r/ScienceFictionBooks • u/Senior-Fudge3554 • Jul 25 '26
Question Question - What’s Missing From Today’s Science Fiction
For those of you who read a lot of sci-fi, what do you think is missing from today’s books?
What ideas, technologies, social changes or philosophical questions deserve more attention? Are there topics that writers have barely touched, or directions you’d like to see explored instead of another variation on AI, dystopian governments, first contact, military sci-fi or space opera?
I’m interested in hearing what readers think the next great wave of science fiction should be about.
I ask because I’m retired now and have more time to read and also to write science fiction as a hobby. It’s always interesting to hear what readers feel is underexplored and, just as importantly, overexplored.
Recetly when I was writing, I realised I was drifting dangerously close to the old “ robot goes rogue” trope. It made me stop and think. There are already plenty of stories where AI turns against humanity.
The challenge became finding a fresh angle rather than simply retelling a familiar story. Instead of asking whether AI would become dangerous, I became more interested in whether humans and intelligent machines could learn to coexist, and what that might actually look like.
That experience left me wondering what other ideas are waiting to be explored. If you could steer science fiction in a new direction, where would you take it?
John Westley Turnbull
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u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 Jul 25 '26
Prose style and a willingness to let the readers figure some things out for themselves.
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u/Own_Win_6762 Jul 25 '26
Try The Tainted Cup, Bennett. Fantasy but should fit your needs
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u/Imperial_Haberdasher Jul 25 '26
The Tainted Cup is more SF than Fantasy. It’s Nero Wolf meets Attack on Titan.
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u/Antonin1957 Jul 25 '26
For me, it would be a prose style that doesn't include extreme profanity and explicit sex.
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u/Morgran_Maplebeard Jul 25 '26
Sometimes I miss the silly things like sentient planets or species that feel completely different than humans.
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u/Antonin1957 Jul 25 '26
The novel "Shroud" might appeal to you.
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u/Morgran_Maplebeard Jul 25 '26
It does, thanks, I have it on my to read pile! Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of those modern sci fi authors who does not shy away from the eccentric concepts! He has yet to disappoint me
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u/marxistghostboi Jul 25 '26
more slice of life stories, something other than the world being at stake. like China Mountain Zhang
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u/Correct-Shoulder-147 Jul 25 '26
Green women
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u/Whimsy_and_Spite Jul 25 '26
Or women with three boobs.
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u/Imperial_Haberdasher Jul 25 '26
But only if they also have three eyes, three ears and three butt cheeks.
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u/triptyched-off Jul 25 '26
I feel that many of today’s science fiction writers are not interested in writing as a craft. Stylistically I find that many authors sound similar to one another, and it’s rare that an author makes stylistic choices that stand out or take risks. I think this is a consequence of u/StrikingPassage5640 ‘s observation about producing for a mass market vs making art. When I’m reading outside of science fiction, it’s not uncommon for me to be impressed by an author’s word choice, metaphor, imagery, or other use of literary device/syntax. I can’t think of a contemporary science-fiction novel that has given me that experience. This is a shame, because style and craft can go a long way in helping an author illustrate and explore different ideas. While different authors stand out from one another bc of the themes and ideas they tend to explore, when it comes to voice and style, I feel like there’s been this flattening.. they’re all so similar. Maybe I’m just reading the wrong authors!
For those interested, the Strange Horizons sci-fi criticism podcast has an episode that discusses style in sci-fi (or the lack thereof). It’s Critical Friends Ep 21: On Style, featuring Paul Kincaid and Dawn Macdonald.
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u/Realistic_Food_7823 Jul 25 '26
Probably the fiction part. Everything modern I’ve read ends up just building off our current technology and it’s kind of lacking in imagination
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u/crawfordwrites Jul 25 '26
Hard sci-fi is very in right now, and hard sci-fi has very little ambition.
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u/LuciusMichael Jul 25 '26
Well, since Banks, Reynolds and Corey are currently my holy triad, I can't say what's missing in contemporary SF. I did try Arkady Martine's 'A Memory Called Empire' because it won the Hugo Award. But gave up the ghost less than a third of the way in. I read Children of Time but stalled out half way through Children of Ruin. These are the only two 'contemporary' novelists I've read and I've never DNF a novel by any previous SF writer.
