[The_Gun_Nut]

As for dystopia or something similar not being popular, I'd like to point out that "The Walking Dead" got renewed for another season.

[inca1980]

Right, and what i'm saying is that Zombie movies have replaced dystopias.  People used to be scared society will go to shit...now people just accept that society most likely is gonna go to shit, so the next best thing is to salvage your humanity...which is the point of a practically every Zombie movie.  People just accept the fact that every few months we'll hear about someone who goes into their workplace and just starts shooting everyone and then themselves......or some terrorists who don't care if they blow themselves up....people here at home and all over the world just mindlessly following religion and just throwing science, music, art and reason right out the window.  The current zeitgeist is one in which everybody feels like the world around them is turning into zombies, society is already screwed so the best thing I could do is just try and survive physically and psychologically.  Look at the movie 28 days later.....it's all about surviving, but shows a group of humans which have survived physically (i.e. they're not infected) but have died spritually/psychologically.  The only thing keeping the group of soldiers from killing themselves is the prospect that some females will be brought.  The protagonists only really care about surviving psychologically and keeping the beautiful things that matter in life alive.
The Walking Dead fits right into this.  Think about one aspect of Zombie movies which is always present.......the worst thing that could happen to a person is not death....it's getting turned into a Zombie.....the audience always feels a little relieved and sees a little redemption when the characters  who just before they're gonna get infected, either kill themselves or get killed. 

[Frostriese]

The tone of post-cp and arguably SR as it stands is definitely one where you cannot change anything. The corps took over and co-opted even the opposition. You know, like RL. Token gestures and the facade of hope and optimism does not actually make it so. I mean, really, how swell is it to be richer and live longer if your life just now belongs to the corps for longer?

Pretty swell. After all, for what free time is still worth theres quite much to fill it with, too. In purely hedonistic terms, life isn't so bad in 2072. SR4 books sometimes try to pander to dystopia by inserting "true for the rich, but what about the poor?" comments, but even those do not hold fully true - thanks to "technology trickle down" the poor of 2072 (except for the desperate poor) do have it better than the poor of nowadays.

In the days of Neo-A sourcebooks the tone was rougher and the world more openly violent and bad. I mean, that was one of the core tenets of cyberpunk as a literary whole: That technology does not necessarily solve problems, merely shift them. SR4, OTOH, is as said rather technologically optimistic. Which IMO is also more realistic, but makes it less cyberpunk...

[Kot]

But cyberpunk went belly up, because of both the advances in technology, and the fact that we don't have any cyberarms yet. I still love the genre, but SR is up-to-date with tech at least. And it has Dragons!

[The_Gun_Nut]

RAWR!!

[Nomad Zophiel]

. . .the tone was rougher and the world more openly violent and bad. I mean, that was one of the core tenets of cyberpunk as a literary whole: That technology does not necessarily solve problems, merely shift them. SR4, OTOH, is as said rather technologically optimistic. Which IMO is also more realistic, but makes it less cyberpunk...

Sci-fi is never about the future its about the present. Technology did smack us over the head and it turned out the Internet was damn useful. Violent crime is down a lot in the past 20 years (in the US). People have grown up on the cyberpunk ethic of soulless corporations and found out that having air conditioning and an iPod is worth them spending some time doing work for someone else. The Wireless Matrix isn't the only change SR made to keep up with the times.

[Frostriese]

Sci-fi is never about the future its about the present.

I never bought that. It's either excuses, or a lame justification to have over-forcefully "meaningful" sci-fi.
However, you're right of course that we live and learn. I always say that about Star Trek, actually, that its pretty much obsolete sci-fi, fitting to the 60s, but not these days anymore (and not for quite some while). It is true that simply nobody could deny the usefulness of much of SR's technology (which after all had been described already in earlier versions, but it seems few thought about what uses it could all have) anymore.

[Kot]

There are two kinds of s-f. 'Scientific', which is about the future. And the common kind, where tech is just scenery. I was reading a few books of the lately popular 'mil-opera' genre. Most of it is crap.
Now, Asimov, Clarke, Lem, Bułyczow - they wrote 'science fiction', in which these worlds they created seemed real. For example, if you can, read Return from the Stars by S. Lem. It's transhumanism. Written in the bloody 1961. And that's just one of his works. Good thing there's a return-to-the-roots movement surfacing, in which people are at least as important as tech in books. If you take any generic 'mil-opera', there are no society changes. Just planets, or multi-stellar bodies that are 'just like <culture x>'. That's what also Cyberpunk was about - the Man more than machine.

[Dead Monky]

You're talking about the difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi.  I prefer hard myself.

