A few curious folks took 250 science fiction stories across thirteen decades and looked at whether the stories were set <50 , 50 to 500, or >500 years in the future.
I disagree that it shows less interest in the distant future.
If your timescale for future change is close to that of, say, Kurzweil's, the world is going to be so different in ~200 years that there is nothing for a storyteller to cling to. If the "Mid future" is a transition away from a human-comprehensible civilization, the far future will be very tough to explain to your audience.
They say they sampled different types of media. Given that sci-fi TV and movies are mostly recent, that could create significant bias. I'd really like to see the same chart using some more objective ranking, for example the top 10 selling sci-fi novels of each year.
I'd be most interested in the outlier of the popularity of near-future stories in the 1900s - I wouldn't have been surprised if it were the 1890's and explained it as date-related apocalyptic stories, but what could have made the near future suddenly so interesting in the 1900s?
Massive, visible and rapid technological progress?
Singularity speed beliefs about rates of progress at most influenced only the last few decades of science fiction - the trend is over 130 years.
I disagree that it shows less interest in the distant future.
If your timescale for future change is close to that of, say, Kurzweil's, the world is going to be so different in ~200 years that there is nothing for a storyteller to cling to. If the "Mid future" is a transition away from a human-comprehensible civilization, the far future will be very tough to explain to your audience.
Have to wonder if more is set in the past.
They say they sampled different types of media. Given that sci-fi TV and movies are mostly recent, that could create significant bias. I'd really like to see the same chart using some more objective ranking, for example the top 10 selling sci-fi novels of each year.
I'd be most interested in the outlier of the popularity of near-future stories in the 1900s - I wouldn't have been surprised if it were the 1890's and explained it as date-related apocalyptic stories, but what could have made the near future suddenly so interesting in the 1900s?
website mangled my comment. Partition on 'less than 50' and 'greater than 50'.
Partition on 50 and it looks like random noise. This is a case of seeing what you want to see.