No reason

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Poll #1488447]

Comments

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

Just about all of the problems that plague other genres can also crop up in science fiction, which has its own problems. Romances may be overtaken by developments in gender politics, but the science fiction of the 1950s was not notable for being advanced; when I read Asimov stories from that period I'm as likely to be struck by the antiquated gender roles as by the antiquated ideas about computers.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Not just that, but the way in which Asimov's short story futures are so clearly "the fifties -- but with multivac and robots and space travel".

He wasn't the only one of course; rereading "The Vault of the Beast" today and it's clearly "1940 but with space travel".

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

And Ray Bradbury once explicitely said: "I actually write about my contemporaries, just dress them in galactic clothes."

But to me that is the definition of MEDIOCRE (at best) science fiction -- I much prefer exploration of deeply alien societies (as in, human or human derived, but very different from us), and better yet, sensible exploration of how technological change changes society.

Like the one or two 1940's books which (fairly accurately) predicted how widespread reliable contraceptives would change gender roles. And they were written when not only very little research was going on in that field, but ALL contraceptives were actually illegal in several states.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I've mentioned this before but Harrison Brown's non-fiction book The Challenge of Man's Future does a fair job of sussing out how oral contraceptives would have to work, using sources mainly prior to 1950. I was surprised to find that bit when I reread it.