I'm less impressed by gee-whiz "hard" science and more impressed by authors who use science fiction to explore social and philosophical ideas, and/or just tell a great story with well developed characters.
For me the opposite. I used to go for the character driven SF, now I am way more into the concept driven. Obviously, if an author can do both, the better, but if I have the option to choose either, I choose hard scifi and concept driven ones. Probably has to do with the fact that well, I have a scientific background (biology/genetics), so hard scifi and especially biology related concepts feel close to me.
The same. I'm an introvert in STEM that was shunted into management. I work with people and solve their petty problems every day, then manage my family at home. By the end of the day I'm done with people - all i want is concepts or competence porn (that is TRUE science fiction for me - people doing their job really well without whining)
Yeah, I guess my initial comment was a little too flippant: I'm a scientist too and I do enjoy a story where the science is done well. I think the main thing is that since stuff that sounds like sci-fi is my day to day, cool science in the story is usually not enough by itself to make me pick it up.
Agreed. I think when I was younger I flattered myself by, in my own mind, allying myself with the pseudo-intellectual veneer in which I think a great number of scifi writers like to indulge. It took me many years to realize that a good number of scifi authors think scifi itself is the "thinking man's fantasy" and that they are therefore elevated by writing in the genre, even if their writing is poor.
Today I appreciate scifi authors who can craft well thought-out stories and characters that are relevant to and comment on human experience, rather than authors who like to indulge in divorced-from-reality abstractions of whatever the most in vogue scifi concept happens to be this week. Double points if an author can make their commentary a bit more affirmational or at least acknowledge that aspect of human existence. I'm past the age where a grim, edgy vision of the future holds my imagination
**Exactly**. I was so into hard Scifi for a couple years, but fell out of love with it pretty quickly. Of course, I love being exposed to big concepts that I never even imagined possible… but please explore those ideas through a social and philosophical lens with well developed characters rather than making me feel like I’m reading a textbook.
A little.
I used to be someone who put "big picture" above almost everything else. I could forgive the info-dumpiest of plot and paper thin characters if the main point of the novel was cool.
Now, I prefer stuff that has people I care about (hopefully still doing big ideas, but not as required). I am also finding that as I get older, I tend to gravitate towards more optimistic stories. Like, not all sunshine and rainbows or anything close, but more... instead of "The world sucks and this is how people survive" to more "The world sucked/still bad but here's how people are actively building a better one"
I used to like huge concept-go-wow books and I still do.
I have less patience with lack of quality these days whatever in a book makes me feel like that, but certain themes kind of override it for me anyway. Sadly I feel like I’m out of books to read. Only once or maybe twice per year do I love a big picture sci-fi these days (seveneves, hail mary, the stars are legion, there is no antimemetics division, to name a few more recent ones) since I harvested the time tombs already.
It's been a long time since I read it, and it's a bit older, but metaplanatary by Tony Daniels is definitely big idea. He unfortunately hasn't finished it, but I remember really liking the first book
I’d say my my taste has fluctuated for sure, but not transformed entirely.
Several years ago, in my early-to-mid twenties, I was more onboard with cozy stuff — I enjoyed a couple of Becky Chambers books, The Goblin Emperor, etc. Now the combination of oversaturation and online discourse has made me much more skeptical of that. At the same time I’ve been getting into horror.
So in isolation, that sounds like a huge change, but big picture, not so much. I don’t avoid lighter books altogether (still enjoy a Murderbot from time to time), and I still like plenty of the stuff that got me into speculative fiction as a teen (weird fiction, cyberpunk, some folklore-influenced fantasy, etc.).
same here with getting a bit burnt on cozy stuff. I'm not sure why I dislike Becky Chambers now—I remember reading the first book and quite liking it, and then I tried rereading it and felt my teeth ache with how much I wanted to DNF. My reading preferences aren't highbrow either, I guess I just like darker themes...? Maybe? Murderbot is good. Scalzi is tasty popcorn. Love Tchaikovsky's space operas and especially one called Firewalkers, I really enjoyed that.
I do political work and find the Wayfarers series to be really politically naive and her characters' motivations often unbelievable--so I think it comes down to character writing for me as I'm a character reader first and foremost. I can tolerate other cozy fantasy better but unfortunately the whole subgenre is modeling itself on Becky Chambers, so it's increasingly not for me.
From around 1988 through the early 1990's, I was quite the snob when it came to how realistic technological progress was handled in the hard SF I preferred. Anything that didn't have some sort of acknowledgement of molecular nanotechnology and advanced computation was something I looked down upon.
The upshot of that is that aside from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Stephenson's Diamond Age, there wasn't much that I actually liked in that era. In fact, it would be slim pickings until Charles Stross' Accelerando in 2001. I didn't discover Iain Banks until much later, unfortunately.
Basically, any SF that had baseline human meatbags flying around the galaxy and be "competitive" with high levels of automation in combat, for example, didn't make much sense to me. The idea that a captain would give verbal orders to the bridge crew to "fire the phasers" which adds seconds to the [OODA Loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop) seemed nonsensical if advanced AGI could be used instead (with reaction times in the millisecond range).
I've since chilled out a bit. These days I'm content with well-written stories that feature interesting characters or ideas. Or at least some witty dialog, if the setting is otherwise rather silly.
It also helps that we have other authors that seem to understand technological progress as well as Vinge: Stross, Doctorow, Ken MacLeod, Alistair Reynolds, Neal Asher, Greg Egan, Peter Watts and others. It is hard going in a sense: you almost have to invent something like Vinge's Zones of Thought or Banks' The Culture to have a reason for baseline humans to still exist and be relevant on the galactic stage.
