Why did science fiction die?

So, why did science fiction die?

Science fiction’s “golden age” is really the late 1800s and early 1900s when it is a powerful creative and political force.

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward published in 1888 almost sparked a social revolution in the United States. When people compared what their lives could be in a better future, to what they were in the ultra-capitaliat America of the late 1800s, socialism took hold.

Here in 2026 a story about a time traveller looking back at his world from a utopian future is generic.

But in 1888 it was “novel”. The word novel is literally used to talk about printed works of prose fiction because they are always “novel” , new.

Science fiction begins to die when it is named science fiction and begins to ossify into the generic and become “genre”.

This is largely driven by publishers who profit from science fiction as a commodity. If a utopian time travel story sold well, publishers want a thousand more utopian time travel stories. The novel stops being new and becomes generic genres.

Genre is the opposite of science fiction. Science fiction must always be novel and new, to smash apart the familiar present and show us the strange future.

Which is why the storytelling of QNTM is such great science fiction. When I interviewed QNTM some years ago, I was interested to discover that he absolutely thought of his books as science fiction. But he didn’t have a strong relationship to the SF “genre”.

He wasn’t trying to write science fiction. He was writing science fiction without trying.

The Antimeme is to the 2020s what the future utopia was to the 1880s. An idea of its time.

It’s a simple concept. Memes are ideas that are good at being remembered. Antimemes are ideas that cannot be remembered. Extrapolate that simple concept to its complex consequences and you get There Is No Antimemetics Division.

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