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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is.

I subscribe to the Asimov's sci-fi short story magazine (I highly recommend it!) and yeah, I have to skip every story that starts with "the world was devastated by climate change 20-50 years ago, here's how we're surviving now above the flooded remains of our world." I just can't take it.

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I tried re-reading Brave New World recently. It was too depressing how it felt it was describing present times.

In cases like this, it helps me to think of a simulation - that the book does not talk about - that has a specific framework and set of rules to decide whether to let people out of the portrayed present or not. I had that idea a long while ago and started to apply it to TV shows, books, news, even myself when I had a weird flashback to boring drug-induced times. It works well to kill the depression that can arise out of narratives (except song lyrics, music productions in general and Rick & Morty. once something feels like too many shrooms and too much LSD aka too much harmony in bullshitting oneself and the audience, the whole thing breaks down and I get an Agent Smith vibe, an Agent Smith that didn't age well at all)

Even more depressingly these works come to be used as a sort of handbook. Ostensibly Snow Crash is dystopian literature, but tech bros liked it and its author even has been co-opted as a "futurist" by Blue Origin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

Stephenson was one of the first people to work at Blue Origin, back when it was more of a "talk about cool space shit" club. He left long ago though, around the time it started to become a serious rocket company.

I wonder how much of this is driven by the publishers vs audiences.

I have read a lot of blogs and articles from authors and agents about thematic checklists for publishing.

On the flip side, immigration makes up the vast majority of content creation, and the leading edge were using these premises 20-30 years ago when they were more novel

Imitation*

Stephen Baxter's Flood is worse. In it, the sea starts rising and it turns out that it's not climate change causing it. Massive amounts of water stored in the upper mantle somehow start being released, so there's no stopping it. The book ends with some of the survivors on rafts in the Himalayas watching Everest disappear beneath the waves.

Scariest shit I've ever read, worse than any horror novel. Thankfully it's just a dumb story and the science of it is really dubious.

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