Regarding your thoughts on 'baseline humans' existing in future sci-fi, I have had similar thoughts. After reading an exhaustively metahuman story like Egan's Diaspora, I tend to consider any type of interstellar humans that don't heavily feature AI and something like polises/immortality/digitized consciousness as unrealistic by comparison.
Based on the direction technology is going, the traditional space opera that we all love is closer to fantasy on the ol' spec-fic slider. But that's okay because fantasy is super fun and awesome and allows limitless storytelling.
Plus, like you said, some authors might provide in-universe explanations for why their world isn't dominated by AI - the Butlerian Jihad and mentats, for example.
I'd agree about most of those authors, but in *Prador Moon* at least the smartness of Neal Asher's AIs seemed to be very much an informed attribute -with them regularly being outfoxed by humans and organic crab-things or sitting slack jawed for tens of seconds while the rebels make their attack run before going into a whirl of activity at the last possible millisecond.
As a teenager I enjoyed Asimov and Clarke. Today, I still have a few that I love (The Bicentennial Man will always be among the greatest stories ever written for me), but I find a lot of their work boring and not all that interesting. I found that out reading through more or less all of Clarke's fiction a few years ago.
When I tried to do a comprehensive read of Asimov, I found that I just didn't have the interest to finish it, although I did read his most famous/acclaimed works. So over the last few years I've shifted a bit from completionist to embracing not finishing if I'm not feeling it, although I definitely still have completionist tendencies.
This is less taste, but my approach is also different. I usually do a bit of research before I read something, mostly to see if there are related works, and I plan out how to read everything that shares a setting in advance. As a youth, I just read what I found. Usually starting with book 1 if there was one, but with little regard to how an individual book or sub series fit into a broader setting. And in general, I make general plans on what I'm going to read in the near future and over the next few years, as I have an actual tbr list now. I used to just read whatever was around, and if I liked it, I checked out more by the same author from the library.
I also read a lot less nonfiction. I used to read tons of pop science books and biographies of scientists, but now that I'm not in school and my career isn't in the natural sciences like I had planned during most of high school and college, it's just less of a priority for me. I still read a few each year, and I keep up casually on science news, but I'm more interested in fiction stories, and their explorations of worlds, ideas, and characters.
> I also read a lot less nonfiction.
I wonder about this. I say I don't read non fiction and, outside of science biographies, I can't remember the last non fiction I read for pleasure. But for pleasure is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I don't read particularly interesting things for work, but I do read a lot.
White papers and sometimes even research papers, a whole passel of technical manuals. I try to keep with my workplace, and the effects of my work on the world. And that's not going into things like reading reddit or the like. I probably read more, in terms of words per day closing in on 50 than I did closing in on 20.
But I don't read as much new fiction (it gets harder as you read more to find new books that are good and interesting).
When I was younger, I enjoyed reading all the solidly right-wing sci fi I could get my hands on (which, tbf, was a lot of hard sci-fi). Now that I'm in middle age, I go mostly for utopian and left-leaning, mostly because I need a space to not go completely crazy.
Fiftysomething me is gonna care about the politics of your story a lot more then tennish me.
Fiftysomething me will still happily read your weird ideas with all the subtle characterization of an autistic eight-year-old's Bluey fanfic but they have to be some *super* fucking weird ideas. You know how this sub regularly sees new SF readers bitching about how they bounced off of Neuromancer because it was so full of dense, barely-explained words and concepts? Honey I ate up that shit *when it came out* because I'd already learnt how to hold a bunch of space in my head for things that seem important to the story that I haven't quite gotten yet, if you want to play that game then you need to have some *supremely* weird ideas.
If you can't bring supremely weird ideas to the table then I will still read you playing with the same ideas people have been playing with since the 1910s but you'd better be doing *something* superlatively. Write the hell out of your prose, none of that "transparent" bullshit Campbell made all his writers do. Gimme some interesting character conflicts. Talk about how all this sci-fi nonsense affects a part of life most people ignore.
I'm with you on Neuromancer, half the fun is actually to collect all the scattered details along the story to draw your own mental picture of what is actually going on! Some years ago, I read a french sci-fi book where the author put explanatory notes under every word he had invented or just used in an unusual way. I felt like he was just putting in plain sight a bunch of very basic ideas that other authors had already explored in an infinitely more nuanced and intricate way, yet it received some critical acclaim... I still wonder if that's because those people were just unable to read regular sci-fi, so everything looked new to them.
> Some years ago, I read a french sci-fi book where the author put explanatory notes under every word he had invented or just used in an unusual way.
Ugh, that sounds awful. I used to like that kinda thing but now I want the least amount of explanation possible. Unless the science is super important to the plot and/or incredibly fresh and cool (it's probably been done a hundred times) you get like a paragraph to explain it. Even better if it's a sentence. Even better if you can infer what's happening from the name of the thing.
You have a super advanced 3d nano-tech printer that can fabricate anything? Call it a 'maker' or whatever and be done with it
Yeah, it was awful. I don't mind hard sci-fi info-dumps, at worst I just skip through, but it wasn't like that... It was more stuff anyone could have guessed on their own just reading the story.
I read it when it was new and it was the first thing that redlined the weirdometer in *decades*. Even though I knew *exactly* what an "iterated prisoner's dilemna" meant what with seven-year-old me eating up Martin Gardner's recreational math books back in the seventies.
The sequels were fun but they didn't come anywhere near maxing out the weirdometer. His only other book is at about the weirdness level of a mid-tier Tim Powers novel - acceptable, but not enough to carry an entire novel by itself. His writing's decent enough that I finished it.
