Contemporary Science Fiction and Its Future
See also: PostcyberpunkContemporary science fiction has been marked by the spread of cyberpunk to other parts of the marketplace of ideas. No longer is cyberpunk a ghettoized tribe within science fiction, but an integral part of the field whose interactions with other parts have been the primary theme of science fiction around the start of the 21st century.
Notably, cyberpunk has influenced film, in works such as Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix series, in anime such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and the emerging medium of video games, with the critically acclaimed Deus Ex and Metal Gear series. This entrance of cyberpunk into mainstream culture has led to the introduction of cyberpunk's stylistic motifs to the masses, particularly the cyberpunk fashion style.
Emerging themes in the 1990s included environmental issues, the implications of the global Internet and the expanding information universe, questions about biotechnology and nanotechnology, as well as a post-Cold War interest in post-scarcity societies; Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age comprehensively explores these themes. Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels brought the character-driven story back into prominence.
The cyberpunk reliance on near-future science fiction has deepened. In William Gibson's 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, the story is a cyberpunk story told in the present, the ultimate limit of the near-future extrapolation.
Cyberpunk's ideas have spread in other directions, though. Space opera writers have written work featuring cyberpunk motifs, including David Brin's Kiln People and Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series. This merging of the two disparate threads of science fiction in the 1980s has produced an extrapolational literature in contrast to those technological stories told in the present.
John Clute writes that science fiction around the start of the 21st century can be understood in two ways: "a vision of the triumph of science fiction as a genre and as a series of outstanding texts which figured to our gaze the significant futures that, during those years, came to pass ... ... indecipherable from the world during those years ... fatally indistinguishable from the world it attempted to adumbrate, to signify."
Read more about this topic: History Of Science Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary, science, fiction and/or future:
“Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“I am not naturally ... “A bag of wind”; yet ... I mean deliberately and decidedly “to cut” in future all my old ideas on this head. I don’t think modesty “pays.” It is a good quality in a family, it is a domestic virtue, it makes a home happy after you have got a home, but it is not potent in getting homes. It is not a money-maker, neither is it lucky in gaining a reputation. I am of the impression that gaseous bodies do better.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)