From a distance it seems obvious – in the vast space of interesting topics, academics clump around a few familiar themes, neglecting vast territories between the currently fashionable clumps. This is sure how it seems to outsiders and students, at least for fields like social science or literature, fields which must cover a vast territory. For example, economists have thousands of papers on auctions, and hardly any papers on romance, even though most people think romance far more interesting and important than auctions.
Why is such an overwhelming majority of comments directed at editors? After all, at least in biology, there are thousands of journals to choose from, many directed at the most obscure niches you can imagine.
The elephant in the room is funding. At least in biology, most basic research is funded by the government, which tremendously influences research priorities. Want to get funded? Study cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, bio-terrorism, or drug abuse. Diabetes and metabolic syndrome have become big in recent years.
On the bright side, scientists are smarter that bureaucrats, and will do their best to study what interests them by repackaging it as superficially relating to the purpose of a grant: "sure, we'll study diabetes, using these mutant mice that happen to also have signs of delayed aging..."
Carl Shulman: retraining incentives do exist. For example, I've been told that it's easier to get some NIH training grants if you are segueing from one sub-field to another rather than just continuing to study as a post-doc what you studied as a grad student.
Perhaps what works is exploited as much as possible by as many researchers and editors as possible, and when the gains diminish sufficiently, new territory is sought, and then outsiders are perhaps turned to and become centers for new clumps. And over time, many clumps fuse into a larger super-clump.
So in order to explore new areas more rapidly, one would have to more rapidly exhaust promising fields of their insights. Would the clumps unify more rapidly if there were many more researchers?
The editors want to publish material which will soon become fashionable because the ideas are so revolutionary that their publication will create the new fashion. I don't refer to editors trying to ride an upcoming wave. I mean editors seeking to create the wave. Also, just because editors might have this desire, it still might be swamped by cowardice, herding or myopia.
One other issue around clumping is finding anyone able to distinguish interesting results from crap. An awful lot of dealing with conference submissions in crypto conferences is filtering out the crap, and it's easy to see how not-very-well-explained-but-innovative results can get discarded because they're hard to tell from nonsense. I've seen that happen with important results from people who didn't know the language of the field, and been involved in reviewing clever (albeit not earth shaking) results where some of the reviewers just didn't get the point of the paper.
The thing is, nobody wants to publish something that is then widely regarded as crap, because that's embarrassing. So there's an incentive to avoid stuff that's too far outside what you're used to, as well as a good reason to avoid it.
I have read lots of academic and professional journals, and attended academic & professional conferences related to my field. Academic journals and conferences definitely clump around things some prestigious writer or journal raised which tend to be interesting items to ponder and nosh over for a little while. Professional journals tend to focus on what readers need to know-- the latest legislative promulgation, commercial development or interesting case studies. These persist in importance until the rules or commercial trends change. As long as the rule, structure or case remains relevant, the articles will be called up and utilized. I have found most academic articles have a short half-life and are quickly forgotten when the next comely hot-topic arrives on the scene. Academic writing is also formulaic and written with little humor or style or talent in comparison to professionals writing on a lark or for resume stuffing.
It would be interesting to read a professional journal on literature, with articles breaking down reading patterns from Amazon statistics.
the mature development of immersive mobile VR cellphone etiquette
Not sure what you have in mind, but a couple of days ago there was a scene in Ghost in the Shell in which we were allowed to see behind the scenes of a videoconference - one of the participants was clipping his toenails in his pajamas, but what the other participants saw was him perfectly dressed, facing forward, etc. It looked like the real him but it was a puppet.
I don't read as much science fiction as I used to, so the undeniably new novel that comes to mind is Permutation City from 1994. Though A Deepness in the Sky also comes to mind as containing at least one new idea: the programmer-at-arms who has to write code in the middle of space warfare. It doesn't have the sheer shock value as Permutation City, though, or even A Fire Upon the Deep.
I don't know about this business of new tropes. The best defy imitation - which, come to think of it, is a fundamental difference between science and science fiction. But it's probably a good bet that by the time anything becomes a trope, it was invented at least a decade ago and probably longer.
Eliezer, your original assertion was about the appearance of new tropes, or 'new' ideas. None of the works that you mentioned have those. My challenge: name once such genuinely 'new' trope or 'new' idea that has appeared in the last five years (or ten!) in science fiction. One of the reasons I've stopped reading it as anything other than a bedtime pleasantry is precisely because there are none that I have seen. A fairly plausible argument has been made recently by one well-known writer that the genre is, if not dead, actively ossified in the ways lots of other genres have become ossified, though still practiced - swing and big band for example (and I would nominate rock & roll as well.)
Eliezer: It doesn't look to me like it's hard to come up with novel sf ideas. I never read more than 50 or 100 sf stories, but I always found it very easy to come up with sf ideas that were novel in the opinions of people who devoted their whole lives to reading the stuff. I also used to ask such people, years ago, for any light that sf could shine on my thinking about technology, for instance, the mature development of immersive mobile VR cellphone etiquette, even asking them to draw on teleportation stories. Nothing. Not even any insightful stories on the immediate social effects of aging reversal. Countless interesting alternative histories unexplored. The list goes on, but I generalized and, due to a defect in human cognition, or possibly just the need for compression, lost most of the data producing the generalization.