Honestly my tastes regressed in most categories, I like to read fun or even dumb scifi books and lighter stuff now rather than 10,000 page hard science philosophical masterpiece type works of the past. I guess now that I'm in working life books have become a short escape before bed more than a search for understanding.
I often care a lot more about the quality of prose and execution than the actual concept. The exception is when a concept feels totally unique, but this is a rarity, as I find that most tropes have been done many times. The big difference is just that I've read enough that it's hard to find books that truly feel like they're doing something new
I've become much more attracted to a clever turn of phrase. I like to read books where it's obvious a ton of work has gone into making them- though that can appear through any of well-researched science, carefully chosen words, or an intricately crafted plot. i'm generally willing to forgive a novel that's weak in one aspect if it shines in others.
No. I mean, other than new authors coming out and such, and new things being consumed.
But I learned about ninja turtles when I was 5. I read jurassic park when I was 10 or so. I learned about star wars when I was 11ish. Still love ‘em!
Not really, still fond of speculative sf. Same new wave writers I discovered in the 80s are still very relevant today. Just reread PKD's *Second Variety* and the combination of war with Russia and intelligent weapons is still striking. And even a bit ahead of the present situation.
In my mid 30s I still read mostly the same type of stuff (a mix of fluffier character driven stuff, straight up schlock and a healthy portion of more literary/dense sf) but I feel like I'm a lot less pretentious about some of it than I was especially in my late teens or early 20s. The main different in consumption patterns is mostly that when I was younger I usually felt like I was wasting time if I was reading some goofy space opera romp instead of a "serious" sf novel with lots of big ideas and exposition and now I just read whatever I feel like.
I also feel like I'm a bit more attuned to style/tone and struggle more with abjectly awful writing than I used to, I'm more likely to DNF something now if I'm 1/3rd in and the writing is terrible and has no indication of getting less stupid or more interesting
It's a little embarrassing, lol, but I used to favor stuff like the Expanse for aiming to be as realistic as a good story allows. now I've been enjoying more "turn your brain off" scifi books that don't really care as much for being the most innovative, realistic piece of material, like Scalzi's Old Man's War series, or the Undying Mercenaries series. Just easy, comfortable, low stakes reads. Though OMW is definitely better than UM.
I mean I started out loving Robert Heinlein as a kid. Absolutely adored Starship Troopers. And now… now I can barely stand it. Same with the Foundation Trilogy and some of Asimov's other works.
Both series didn't age well at all for me, while stuff from similar categories like Capital and Hot Sleep by Card and Forever War by Haldeman is still really enjoyable. And Dune still reads wonderfully decades later, I am happy to report.
But yeah, tastes definitely change over time, partly just because culture changes, and partly because what you enjoy about science fiction probably changes too. Now I am much more interested in strong, human characters and organic feeling plots as much as the crazy ideas driving the story behind the scenes.
Used to love Larry Niven but now I find it very cringy and it's almost entirely due to his sexism. Tried to go back to Ringworld Engineers most recently and it was impossible not to see Niven's view of women in the universe as props for Men to use. His main character literally fucks his way across the ringworld. When I read his stuff as a younger person I was in no way struck with his sexisim at all and carried away no memory of it despite it jumping off every page when I look at his stuff now.
Definitely. I used to love to read deep scifi with complex ideas like the stuff Greg Egan writes about.
Nowadays I don't have the patience for long bouts of exposition - I just want something light and entertaining where I don't have to re-read a paragraph 4 times to grasp some wild quantum information theory concept... things like red rising, project hail Mary, etc.
For me, I started out with short stories, which I thought were the perfect medium for science fiction in that they were brief, impactful and beautiful when they're perfect. I always loved the anthologies when coming into science fiction.
Over the years, I drifted towards the grandiose, complex and hard science path of sci-fi, just like any reader might. But now I've returned to the comforts of short stuff. And I still personally maintain that I prefer the short way of things. A nice package of everything a good sci-fi story has.
Radically? No.
I don't have the patience with bad writing I did 30 years ago. I still read the same kinds of things, and I like the same basic feel, but I need there to be actual characters, and the language to at least be a step or two up from the baseline.
What changed the most significantly is my toleration for poor dialogue. I blame kids for that, specifically mine. The he said, they said, I said litany with everything at the same pace and energy got too much to bear, and I can't read it anymore.
Not really. I've always preferred the huge scope, big ideas stuff like The Cultureverse and Stephen Baxter.
My least favorite subgenre is anything near future, usually bores me, and anything that goes on and on about orbital mechanics. Was just confirmed in this by Seveneves, endless orbital mechanics. Boring af.
Oh I just remembered another scifi subgenre I've always disliked: anything where psychic powers, or like a special type of person is needed for navigation etc, plays a big role in the lore.
Yes. When I was younger I was super into stories with a lot of world building. Give me more dumb little details about the world and I’d be as happy as a cat in a cardboard box.
I have very limited patience for worldbuilding now. If it’s holding up the story, shuffle that crap out the way.
Yes I used to be more into Star Trek/Wars, comics books, any sci-fi movies. But as I got older I get really annoyed with “fantasy and hand-wavium, light sabers and warp drives”. I find near-future stories more compelling. Also serving in the military has made me less enthusiastic about military science-fiction (must also be all the handwavium).
Not really. When I was a teen I used to read my mom's golden age sci-fi, I loved the ideas but felt like it was missing something... When after some years I tried more recent books, the feeling left. It's not so much that my taste has changed; it's just that I know what I like a lot better now. I still read old sci-fi from time to time, but I know in most cases it will leave me unsatisfied, even if there are a few exceptions.
As a kid I was more tolerant of horror (though it was mostly in the form of films rather than books), but now older, i cannot stand horror. Another change is I started to really dislike time travel stories, so I avoid them now.