[Kot]

Well, even soft sci-fi can be scientific. And maybe i just lack the terms. Damnit, my english isnt any good sometimes.

[Dead Monky]

It's fine.  It doesn't really matter anyway.  They're pretty vaguely defined categories and it can be hard to tell what's what sometimes.  And, of course, people's opinion of what is hard sci-fi and what is soft can vary a lot.  So in the end, who cares?

[Frostriese]

You're talking about the difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi.  I prefer hard myself.

Its not everything. The problem is that the difference between the two is defined merely based on technologcial realism. But ignoring technology (besides FTL and lasers...) isnt even the biggest fault of most of sci-fi. The biggest fault is ignoring social changes and trends. So much of sci-fi is "Current Decade IN SPAAACE", and thats just annoying - its lazy. Thats why cyberpunk was so original, because it did took social changes into account. As does Shadowrun still, to an amazing degree. Just look on how much society is discussed in Augmentation or especially Wireless, and just how much thought is invested into it.

That is why I said for example Star Trek its obsolete. It never really much talked about technology besides FTL (and Beaming, maybe), or any social changes (vague utopianism, yeah, but only very vague), so its bad on principle, but also every decade it aired in had its own take on it based on how things are (technology and society wise) at that time IRL. And eventually you just cant "update" an universe anymore, you have to look for a replacement model.

And while much mil sci-fi has creative ideas, its rather trapped in this, too. On the whole, its not a very creative subgenre, yet it dominates the American sci-fi market for a decade, or so it seems to me. Meanwhile, its British authors who lead the creative vanguard - Hamilton, Alistair, Stross, McLeod, Morgan, Asher, Banks...
(Im allowed to judge by nations, since I do so from the outside. And Germany didnt have ANY good sci-fi authors since the Weimar Republic, damnit. No, Eschenbach doesnt count, and the Perry Rhodan authors count as big negatives :p )

But my point is those people think about possible political and social changes, about how technology will aspect our life, about technology beyond just FTL and weaponry, and about how they can absolutely upturn our society. Biotechnology alone in the coming decades, if one just thinks about it - but most sci-fi 'verses and franchises just completly ignore it. And that is whats bad. And that is why sci-fi shouldnt be about the present. The present may correct and update sci-fi, but the genre has to be more then just that.

[Nomad Zophiel]

But my point is those people think about possible political and social changes, about how technology will aspect our life, about technology beyond just FTL and weaponry, and about how they can absolutely upturn our society. Biotechnology alone in the coming decades, if one just thinks about it - but most sci-fi 'verses and franchises just completly ignore it. And that is whats bad. And that is why sci-fi shouldnt be about the present. The present may correct and update sci-fi, but the genre has to be more then just that.

Sci-fi can't not be about the present, at least the way I was using the phrase. No matter how hard a speculative author tries to determine what the future will be like, he is necessarily looking at it through the lens of the present. There are always unintended, unforeseeable consequences to change, whether technological or social. Even books like the Difference Engine, which take place in an alternate past, are reflective of the time they were written.

More importantly, the characters have to be people that the reader is capable of caring about. So their challenges and values have to be something identifiable to the current reader. We don't even notice a lot of these presuppositions because, being in that society, we take for granted the same things as the authors. The fantastic elements of a sci-fi story are still the vehicles for telling a story. That story has to have some meaning, some emotional reosnance to its audience or what's the point?

[Kot]

Nomad, we had something called 'Sociological S-F' here in Poland (and in other countries of the eastern block). Their sole purpose was social commentary (on socialism, and such), and the authors avoided censorship by putting it into a s-f world. That's what Lem, Zajdel and others did in Poland, and Bułyczow and Strugaccy (fyi - they wrote the story on which Stalker was loosely based) did in Russia. And there were tons of books like that. I've grown up reading them like there's no tomorrow, so probably that's how i ended socially, scientifically and politically aware before i went to high school. And in a country that whores it's reclaimed independece, that's not really a good thing.

P.S. Yeah, i'm a spoiled bookworm geek, and proud of it.

[inca1980]

All art in general is necessarily dealing with the society and culture in which it is embedded.  I agree with Nomad, if you think you're reading sci-fi that doesn't deal with the "present" then you're most likely taking a lot of assumptions for granted.  That's not to say that we can't enjoy art from a different time period but merely that we see it in a very different way and we focus on different aspects of it, namely the ones which resonate with current themes of the day.  The technology, the scenery, the whole world are secondary to the larger story about human nature which is told....this isn't only the way sci-fi works, it's the way all art works.  In good art, the medium is secondary to the message being communicated.