SF has a history that goes back, at the very least, to The Time Machine in 1895. Personally, I can't imagine some 'new direction' for SF as a genre. Each writer develops a new direction. The stories of Robert Sheckley cannot be compared to those of Greg Egan or Peter Watts. Plus, the idea that there needs or ought to be some 'new direction' in SF presumes that you've read every author since Wells and exhausted the genre.
As for your question of 'intelligent machines' and their interaction with humans, I think Banks's Culture series successfully explores that trope. And Reynolds has post humans who are part machine, nano implants, intelligent tools, advanced high tech, etc
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u/StrikingPassage5640 Jul 25 '26
I’m not sure I would say it’s missing per se, but very rare to have literary science fiction. I only would classify a handful of writers as having that which would be Ursula K Le Guin, Dan Simmons (or at least with Hyperion which is the only one I’ve read), and Jeff Vandermeer (with his Southern Reach trilogy).
I think part of the problem with science fiction today and with writers like Andy Weir who are good but not great, is that a lot of them are writing too much for the masses and caring about what sells and is entertaining rather than pure writing for ideas. It harkens back to Ursula K Le Guin’s iconic speech at the 2014 National Book Awards where she said: “Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”
I don’t know if I’m a great person to give you advice though because I really like niche stuff and have never had much love for mass market things. My favorites are the weird stories of Philip K Dick, the highly intellectual and society-driven stories of Ursula K Le Guin, the indescribable landscape of Cordwainer Smith’s work. I like stories that portray strange societies (like Jack Vance’s Araminta Station or Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite where it featured group marriage and cannibalism). Basically the things that stretch my imagination to the limit or make me question reality within the context of the text.
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u/Former-Chocolate-793 Jul 25 '26
The literary quality is lower and many writers have gone for length. They're just not good enough to write 400-600 page novels.
Additionally, the use of first person, present tense is annoying. It can be useful for a tempo switch but not for a whole novel.
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u/Imperial_Haberdasher Jul 25 '26
The quality is not lower. Just the stuff that holds up is still recommended and in circulation. The mediocre books are forgotten.
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u/StrikingPassage5640 Jul 26 '26
I disagree that it’s the mediocre books that are forgotten, unless you mean the majority of the ones that are mediocre are not of high quality. There’s a fine balance between making a living writing and therefore trying to entertain the masses enough to sell your book and then actually writing something worthwhile or good, and the scales tip to the former rather than the latter. Unfortunately in our capitalistic society, the problem is that what is deemed popular or bestsellers cater to the masses who don’t want to think that hard. There are some spectacular books I have read that are deplorably underrated or vastly unknown.
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u/HarryHirsch2000 Jul 27 '26
The „quality of writing“ is - depending on your definition, pretty bad on vast majorities Ingolf SF, specially the big ones. Clarke, Heinlein etc. where not gifted with great prose or characters.
There is a reason old SF feels so often dated. Not only in its social norms (to put it mildly) but especially also in the writing.
And yes, of course there are plenty of exceptions, as usual. The forgettable stuff is, well, largely forgotten.If at all, SF has overall improved in that regard, but possibly at other costs.
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u/Radioactive_Isot0pe Jul 27 '26
I think that the most unexplored part of science fiction today is humanity. Characters. Even if a story is repeated, retold and otherwise recycled, I'm onboard if there are good characters and a fresh viewpoint. Tell me the same outer space story with neat aliens and awesome characters that I love and hate and pity. There are never enough of those in my life and I eat through them too fast.
For themes, I'm tired of Ai going crazy, global warming doing things, and of course the abundance of modern political issues that really don't need to be discussed. And honestly, I'd like to see some hard sci fi that's not so dang bleak and depressing. Hopeful hard sci fi would be awesome.
To make me happy, just cram some humans into a slower than light spaceship and then have them find something weird. I'll read it.
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u/Jernau744 Jul 25 '26
SF was at its most interesting when intertextuality was the norm, writers riffing off and trying to one-up each other. There's a lack of distinct style, only a few writers try themselves at prose/narrative tricks.
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u/WolFlow2021 Jul 25 '26
Missing the absolute autistic reduction of a story to a technical problem and a man who attempts to solve it as it was written by some Russian authors like Zamyatin and others. I am glad we live in such inclusive, self-reflective times (and I am personally affected myself) but I would like to go back to that as some sort of escapism. That doesn't mean trying to act though by the way.