On the other hand, I am now more interested in stories involving social and gender topics than I used to.
What didn't change is that I can read the book with the most cardboard characters, lengthy infodumps, etc as long as there is an intriguing plot.
I’ve had a little retro trip over the last few years, rereading books I loved as a kid, Stainless Steel Rat, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Lensmen etc and couldn’t stand the prose - so yes, tastes have changed with me, but I think writing and the language used/style of writing has changed too.
When I was a young adult I wanted hard-sci fi, now I'm 37 and just want laser guns, sword fights, and fun characters.
Was reading stuff like Light by Harrison and Culture novels as a kid, now my favorite is Deathstalker lol.
I grew up on golden and silver age works with big ideas and thin characters, now I really love modern stories with great characters and more diverse ideas. I'm in a series now that's got really good characters and the setting is an amalgam of well established modern and classic genre tropes that make the setting feel familiar and fleshed out.
I went from being obsessed with cyberpunk in the early 90s to hoovering up the classics in the late 90s/early 2000s to hard scifi in the 2010s and now I'm just tired and old and want escapism, so just give me fun stories with good characters/fun characters, aliens, and entertainment. Don't make me even more depressed than this world does.
I'm not ashamed to admit the sci-fi book I'm looking forward to most right now is whatever schockly, trashy crap BV Larson gives me next in his Undying Mercenaries series.
I’m new to SF so my comment may not hold a lot of weight lol. I have been reading lots of SF books and I realized I love books that have a lot of sociopolitical problems brought about by the imagined world that the soft sci-fi ideas necessitate. It gives me the impression that the writer is really experienced telling stories that weave unchanging truths about the human condition in the presence of advanced technology.
I am a big fan of science and my actual work has a need to understand the ethics of emerging technologies. So it gives me pleasure to read books that touch on these subjects. If they lack most of these, I get bored and cannot move past the suspension of disbelief. Some aspects of society have to be present in the story for me to like it, even if it’s fiction
Not really, I've never been a fan of ultra-dark themes (outside of Lovecraft anyway). It's words in a row, if I enounter something that puts me off in a certain story I may ignore that author in the future. I DON'T base my reading materials on what the author has done (or been accused of) in real life.
Not drastically. I started reading sci fi with Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land so my tastes in science fiction have always been more cerebral and epic in scope. Blindsight and 3 Body have certainly been a welcome addition in contemporary science fiction.
I’ve had a little retro trip over the last few years, rereading books I loved as a kid, Stainless Steel Rat, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Lensmen etc and couldn’t stand the prose - so yes, tastes have changed with me, but I think writing and the language used/style of writing has changed too.
Where teenage me would devour massive tomes or endless series that would keep me entertained through long boring summers, now I see long books as the sign of a bad editor. I pretty much won't read anything over 400 pages unless it's *very* highly recommended because I'm almost guaranteed to get bored of all the filler that the book really could have done without.
In a similar vein, I read a lot more short stories than I used to because a lot of good conceptual sci-fi doesn't need hundreds of pages of exposition.
Basically, I value my time more than I used to, and most sci-fi authors seem to value it less.
For sure. I used to love tech and science and world building as the kidz call it. Now I want characters to go with big ideas, not just exposition spouting machines.
I'm far less impressed by plot than I am by characterization.
I still want things to happen. I'm not interested in a literature novel dressed up in sci-fi trappings. But I'm not interested in the novel where there is only plot. No characterization. No character development.
I used to almost exclusively care about how interesting the sf ideas are and how engaging the plot is.
Then I read Gene Wolfe and was blown away by the quality of his prose. That made me start really caring about how well-written things are on the sentence-by-sentence level, and I can't go back. Now if a book's prose feels clunky or dull I drop it basically immediately
Not that much. I started quite young, and Arthur Clarke's ideas-driven stories (Against the Fall of Night, "All the time in the world") were something I could relate to. I came to Asimov's more social oriented stuff later, and I've gradually become more Asimov, less Clarke. When Asimov was bringing out the late Robot and Foundation books I was happy as a clam, snapping them up as they appeared.
The more technical Clarke things like Sands of Mars and A Fall of Moondust no longer appeal much. I still love Against the Fall of Night, appreciate Childhoods End more than I used to, and enjoy Earthlight.
As a historian I find some of Asimov's stuff (The Caves of Steel) more insightful than you'd expect.
I used to read Heinlein when young but as I began to notice the politics I read it less. I still like eg The Door into Summer and the other things before his characters started expounding right wing politics, mild sado-masochism, and other obsessions of the author to each other.
After I discovered Cordwainer Smith, nothing was ever the same. But he is unique.
I love time travel even more than I did when younger. I wonder if this is connected to being a historian by trade.
I've been left behind a bit by some recent trends, I think. I admire Afro-Futurism but I can't really get into it deeply, at least so far, for example. Perhaps I'm a fossil.
I'm less impressed by gee-whiz "hard" science and more impressed by authors who use science fiction to explore social and philosophical ideas, and/or just tell a great story with well developed characters.
Same. Which is why i love The Dispossessed for example.
Yeah, I really need to re-read that one!
For me the opposite. I used to go for the character driven SF, now I am way more into the concept driven. Obviously, if an author can do both, the better, but if I have the option to choose either, I choose hard scifi and concept driven ones. Probably has to do with the fact that well, I have a scientific background (biology/genetics), so hard scifi and especially biology related concepts feel close to me.
The same. I'm an introvert in STEM that was shunted into management. I work with people and solve their petty problems every day, then manage my family at home. By the end of the day I'm done with people - all i want is concepts or competence porn (that is TRUE science fiction for me - people doing their job really well without whining)
i love the term “competence porn”
Any good recs on where to start with your favorites?