Eliezer, my concern is doubts about my ability to produce "otherwise acceptable literary quality." I was trying to note that a lot of preferences for conformity are tied up in that.
Only as a movie. By the standards of literary SF, absolutely nothing you see on a screen is a new idea.
ScentOfViolets, you and I must have been reading different science fiction. Consider Neverness - was it the first story to have godlike AIs, faster-than-light travel? No. But I can't think of any other book like it. Was Iain Banks (Consider Phlebas, Player of Games) the first author to depict a future civilization focused on having fun? No, but I can't think of any predecessor like him, though others came after.
Is Singularity Sky original? No. Was A Fire Upon the Deep original? Yes. I could discurse at length as to why this is so (Vinge cares about his ideas, Stross is trying to show off how cool and detached he is) but the presence of a lot of non-original work doesn't mean that a science-fiction editor wouldn't be bursting with joy to get the manuscript for the next Neverness. It means that most of the novels, they take what they can get.
Robin, I'm still puzzled as to why, if you know SF, you think that a novel with your original idea and otherwise acceptable literary quality wouldn't be published. Do we just have different pictures of the field, or is your idea too terrible for mortal minds to comprehend, or what?
Science fiction novels are different from each other in many ways but one way is in the speculations that they make about the future. When people talk about writing "new" or "novel" science fiction novels, one thing they might mean by "novel" is "novel speculation". If this is what people are arguing about, then the argument comes down to this: one side argues that novel speculation is easy but is rejected by publishers, and the other side argues that publishers encourage novel speculation but it's hard to do.
The main problem here is that there are two alternative proposed causes for the lack of novel speculation in science fiction: one side says that it's the publishers who reject novel speculation (which they do presumably because of market pressure), and the other side says it's the difficulty of coming up with novel speculations.
It may be possible to resolve this argument by looking at an area where one of the two proposed causes is absent. There is such an area. Futurologists speculate about the future and are not at the mercy of market pressure. We can ask, then, just how abundant are the speculations of futurologists.
My impression is that they are not abundant. This suggests that the problem in science fiction is not with the publishers with their dependence on the market, but with the intrinsic difficulty of coming up with novel speculations.
What would 'novel' SciFi look like? Would the movie 'Primer' qualify? No offense to Robin, but I doubt a newcomer could write a truly novel, truly good novel in any genre.
This link is 403ing. Does anyone know what this experiment was?
**edit** internet archive has a copy:
https://web.archive.org/web... among others.
It's a journal for papers that were rejected from other math journals.
***edit***; Issue 1 : https://web.archive.org/web...***edit***; Issue 2 : https://web.archive.org/web...
Why is such an overwhelming majority of comments directed at editors? After all, at least in biology, there are thousands of journals to choose from, many directed at the most obscure niches you can imagine.
The elephant in the room is funding. At least in biology, most basic research is funded by the government, which tremendously influences research priorities. Want to get funded? Study cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, bio-terrorism, or drug abuse. Diabetes and metabolic syndrome have become big in recent years.
On the bright side, scientists are smarter that bureaucrats, and will do their best to study what interests them by repackaging it as superficially relating to the purpose of a grant: "sure, we'll study diabetes, using these mutant mice that happen to also have signs of delayed aging..."
Carl Shulman: retraining incentives do exist. For example, I've been told that it's easier to get some NIH training grants if you are segueing from one sub-field to another rather than just continuing to study as a post-doc what you studied as a grad student.
Perhaps what works is exploited as much as possible by as many researchers and editors as possible, and when the gains diminish sufficiently, new territory is sought, and then outsiders are perhaps turned to and become centers for new clumps. And over time, many clumps fuse into a larger super-clump.
So in order to explore new areas more rapidly, one would have to more rapidly exhaust promising fields of their insights. Would the clumps unify more rapidly if there were many more researchers?
Robin,
The editors want to publish material which will soon become fashionable because the ideas are so revolutionary that their publication will create the new fashion. I don't refer to editors trying to ride an upcoming wave. I mean editors seeking to create the wave. Also, just because editors might have this desire, it still might be swamped by cowardice, herding or myopia.
One other issue around clumping is finding anyone able to distinguish interesting results from crap. An awful lot of dealing with conference submissions in crypto conferences is filtering out the crap, and it's easy to see how not-very-well-explained-but-innovative results can get discarded because they're hard to tell from nonsense. I've seen that happen with important results from people who didn't know the language of the field, and been involved in reviewing clever (albeit not earth shaking) results where some of the reviewers just didn't get the point of the paper.
The thing is, nobody wants to publish something that is then widely regarded as crap, because that's embarrassing. So there's an incentive to avoid stuff that's too far outside what you're used to, as well as a good reason to avoid it.
I think it's hard to tell what's novel and what isn't.