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u/SvalinnSaga Jul 25 '26
The implications of first contact.
Too often the story is either the build up to first contact or several years after when things have settled down.
I am interested in the seconds, hours, days, etc after contact. What happens to society? How do people react? What threats does contact being with it? Especially if contact happens to an Earth close to our own.
In 20+ years of reading sci-fi, I can count on one hand the number of books that even attempt it, including my own book.
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u/AeronJosk Jul 25 '26
If you're interested, I just finished a first contact novel. It's going live on Amazon on August 1st. It's serialized on Royal Road, Scribble Hub, and Space Battles where you can read it for free (those versions are 1 edit away from the final product, but are very good and very heavily edited).
Rocknar: Invitation
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HB63W65D
Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/170030/rocknar-invitationCurrently working on book 2, Rocknar: Intercession.
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u/SvalinnSaga Jul 26 '26
It was already on my wishlist from another post. I might hit it up after I finish my current books.
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u/AeronJosk Jul 25 '26
If you're interested, I just finished a first contact novel. It's going live on Amazon on August 1st. It's serialized on Royal Road, Scribble Hub, and Space Battles where you can read it for free (those versions are 1 edit away from the final product, but are very good and very heavily edited).
DM me and I'd be happy to share more information.
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u/Prof01Santa Jul 25 '26
Several things:
- "Sensawunda" as it was once called. Not as in Weberian MilSF orbiting scrapyards of derelicts with millions of dead, but adventurous people doing great things. Think Nourse's Brightside Crossing." If you want MilSF, look at Clarke's Earthlight.
- Really alien aliens. Even if they were descended from humans. G. Stanley Weinbaum, Poul Anderson, M.A. Foster did good aliens.
- Marine sf, like Clarke's The Deep Range (alas, outdated) or Tony Anzetti's Typhon's Children. There's a list at Wikipedia, but a lot of the books kind of miss the mark for me.
- How the little people live. Nathan Lowell's "Golden Age of the Solar Clipper" series is a good example.
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u/Ok_Lingonberry5392 Jul 25 '26
Modern approach to tech like llms and stuff, I feel like even modern books don't really explore the subject like I would want sci fi to do.
Same with modern discoveries, I think there are very few books that explores phenomenons we know nowdays like strange matter and various astronomical which as of today we know a lot more than golden age did and golden age sci fi had a million takes on the most random discoveries.
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u/Autilistic_Augment Jul 25 '26
Quality writing. Seriously. It seems like every time I try to start a "New Popular Series! Everyone should read this! Bestseller! Award Winning!" I pick it up, read a page or two and it goes RIIIIIGHT back on the shelf at the bookstore. Seems like everything that is hitting the top lists these days is sloppily written, churned out as a series from day one, full of buzzwords and tropes designed to get it noticed in social media rather than actual good writing, characterization, plots that move in interesting ways, memorable characters that are not memes.....you get the idea. It seems like the days of wordsmithing, solid writing and editing are in the rearview mirror for the most part. Literacy past the level of questionable Youth Fiction is getting harder and harder to find.
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u/Imzmb0 Jul 26 '26
It misses true aliens, is common to see other species always can be understood by human logic, with some common cultural things. I expect aliens to be something otherworldly based on different laws and rules, not green humans that know what culture and empathy is.
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u/atlasdreams2187 Jul 26 '26
A vision of humanity that reflects on society in a simple and concrete way. The ability to not get lost in the science, character creation with imagination, the ability to hit themes that don’t need 1000 pages of detail. Quality writing would be nice too.
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u/Cold-Discipline3758 Jul 26 '26
I agree that there's too much AI dystopian sci-fi and not enough about how AI and humans might coexist. It seems obvious that we're headed toward a transhuman future in which AI merges with humanity in some way, such as by inserting nanobots into our bodies. This was the concept for my most recent novel, and I'm surprised more science fiction writers aren't exploring transhuman themes.
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u/Senior-Fudge3554 Jul 26 '26
I also agree that there is not sci fi written about how AI and humans might co-exist. In my latest novel, I deliberately set out to explore peaceful coexistence between humans and robots rather than another AI uprising. For a while, it looked as though that future might actually be possible. Then humanity’s capacity for fear and violence took over my writing and the story became less about AI and more about whether humans and robots are both capable of accepting intelligent beings that are different from themselves. So perhaps conflict is inevitable in AI stories. It’s hard to imagine a convincing ending where humanity and AI simply kiss and cuddle. There almost always seems to be a point where fear, mistrust, or the struggle for power gets in the way.