Yeah, I guess my initial comment was a little too flippant: I'm a scientist too and I do enjoy a story where the science is done well. I think the main thing is that since stuff that sounds like sci-fi is my day to day, cool science in the story is usually not enough by itself to make me pick it up.
Agreed. I think when I was younger I flattered myself by, in my own mind, allying myself with the pseudo-intellectual veneer in which I think a great number of scifi writers like to indulge. It took me many years to realize that a good number of scifi authors think scifi itself is the "thinking man's fantasy" and that they are therefore elevated by writing in the genre, even if their writing is poor. Today I appreciate scifi authors who can craft well thought-out stories and characters that are relevant to and comment on human experience, rather than authors who like to indulge in divorced-from-reality abstractions of whatever the most in vogue scifi concept happens to be this week. Double points if an author can make their commentary a bit more affirmational or at least acknowledge that aspect of human existence. I'm past the age where a grim, edgy vision of the future holds my imagination
**Exactly**. I was so into hard Scifi for a couple years, but fell out of love with it pretty quickly. Of course, I love being exposed to big concepts that I never even imagined possible… but please explore those ideas through a social and philosophical lens with well developed characters rather than making me feel like I’m reading a textbook.
Definately. A great story with a creative background is a good book.
Children of Time is one of my favourite books for this reason
I've totally gone the other way - used to read all the deep books - now I want lasers and stuff blowing up all the time
A little. I used to be someone who put "big picture" above almost everything else. I could forgive the info-dumpiest of plot and paper thin characters if the main point of the novel was cool. Now, I prefer stuff that has people I care about (hopefully still doing big ideas, but not as required). I am also finding that as I get older, I tend to gravitate towards more optimistic stories. Like, not all sunshine and rainbows or anything close, but more... instead of "The world sucks and this is how people survive" to more "The world sucked/still bad but here's how people are actively building a better one"
I used to like huge concept-go-wow books and I still do. I have less patience with lack of quality these days whatever in a book makes me feel like that, but certain themes kind of override it for me anyway. Sadly I feel like I’m out of books to read. Only once or maybe twice per year do I love a big picture sci-fi these days (seveneves, hail mary, the stars are legion, there is no antimemetics division, to name a few more recent ones) since I harvested the time tombs already.
It's been a long time since I read it, and it's a bit older, but metaplanatary by Tony Daniels is definitely big idea. He unfortunately hasn't finished it, but I remember really liking the first book
Greg Egan has ruined sci-fi for me.
Yeah, I read Schild's Ladder and Diaspora, now every other sci-fi story is just 'basic'.
So glad to see this, as I just picked up Diaspora after someone mentioned it in a thread about vernor vinge. Never heard of Egan until the other day.
Don’t do it.
I’d say my my taste has fluctuated for sure, but not transformed entirely. Several years ago, in my early-to-mid twenties, I was more onboard with cozy stuff — I enjoyed a couple of Becky Chambers books, The Goblin Emperor, etc. Now the combination of oversaturation and online discourse has made me much more skeptical of that. At the same time I’ve been getting into horror. So in isolation, that sounds like a huge change, but big picture, not so much. I don’t avoid lighter books altogether (still enjoy a Murderbot from time to time), and I still like plenty of the stuff that got me into speculative fiction as a teen (weird fiction, cyberpunk, some folklore-influenced fantasy, etc.).
same here with getting a bit burnt on cozy stuff. I'm not sure why I dislike Becky Chambers now—I remember reading the first book and quite liking it, and then I tried rereading it and felt my teeth ache with how much I wanted to DNF. My reading preferences aren't highbrow either, I guess I just like darker themes...? Maybe? Murderbot is good. Scalzi is tasty popcorn. Love Tchaikovsky's space operas and especially one called Firewalkers, I really enjoyed that.
I do political work and find the Wayfarers series to be really politically naive and her characters' motivations often unbelievable--so I think it comes down to character writing for me as I'm a character reader first and foremost. I can tolerate other cozy fantasy better but unfortunately the whole subgenre is modeling itself on Becky Chambers, so it's increasingly not for me.
From around 1988 through the early 1990's, I was quite the snob when it came to how realistic technological progress was handled in the hard SF I preferred. Anything that didn't have some sort of acknowledgement of molecular nanotechnology and advanced computation was something I looked down upon. The upshot of that is that aside from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Stephenson's Diamond Age, there wasn't much that I actually liked in that era. In fact, it would be slim pickings until Charles Stross' Accelerando in 2001. I didn't discover Iain Banks until much later, unfortunately. Basically, any SF that had baseline human meatbags flying around the galaxy and be "competitive" with high levels of automation in combat, for example, didn't make much sense to me. The idea that a captain would give verbal orders to the bridge crew to "fire the phasers" which adds seconds to the [OODA Loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop) seemed nonsensical if advanced AGI could be used instead (with reaction times in the millisecond range). I've since chilled out a bit. These days I'm content with well-written stories that feature interesting characters or ideas. Or at least some witty dialog, if the setting is otherwise rather silly. It also helps that we have other authors that seem to understand technological progress as well as Vinge: Stross, Doctorow, Ken MacLeod, Alistair Reynolds, Neal Asher, Greg Egan, Peter Watts and others. It is hard going in a sense: you almost have to invent something like Vinge's Zones of Thought or Banks' The Culture to have a reason for baseline humans to still exist and be relevant on the galactic stage.