I have read lots of academic and professional journals, and attended academic & professional conferences related to my field. Academic journals and conferences definitely clump around things some prestigious writer or journal raised which tend to be interesting items to ponder and nosh over for a little while. Professional journals tend to focus on what readers need to know-- the latest legislative promulgation, commercial development or interesting case studies. These persist in importance until the rules or commercial trends change. As long as the rule, structure or case remains relevant, the articles will be called up and utilized. I have found most academic articles have a short half-life and are quickly forgotten when the next comely hot-topic arrives on the scene. Academic writing is also formulaic and written with little humor or style or talent in comparison to professionals writing on a lark or for resume stuffing.
It would be interesting to read a professional journal on literature, with articles breaking down reading patterns from Amazon statistics.
the mature development of immersive mobile VR cellphone etiquette
Not sure what you have in mind, but a couple of days ago there was a scene in Ghost in the Shell in which we were allowed to see behind the scenes of a videoconference - one of the participants was clipping his toenails in his pajamas, but what the other participants saw was him perfectly dressed, facing forward, etc. It looked like the real him but it was a puppet.
Rejecta Mathematica is an interesting experiment that may help with 'clumping:' math.rejecta.org.
I don't read as much science fiction as I used to, so the undeniably new novel that comes to mind is Permutation City from 1994. Though A Deepness in the Sky also comes to mind as containing at least one new idea: the programmer-at-arms who has to write code in the middle of space warfare. It doesn't have the sheer shock value as Permutation City, though, or even A Fire Upon the Deep.
I don't know about this business of new tropes. The best defy imitation - which, come to think of it, is a fundamental difference between science and science fiction. But it's probably a good bet that by the time anything becomes a trope, it was invented at least a decade ago and probably longer.
Eliezer, your original assertion was about the appearance of new tropes, or 'new' ideas. None of the works that you mentioned have those. My challenge: name once such genuinely 'new' trope or 'new' idea that has appeared in the last five years (or ten!) in science fiction. One of the reasons I've stopped reading it as anything other than a bedtime pleasantry is precisely because there are none that I have seen. A fairly plausible argument has been made recently by one well-known writer that the genre is, if not dead, actively ossified in the ways lots of other genres have become ossified, though still practiced - swing and big band for example (and I would nominate rock & roll as well.)
Eliezer: It doesn't look to me like it's hard to come up with novel sf ideas. I never read more than 50 or 100 sf stories, but I always found it very easy to come up with sf ideas that were novel in the opinions of people who devoted their whole lives to reading the stuff. I also used to ask such people, years ago, for any light that sf could shine on my thinking about technology, for instance, the mature development of immersive mobile VR cellphone etiquette, even asking them to draw on teleportation stories. Nothing. Not even any insightful stories on the immediate social effects of aging reversal. Countless interesting alternative histories unexplored. The list goes on, but I generalized and, due to a defect in human cognition, or possibly just the need for compression, lost most of the data producing the generalization.
Eliezer, my concern is doubts about my ability to produce "otherwise acceptable literary quality." I was trying to note that a lot of preferences for conformity are tied up in that.
GrayArea: Would the movie 'Primer' qualify?
Only as a movie. By the standards of literary SF, absolutely nothing you see on a screen is a new idea.
ScentOfViolets, you and I must have been reading different science fiction. Consider Neverness - was it the first story to have godlike AIs, faster-than-light travel? No. But I can't think of any other book like it. Was Iain Banks (Consider Phlebas, Player of Games) the first author to depict a future civilization focused on having fun? No, but I can't think of any predecessor like him, though others came after.
Is Singularity Sky original? No. Was A Fire Upon the Deep original? Yes. I could discurse at length as to why this is so (Vinge cares about his ideas, Stross is trying to show off how cool and detached he is) but the presence of a lot of non-original work doesn't mean that a science-fiction editor wouldn't be bursting with joy to get the manuscript for the next Neverness. It means that most of the novels, they take what they can get.
Robin, I'm still puzzled as to why, if you know SF, you think that a novel with your original idea and otherwise acceptable literary quality wouldn't be published. Do we just have different pictures of the field, or is your idea too terrible for mortal minds to comprehend, or what?
Science fiction novels are different from each other in many ways but one way is in the speculations that they make about the future. When people talk about writing "new" or "novel" science fiction novels, one thing they might mean by "novel" is "novel speculation". If this is what people are arguing about, then the argument comes down to this: one side argues that novel speculation is easy but is rejected by publishers, and the other side argues that publishers encourage novel speculation but it's hard to do.
The main problem here is that there are two alternative proposed causes for the lack of novel speculation in science fiction: one side says that it's the publishers who reject novel speculation (which they do presumably because of market pressure), and the other side says it's the difficulty of coming up with novel speculations.
It may be possible to resolve this argument by looking at an area where one of the two proposed causes is absent. There is such an area. Futurologists speculate about the future and are not at the mercy of market pressure. We can ask, then, just how abundant are the speculations of futurologists.
My impression is that they are not abundant. This suggests that the problem in science fiction is not with the publishers with their dependence on the market, but with the intrinsic difficulty of coming up with novel speculations.
What would 'novel' SciFi look like? Would the movie 'Primer' qualify? No offense to Robin, but I doubt a newcomer could write a truly novel, truly good novel in any genre.