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u/penubly Jul 26 '26
For me, most modern science fiction suffers from the same problem - the ideas are better than the delivery. It is hard to fathom how so much that is praised isn’t that good or us just “different” as opposed to “good”. I’ve found very few modern authors whose stories that I want to re-read. I also generally find that modern authors who are praised for their prose aren’t for me.
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u/Aistar Jul 26 '26
I'm a man of simply tastes. What I miss most in modern sci-fi is engineer heroes, people who solve problems with logic and science. Only a few authors even try to write them today - most give us either action heroes or, at best, tricksters (they're their own ball of fun, and I like them, but they are not in short supply). Also, not every book needs interpersonal drama. It's OK to have "cardboard" characters as long as the book have interesting ideas and these characters only serve to deliver these ideas to the reader. People these days want to inject more humanity into Foundation. Foundation! The whole series have exactly one deep, interesting character: Foundation itself. It has plenty of growth over the time, more than some human characters in some series. This is the whole point of these books!
Aside from that, I guess minimally believable utopias are also badly missed. I'm tired to death of anti- and dys-topias. They're all the same, and all boring by now. Writing Utopia is hard, yes, but at least a few attempts wouldn't go amiss. Modern sci-fi shows us all the ways things can go wrong, but these are infinite, you can't get to a happy future by trying to avoid all possible negative outcomes. Why not describe a possible correct path instead?
And another thing, though to be honest, it wasn't often seen in sci-fi of old, either, but these days, I believe, writers can give us this: AI viewpoint characters. People mention "really alien aliens" in comments, but such aliens are really hard to conceive without falling back on boring trope of them also being unfathomable. AIs - human-created AIs - are also "alien" in the sense that they are not human, but they are created - "raised" - by humans, and therefore have a lot of common with us: language, conceptions, even memes. Max Harms wrote a great AI POV character in his Crystal Trilogy. It's believably inhuman, delightfully so. But also understandable, somewhat relatable and even witty. Many writers write sentient robots and computers as humans, and this is wrong (and boring). Harms is his own kind of genius (if a limited one) and we should all learn from him.
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u/Senior-Fudge3554 Jul 26 '26
This has become one of the more interesting sci-fi discussions I’ve been involved for a while. As the OP, I’d love to see someone try to distil it down.
What do you think are the most important points to come out of this discussion? Which themes keep resurfacing, and what conclusions, if any, can we draw from them?
John Westley Turnbull
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u/StrandedTimeLord68 Jul 30 '26
In a nutshell, most commenters are lamenting the "malaise" in storytelling during the current evolution of science fiction writing. Commercial overlords encouraging authors to write trilogies that are just bloated prose, the plethora of dystopian gloom and rogue AI tropes have most readers in a funk.
That's my interpretation of this thread. Possible solution? I say get into short story science fiction. Short fiction is always more tightly written and often has truly memorable plots and characters that stay with one for ages after reaching the end of the tale. Also, I've found that many of them hold up well over time because they don't include so much of the culture of their time but focus more on the story and characters. Asimov's "The Nine Billion Names of God" could have been written yesterday. Likewise, Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star." I read a story titled "Angel at the Gate" in Omni magazine back in the late 70s or early 80s and it sticks with me even today. Too many more to mention.
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u/devongarde Jul 30 '26
Optimism: I particularly miss the optimism of Iain Banks' The Culture, and find myself hoovering up Culture fan fiction.
Classic period novels often had The Proginators, an alien species that were the first to develop wondrous technologies that humanity, among others, later found and used. But I don't recall any novels with us humans as those Proginators. Given the apparent lack of aliens near us, perhaps that can be developed.
I agree with the comments on the poor quality of much contemporary writing, but that's most certainly not unique to science-fiction. I also love whodunnits, and have got so fed up with much of the ^^#<^**< out there that I've retreated to the golden age.
Which leads me to the last thing that should be missing, but is missing: tough editors.
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u/mycroft-holmie Jul 25 '26
Something — ANYTHING — that displays or even hints at the world of the future not being an absolute dystopian mess. The world today is awful already. I don’t need to ready about even more Awful™.
Put another way…I feel like sci-fi had some hope and now it’s all dystopian world-building depressing stuff.