Without wanting to paint with too broad a brush, I would say in my experience driving in 10x countries, U.S. drivers, being most habituated to spending their lives in cars, drive in the most distracted, least careful way. Especially in places where the typology is the U.S. default of low-density, car-oriented sprawl. Accordingly there are an appaling number of deaths and injuries on the road: 1 in 43,750 people dies each year in the U.K. in automobile accidents vs. 1 in 8,500 in the U.S.A.
Inb4 deaths per mile driven, I'd argue higher VMT in the U.S.A. only proves the point - too many cars being driven too much because of silly land use. High VMT is acutally a symptom of a dangerous mobility system as much as a cause.
Add to that the relative ease to get a license in the US, and the level of punishment for breaking the laws.
I (an American) was on holiday and Switzerland and was explained the process of getting your license back if you lose it. It is a big disincentive to driving badly and putting yourself at risk of that, to be sure.
FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.
Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a literal title for what it's about.
Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?
Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.
Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.
As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached.
Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.
The part where superintelligent computers keep humans around as pets in a powerful and happy civilization is plausible. The part where there’s hyperdrive and energy grids and fields and effectors, less so.
IIRC Banks insisted in interviews that the culture's citizens aren't pets. The exact relationship is, like the FTL travel and indeed teleportation, very vague and only sketched in where needed to advance the plot.
We have no experience with the extremely asymmetrical relationships which would result. Lem tries to imagine this in Golem XIV - what happens when humans who are used to thinking of themselves as smart are talking with a categorically more intelligent machine - and it doesn't work very well even though it's only a sketch.
"Tatja Grimm's World" has a neat trick where Vinge is able to sidestep this because [[SPOILER]] although Tatja is much smarter than everybody else from her world, that's not because she's smarter than we are, almost everyone born on her planet is an idiot for reasons the story justifies.
The Culture can't happen. It requires Faster Than Light spaceships and that's not a thing in our universe. Also, and I know it's not what you meant, but in Banks' fiction "State of the Art" is specifically a novella about a Culture visit to Earth in the 1970s. They're not us.
Egan's "The Amalgam" is an SF society which could in principle descend in part from some future humanity, and I suppose if you like Banks' setting for its utopianism you'd be satisfied with the Amalgam. Its citizens tend to live long, full lives in which they're definitely mostly concerned with the upper parts of Maslow's pyramid and their practical needs are fulfilled as a matter of course in most cases.
I must say, to the extent we have any future at all, I think probably of Egan's "Dream Apes". An Orangutan-like self-engineered future humanity who have arranged that there are no apex predators above them, there's an abundance of resources for their relatively modest population, and they just chill, believing that if there is something out there it's not their concern. Of course in the story the Dream Apes are all annihilated by a cataclysmic event which destroys Earth, but hey, it's pretty quick.
I don't think anyone's failing to recognize modern sci-fi novels because they aren't called "The Space Martians Go To The Moon In Their Starship" or whatever.
Really, I think the most significant trend here is that, between 1950 and 1980 or so, the sci-fi genre grew up and stopped relying on painfully literal titles.
I’d argue that SF should never have "grown up." Look at the works considered classics today, like Heinlein, or even Star Trek. At the time of release, they were often dismissed as unserious (TOS famously had scientific blunders like planets at -290°C), yet they remain cultural touchstones because they prioritized vision over rigor.
SF used to excel at selling "dreams" to humanity. By trying too hard to be seen as "serious" or scientifically airtight, authors sacrificed the sense of wonder that allows for mainstream success. We traded mass appeal for academic validation.
Publishers make choices the author had no say in all the time. One of the things commonly mentioned about Phil Dick is that while the movies you've probably seen based on his work (such as "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall") have different titles than the stories they are based on, those stories weren't published under his proposed name in many cases either.
Generally in SF genre fiction "Martian" means a space alien, a being native to the planet Mars e.g. the antagonists in "War of the Worlds" are Martians.
However the word can also mean, and does in the case of the novel, a person who merely lives on the planet Mars, as Mark Wayney does.
> science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.
Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.
And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.
In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...
The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what little remains is filled with mass produced trash (Star Wars novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers with vampires, werewolves and dragons.
I wouldn’t expect only one fiction subgenre to have such a dramatic increase of proportion of abstract titles while other related subgenres did not. In other words, I would expect all of these graphs to have a negative correlation with time due to a general abstraction of titles across all fiction subgenres. I would be surprised if there was enough consumer differentiation to support abstraction in one subgenre but not the others.
Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.
But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.
Not one of the culture books either, even though several have spaceships as main characters. And only a handful of Hamilton books. And I reckon a single Polity book.
The genre where we find the "fantasy/sci-fi" books right next to usually mystery books in our German book stores usually is speculative fiction:
- mystery,
- horror,
- fantasy,
- and sci-fi have lots of overlap.