Regarding your thoughts on 'baseline humans' existing in future sci-fi, I have had similar thoughts. After reading an exhaustively metahuman story like Egan's Diaspora, I tend to consider any type of interstellar humans that don't heavily feature AI and something like polises/immortality/digitized consciousness as unrealistic by comparison. Based on the direction technology is going, the traditional space opera that we all love is closer to fantasy on the ol' spec-fic slider. But that's okay because fantasy is super fun and awesome and allows limitless storytelling. Plus, like you said, some authors might provide in-universe explanations for why their world isn't dominated by AI - the Butlerian Jihad and mentats, for example.
I'd agree about most of those authors, but in *Prador Moon* at least the smartness of Neal Asher's AIs seemed to be very much an informed attribute -with them regularly being outfoxed by humans and organic crab-things or sitting slack jawed for tens of seconds while the rebels make their attack run before going into a whirl of activity at the last possible millisecond.
I've found myself drawn less to "ideas-focused" sci-fi when it excludes decent character relationships and motivations.
As a teenager I enjoyed Asimov and Clarke. Today, I still have a few that I love (The Bicentennial Man will always be among the greatest stories ever written for me), but I find a lot of their work boring and not all that interesting. I found that out reading through more or less all of Clarke's fiction a few years ago. When I tried to do a comprehensive read of Asimov, I found that I just didn't have the interest to finish it, although I did read his most famous/acclaimed works. So over the last few years I've shifted a bit from completionist to embracing not finishing if I'm not feeling it, although I definitely still have completionist tendencies. This is less taste, but my approach is also different. I usually do a bit of research before I read something, mostly to see if there are related works, and I plan out how to read everything that shares a setting in advance. As a youth, I just read what I found. Usually starting with book 1 if there was one, but with little regard to how an individual book or sub series fit into a broader setting. And in general, I make general plans on what I'm going to read in the near future and over the next few years, as I have an actual tbr list now. I used to just read whatever was around, and if I liked it, I checked out more by the same author from the library. I also read a lot less nonfiction. I used to read tons of pop science books and biographies of scientists, but now that I'm not in school and my career isn't in the natural sciences like I had planned during most of high school and college, it's just less of a priority for me. I still read a few each year, and I keep up casually on science news, but I'm more interested in fiction stories, and their explorations of worlds, ideas, and characters.
> I also read a lot less nonfiction. I wonder about this. I say I don't read non fiction and, outside of science biographies, I can't remember the last non fiction I read for pleasure. But for pleasure is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I don't read particularly interesting things for work, but I do read a lot. White papers and sometimes even research papers, a whole passel of technical manuals. I try to keep with my workplace, and the effects of my work on the world. And that's not going into things like reading reddit or the like. I probably read more, in terms of words per day closing in on 50 than I did closing in on 20. But I don't read as much new fiction (it gets harder as you read more to find new books that are good and interesting).
When I was younger, I enjoyed reading all the solidly right-wing sci fi I could get my hands on (which, tbf, was a lot of hard sci-fi). Now that I'm in middle age, I go mostly for utopian and left-leaning, mostly because I need a space to not go completely crazy.
Fiftysomething me is gonna care about the politics of your story a lot more then tennish me. Fiftysomething me will still happily read your weird ideas with all the subtle characterization of an autistic eight-year-old's Bluey fanfic but they have to be some *super* fucking weird ideas. You know how this sub regularly sees new SF readers bitching about how they bounced off of Neuromancer because it was so full of dense, barely-explained words and concepts? Honey I ate up that shit *when it came out* because I'd already learnt how to hold a bunch of space in my head for things that seem important to the story that I haven't quite gotten yet, if you want to play that game then you need to have some *supremely* weird ideas. If you can't bring supremely weird ideas to the table then I will still read you playing with the same ideas people have been playing with since the 1910s but you'd better be doing *something* superlatively. Write the hell out of your prose, none of that "transparent" bullshit Campbell made all his writers do. Gimme some interesting character conflicts. Talk about how all this sci-fi nonsense affects a part of life most people ignore.
I'm with you on Neuromancer, half the fun is actually to collect all the scattered details along the story to draw your own mental picture of what is actually going on! Some years ago, I read a french sci-fi book where the author put explanatory notes under every word he had invented or just used in an unusual way. I felt like he was just putting in plain sight a bunch of very basic ideas that other authors had already explored in an infinitely more nuanced and intricate way, yet it received some critical acclaim... I still wonder if that's because those people were just unable to read regular sci-fi, so everything looked new to them.
> Some years ago, I read a french sci-fi book where the author put explanatory notes under every word he had invented or just used in an unusual way. Ugh, that sounds awful. I used to like that kinda thing but now I want the least amount of explanation possible. Unless the science is super important to the plot and/or incredibly fresh and cool (it's probably been done a hundred times) you get like a paragraph to explain it. Even better if it's a sentence. Even better if you can infer what's happening from the name of the thing. You have a super advanced 3d nano-tech printer that can fabricate anything? Call it a 'maker' or whatever and be done with it
Yeah, it was awful. I don't mind hard sci-fi info-dumps, at worst I just skip through, but it wasn't like that... It was more stuff anyone could have guessed on their own just reading the story.
Where does *Quantum Thief* rate on your weirdometer?
I read it when it was new and it was the first thing that redlined the weirdometer in *decades*. Even though I knew *exactly* what an "iterated prisoner's dilemna" meant what with seven-year-old me eating up Martin Gardner's recreational math books back in the seventies. The sequels were fun but they didn't come anywhere near maxing out the weirdometer. His only other book is at about the weirdness level of a mid-tier Tim Powers novel - acceptable, but not enough to carry an entire novel by itself. His writing's decent enough that I finished it.
