. Its the first
book in a series focussing on the Night Lords, a traitor legion that doesnt
actually follow chaos.

I've also read a book or two from Dan Abnett, which are more easygoing. Dembski-
Bowden is a bit intense.

Anyone got any suggestions for books regarding Chaos or the Eldar? Most of my
knowledge about the Eldar comes from the computer game, Dawn of War :P

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[]Reesesjesus 2 points 1 year ago

I have like 50 WH40k books, and I'd have to say just about anything from the Horus
Heresy series is going to be a pretty good book, especially my personal favorite
The First Heretic by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (best wh40k writer next to Dan Abnett).

I'd also suggest the Gaunt's Ghost series for a view at what it would be like to be
a normal soldier in WH40k's unforgiving environment. Hint: it sucks

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[]LeFronk 8 points 1 year ago

i woudnt count WH40K as SF ... its more fantasy with spaceships. Space Nazis
(Imperium) fighting space zombies (necron), space monster (tyranids), space demons
(chaos), space elfes (eldar).

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[]doodeman 18 points 1 year ago

"Fantasy with spaceships" is pretty much the definition of space opera. 40k is dark
space opera.

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[]WhatVengeanceMeans 4 points 1 year ago

Recall /u/eaton's discussion of "hard" versus "soft" SF. I'd actually rate 40K as
harder than some, because they outright tell you that their laws of physics are
different from those of reality (the Empyrean is distinctly fictional) where "soft"
SF writers tend to just write things that are (for example) thermodynamically
impossible and never even think to hand-wave because they don't understand
thermodynamics themselves. 40K is a little kinder to my suspension of disbelief.

That said, you're essentially calling 40K "soft".

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[]1UnitOfPost 4 points 1 year ago

What's a good introduction book to Lovecraft?

I've been going through the history of sci-fi lately (such as Starship Troopers,
Ender's series, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Neuromancer, etc) and am
thinking I should tackle Lovecraft next (I like horror almost as much) but want to
get a good intro.

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[]pasabagi 7 points 1 year ago

Well, they're all short stories, so the penguin classics editions aren't bad places
to start. However, to be honest, as much as I love his contribution to the genre
and find it intellectually fascinating, his work can be a bit dry.

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[]serioussham 3 points 1 year ago

I'll just point out the moderately active /r/Lovecraft

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[]Squoghunter1492 2 points 1 year ago

Where would a mythos like Mass Effect fall in the grand scheme of SciFi? It seems
to me (ignoring the apocalyptic robots of doom) that the entire universe is an
incredibly realistic view of how the universe would be if we encountered multiple
other species out there.

There's a lot of misunderstandings between the races on things like culture and
anatomy and all that stuff, but basically all "civilized" people get along, despite
their differences. There's a lot of politicking, especially in regards to the human
Systems Alliance's ambition, and there's also some real grimdark thrown in there
too, with things like Batarian slaver raids, monstrous creatures that annihilate
colonies, and simple tragic mishaps, like some miners who ran out of oxygen on a
moon and died alone. Lots of stuff.

It feels like a representation of our own time extrapolated into the future, but
(ignoring doombots) without all the stereotypical tropes of SciFi really showing
through. I mean, it's SciFi, but it's not obnoxious about it, and it's not really
space opera or grimdark. Where does it fall?

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[]pasabagi 3 points 1 year ago

I don't really know it that well - to be honest, games are difficult to place
because they often have far weaker stories and settings than a novel or film would
need to be popular. Doom, for instance, while awesome as a game, has a plot of
basically 'kill scary bad dudes'. A technically fantastic game will do well
whatever the story, so that kind've skews the needle as far as working out how it
relates to the broad strokes of culture.

EDIT: Some recent games (The Last of Us) seem to be turning this around, a bit,
which is awesome.

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[]Squoghunter1492 3 points 1 year ago

The original Mass Effect isn't exactly known for it's gameplay (hint: it's
terrible), but its still widely renowned for some of the best storytelling in video
games, or at least it was at the time.

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[]pasabagi 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah - to be honest, it's a pretty difficult thing to apply techniques you use in
analysing a novel to a game or a film, because the social and technical challenges
are totally different. Games are really an extreme example, because they're non-
passive. Moreover, different games ask the player to take different subjective
positions - in one, they are a soldier, in another, they are an impersonal force
controlling an army, in another, they are an architect and manager of a prison.
Much harder than novels, for instance, where they are always just the reader.