- And XKCDs What-If-Books even.
But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.
Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.
“Cost per square foot” to build doesn’t take into account land acquisition costs?
Some of the “economies of scale” the author is discussing accrue to whoever in the development partnership contributes land. If a piece of land can support the development of 250 apartments, it is worth a lot more than the same piece of land used for a few single family houses. But, per unit the land cost is still a lot lower for the apartments in a dense area than the single family houses in the sparse area. So it could be cheaper to build lots of apartments, but the owner of the land takes that potential savings as profit (often contributing the dollar value of the land into the dev partnership for a share of the project equity).
The other thing to consider is that multi-unit apartment buildings are exactly that: a multiplication of costs driven on a per-unit basis. Every unit needs a bathroom and kitchen, the most expensive part of any dwelling. Actually per square foot studios are the most expensive to build and larger apartments are cheaper. Airplane hangars are cheap per square foot.
Look at college dorms or Eastern Bloc communal apartments for an example of how resource-constrained institutions delivered inexpensive housing to large numbers of people while benefitting from economies of scale: amortize the high costs of the expensive parts of a building (kitchens, bathrooms) by sharing them between users who get private access to cheaper building features (bedrooms).
Final thing is that buildings are hard to manufacture off site because, well, to put it in stupid terms: they are very big and heavy, and you never really know whether something will work on site until it’s done on site. So each construction site is a purpose-built “building factory” for one building with all the affiliated capital costs, mobilization costs, etc. There is an economy of scale, but it’s in the manufacturing of things that laborers can work with - tools, standardized wood sizes and hardware, bricks, tiles, flooring, screws, nails, etc.
To some extent, this is also because our logistics is really centered around shipping containers, and anything significantly larger than that becomes a weird, specialized and expensive thing to transport, so it’s cheaper to do onsite.
(There was a bit of a movement to turn literal shipping containers into rooms or tiny homes, but it turns out it’s quite expensive to modify something that wasn’t supposed to be anything other than a box to have things like windows and doors and plumbing, to say nothing of whatever remediation would be required of the container’s previous life.)
I found this same link in just doing some research for my sibling reply, but they mentioned a lot of that $5.9tn is "implicit" (like not counting the health harms) – that feels a bit more iffy to me though.
This comment does not show a lot of curiosity - even a quick read of the Wikipedia article for gender identity refutes this argument. Gender has been differentially and socially constructed throughout human history.[1]
Not to hijack this thread, but curious whether some map people out there might opine on growth areas for this space - technologically, artistically, product-wise.
Spent most of my career in GIS. So, not a map person as much as a map data person. I do work with actual map makers though and get first look, editing and testing privileges.
A map made for a specific purpose will almost always be hand tuned. The first, second...nth draft might mostly or completely auto-generated but the final product (for a good product anyways) will be hand edited. It could be additional graphics, legend or chloropleth tweaking, emphasis or de-emphasis any of the thousands of things you can tweak on a digital document that is also mostly graphical and part art.
So tools for better intent manifestation, even more rapid live visualizations etc. Someone linked an Esri story map video in this thread and that's a good example of state of the art for map generation right now.
There's lots of room for innovations on the data side of things. Making spatial relations to non-spatial data. There's no unified spatial query language that allows arbitrary length depth, lambdas and subqueries. Yes there are spatially aware relational databases but it's a dream of mine to build a universal spatial query language that can do something like
Relate river to city
by nearest
ordered by city.population
where river.distancefrom(max_elevation(city)) < 100
and max_elevation(city) < 0
Select river.name, (river.width.nearest_point(city)) as width, etc
Can’t you do something similar currently using PostGIS? Granted, it’s ugly and you’ll see ST_ everywhere and it won’t be super readable, but it seems possible at least.
I have a few production apps in the GIS/mapping space and I think the big area for growth is a truly cross-platform mapping solution that works across all platforms. Right now Mapbox's (and Maplibre's) options are the closest to this, but web and the two mobile platforms still differ quite a bit, and there's only support for macOS on the desktop.
Maplibre-rs is something to keep an eye on, but it's very much a proof of concept and early going. It's using wgpu (https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu), which is a rust-based "implementation" of the WebGPU api, so to speak, which of course would support running via wasm in the browser as well as having support for pretty much all the other platforms.
I could totally see this being integrated into white boarding tools like Miro, but I’d personally love to see Microsoft integrate it with a next-gen Visio/Whiteboard hybrid, with PowerBI integration.
From my own professional experience: it costs a minimum of $350 per net rentable square foot for new construction of mid-rise rental apartment buildings. This includes all materials, labor and design/permitting costs, and the cost of land acquisition in the urban core of a second-tier U.S. real estate market (NC Triangle). $350,000, 1000-square-foot three-bedroom apartments are affordable housing. But good luck finding one in a new building!