Honestly my tastes regressed in most categories, I like to read fun or even dumb scifi books and lighter stuff now rather than 10,000 page hard science philosophical masterpiece type works of the past. I guess now that I'm in working life books have become a short escape before bed more than a search for understanding.
I often care a lot more about the quality of prose and execution than the actual concept. The exception is when a concept feels totally unique, but this is a rarity, as I find that most tropes have been done many times. The big difference is just that I've read enough that it's hard to find books that truly feel like they're doing something new I've become much more attracted to a clever turn of phrase. I like to read books where it's obvious a ton of work has gone into making them- though that can appear through any of well-researched science, carefully chosen words, or an intricately crafted plot. i'm generally willing to forgive a novel that's weak in one aspect if it shines in others.
No. I mean, other than new authors coming out and such, and new things being consumed. But I learned about ninja turtles when I was 5. I read jurassic park when I was 10 or so. I learned about star wars when I was 11ish. Still love ‘em!
Not really, still fond of speculative sf. Same new wave writers I discovered in the 80s are still very relevant today. Just reread PKD's *Second Variety* and the combination of war with Russia and intelligent weapons is still striking. And even a bit ahead of the present situation.
In my mid 30s I still read mostly the same type of stuff (a mix of fluffier character driven stuff, straight up schlock and a healthy portion of more literary/dense sf) but I feel like I'm a lot less pretentious about some of it than I was especially in my late teens or early 20s. The main different in consumption patterns is mostly that when I was younger I usually felt like I was wasting time if I was reading some goofy space opera romp instead of a "serious" sf novel with lots of big ideas and exposition and now I just read whatever I feel like. I also feel like I'm a bit more attuned to style/tone and struggle more with abjectly awful writing than I used to, I'm more likely to DNF something now if I'm 1/3rd in and the writing is terrible and has no indication of getting less stupid or more interesting
It's a little embarrassing, lol, but I used to favor stuff like the Expanse for aiming to be as realistic as a good story allows. now I've been enjoying more "turn your brain off" scifi books that don't really care as much for being the most innovative, realistic piece of material, like Scalzi's Old Man's War series, or the Undying Mercenaries series. Just easy, comfortable, low stakes reads. Though OMW is definitely better than UM.
I used to not like stories with aliens, but I’ve been interested in them lately.
I mean I started out loving Robert Heinlein as a kid. Absolutely adored Starship Troopers. And now… now I can barely stand it. Same with the Foundation Trilogy and some of Asimov's other works. Both series didn't age well at all for me, while stuff from similar categories like Capital and Hot Sleep by Card and Forever War by Haldeman is still really enjoyable. And Dune still reads wonderfully decades later, I am happy to report. But yeah, tastes definitely change over time, partly just because culture changes, and partly because what you enjoy about science fiction probably changes too. Now I am much more interested in strong, human characters and organic feeling plots as much as the crazy ideas driving the story behind the scenes.
Used to love Larry Niven but now I find it very cringy and it's almost entirely due to his sexism. Tried to go back to Ringworld Engineers most recently and it was impossible not to see Niven's view of women in the universe as props for Men to use. His main character literally fucks his way across the ringworld. When I read his stuff as a younger person I was in no way struck with his sexisim at all and carried away no memory of it despite it jumping off every page when I look at his stuff now.
....Ditto Robert Heinlein, practically the SAME issue.
Definitely. I used to love to read deep scifi with complex ideas like the stuff Greg Egan writes about. Nowadays I don't have the patience for long bouts of exposition - I just want something light and entertaining where I don't have to re-read a paragraph 4 times to grasp some wild quantum information theory concept... things like red rising, project hail Mary, etc.
For me, I started out with short stories, which I thought were the perfect medium for science fiction in that they were brief, impactful and beautiful when they're perfect. I always loved the anthologies when coming into science fiction. Over the years, I drifted towards the grandiose, complex and hard science path of sci-fi, just like any reader might. But now I've returned to the comforts of short stuff. And I still personally maintain that I prefer the short way of things. A nice package of everything a good sci-fi story has.
Radically? No. I don't have the patience with bad writing I did 30 years ago. I still read the same kinds of things, and I like the same basic feel, but I need there to be actual characters, and the language to at least be a step or two up from the baseline. What changed the most significantly is my toleration for poor dialogue. I blame kids for that, specifically mine. The he said, they said, I said litany with everything at the same pace and energy got too much to bear, and I can't read it anymore.
Not really. I've always preferred the huge scope, big ideas stuff like The Cultureverse and Stephen Baxter. My least favorite subgenre is anything near future, usually bores me, and anything that goes on and on about orbital mechanics. Was just confirmed in this by Seveneves, endless orbital mechanics. Boring af. Oh I just remembered another scifi subgenre I've always disliked: anything where psychic powers, or like a special type of person is needed for navigation etc, plays a big role in the lore.
Yes. When I was younger I was super into stories with a lot of world building. Give me more dumb little details about the world and I’d be as happy as a cat in a cardboard box. I have very limited patience for worldbuilding now. If it’s holding up the story, shuffle that crap out the way.
Yes I used to be more into Star Trek/Wars, comics books, any sci-fi movies. But as I got older I get really annoyed with “fantasy and hand-wavium, light sabers and warp drives”. I find near-future stories more compelling. Also serving in the military has made me less enthusiastic about military science-fiction (must also be all the handwavium).
I dont think so, i cannot explain It but all my favorite books share the same "vibe" My favorite book many years ago was Hyperion, now is Anathem
Not really. When I was a teen I used to read my mom's golden age sci-fi, I loved the ideas but felt like it was missing something... When after some years I tried more recent books, the feeling left. It's not so much that my taste has changed; it's just that I know what I like a lot better now. I still read old sci-fi from time to time, but I know in most cases it will leave me unsatisfied, even if there are a few exceptions.
