A poll for science fiction masses

[kinzel]

As someone who went to Clarion West thirty five years ago I'm participating in this years Clarion West Write-a-Thon ... see my page at: http://www.clarionwest.org/events/writeathon/SteveMiller

alas, my stated goal is to write a new near-future science fiction story and now it turns out that the phrase "near future" creates different expectations for different people. So, I need help figuring out what's near future. I also hear that all near future sf "should be mundane" but ... I dunno.

What's your take:

[Poll #1209566]

Comments

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

It's been decades since I started avoiding "near-future SF." Most of it tends to be either "thriller" stuff and that got boring and lacking interest to me long long ago. There are willing suspension of disbelief issues in it for me, along with "if I wanted to read Boring Contemporary Mainstream Fiction and Its Close Relatives I Would Read Boring Contemporary Mainstream Fiction and Its Close Relatives."

There's no sense of wonder, eclat, surprise, mystery, etc., in it for me. (And I stopped reading e.g. Asimov's long ago, because I was finding very little of the content anything I felt like reading/enjoyed reading.

There is way too much I see of the "ordinary world" and find inutterably tedious for me to tend to accept/be interested in most near-term SF thesis/extrapolation.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Hrm. Quite a lot of classic SF was set in the near future (after all, 30 years out from 1950 means the book is set in 1980... when I was 3 years old). Thus my problem as a child with running into books that should have already happened. And they were rarely Boring Contemporary Mainstream Fiction...

So maybe the stuff you're talking about and the stuff that is legitimately SF set close to the author's now are not the same thing.

(and I dunno, I kind of *like* living in a world where ideas I read about as a little kid have really happened. even if Heinlein didn't imagine how awful cell phones would turn out to be...)

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

I regard "near-term SF" as time set within the next five or so years forward of the originally intended publication year, or with a strong feel of taking the present and extrapolating the social setting forward from the current society most as-is and basing things on the current status quo and values.

Hmm, there's a qualitative metric I can't quite put words to... perhaps its that there's more the sort of thing that makes a book feel like "near-term thriller" with most of the contemporary social limits and tech limits and attitudes and institutions, as opposed to different social structures and mores and tech base and expectations--there are those generational things involved, perhaps.

The old trope of SF had people going out exploring the universe, traveling through time/space/to alternate worlds excited about going out and exploring... there isn't all that much of that today, what the bulk of SF/F and related material is these days, is fantastical, particular there is a huge onslaught of paranormal romance/urban fantasy (there is a very large overlap zone in them) particularly contemporary ones which involve some degree of alternate reality. The old go-out-to-the-stars-and-explore stuff is mostly absent these days. There's still exoticness to paranormals/UF to some degree or other, but most of the near-term stuff has very little exotic content to it.