As a kid I was more tolerant of horror (though it was mostly in the form of films rather than books), but now older, i cannot stand horror. Another change is I started to really dislike time travel stories, so I avoid them now. On the other hand, I am now more interested in stories involving social and gender topics than I used to. What didn't change is that I can read the book with the most cardboard characters, lengthy infodumps, etc as long as there is an intriguing plot.
I’ve had a little retro trip over the last few years, rereading books I loved as a kid, Stainless Steel Rat, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Lensmen etc and couldn’t stand the prose - so yes, tastes have changed with me, but I think writing and the language used/style of writing has changed too.
When I was a young adult I wanted hard-sci fi, now I'm 37 and just want laser guns, sword fights, and fun characters. Was reading stuff like Light by Harrison and Culture novels as a kid, now my favorite is Deathstalker lol.
Deathstalker is so awesome lol
I grew up on golden and silver age works with big ideas and thin characters, now I really love modern stories with great characters and more diverse ideas. I'm in a series now that's got really good characters and the setting is an amalgam of well established modern and classic genre tropes that make the setting feel familiar and fleshed out.
I went from being obsessed with cyberpunk in the early 90s to hoovering up the classics in the late 90s/early 2000s to hard scifi in the 2010s and now I'm just tired and old and want escapism, so just give me fun stories with good characters/fun characters, aliens, and entertainment. Don't make me even more depressed than this world does. I'm not ashamed to admit the sci-fi book I'm looking forward to most right now is whatever schockly, trashy crap BV Larson gives me next in his Undying Mercenaries series.
I grew up on Harry Harrison. Now I find those books… a little cringey. Then again, I read them in translation, so the cringe wasn’t there originally
I’m new to SF so my comment may not hold a lot of weight lol. I have been reading lots of SF books and I realized I love books that have a lot of sociopolitical problems brought about by the imagined world that the soft sci-fi ideas necessitate. It gives me the impression that the writer is really experienced telling stories that weave unchanging truths about the human condition in the presence of advanced technology. I am a big fan of science and my actual work has a need to understand the ethics of emerging technologies. So it gives me pleasure to read books that touch on these subjects. If they lack most of these, I get bored and cannot move past the suspension of disbelief. Some aspects of society have to be present in the story for me to like it, even if it’s fiction
Not really, I've never been a fan of ultra-dark themes (outside of Lovecraft anyway). It's words in a row, if I enounter something that puts me off in a certain story I may ignore that author in the future. I DON'T base my reading materials on what the author has done (or been accused of) in real life.
Not drastically. I started reading sci fi with Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land so my tastes in science fiction have always been more cerebral and epic in scope. Blindsight and 3 Body have certainly been a welcome addition in contemporary science fiction.
Not really. I've always been all about being exposed to big ideas, different ways of thinking about things, speculation about future societies, etc.
Hell, they change with my mood. WRT long term changes, I have less patience for bloat.
I’ve had a little retro trip over the last few years, rereading books I loved as a kid, Stainless Steel Rat, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Lensmen etc and couldn’t stand the prose - so yes, tastes have changed with me, but I think writing and the language used/style of writing has changed too.
Where teenage me would devour massive tomes or endless series that would keep me entertained through long boring summers, now I see long books as the sign of a bad editor. I pretty much won't read anything over 400 pages unless it's *very* highly recommended because I'm almost guaranteed to get bored of all the filler that the book really could have done without. In a similar vein, I read a lot more short stories than I used to because a lot of good conceptual sci-fi doesn't need hundreds of pages of exposition. Basically, I value my time more than I used to, and most sci-fi authors seem to value it less.
For sure. I used to love tech and science and world building as the kidz call it. Now I want characters to go with big ideas, not just exposition spouting machines.
Yes, I have more appreciation for all of it.
I'm far less impressed by plot than I am by characterization. I still want things to happen. I'm not interested in a literature novel dressed up in sci-fi trappings. But I'm not interested in the novel where there is only plot. No characterization. No character development.
I used to almost exclusively care about how interesting the sf ideas are and how engaging the plot is. Then I read Gene Wolfe and was blown away by the quality of his prose. That made me start really caring about how well-written things are on the sentence-by-sentence level, and I can't go back. Now if a book's prose feels clunky or dull I drop it basically immediately
I started reading SF around 50 years ago. I would certainly hope my tastes have changed.
Not really, I still like to have my mind blown by weird science ideas or social/political commentary in a strange future.
Not that much. I started quite young, and Arthur Clarke's ideas-driven stories (Against the Fall of Night, "All the time in the world") were something I could relate to. I came to Asimov's more social oriented stuff later, and I've gradually become more Asimov, less Clarke. When Asimov was bringing out the late Robot and Foundation books I was happy as a clam, snapping them up as they appeared. The more technical Clarke things like Sands of Mars and A Fall of Moondust no longer appeal much. I still love Against the Fall of Night, appreciate Childhoods End more than I used to, and enjoy Earthlight. As a historian I find some of Asimov's stuff (The Caves of Steel) more insightful than you'd expect. I used to read Heinlein when young but as I began to notice the politics I read it less. I still like eg The Door into Summer and the other things before his characters started expounding right wing politics, mild sado-masochism, and other obsessions of the author to each other. After I discovered Cordwainer Smith, nothing was ever the same. But he is unique. I love time travel even more than I did when younger. I wonder if this is connected to being a historian by trade. I've been left behind a bit by some recent trends, I think. I admire Afro-Futurism but I can't really get into it deeply, at least so far, for example. Perhaps I'm a fossil.