It's comments like this that remind me I'm on HN. Let's be honest for a minute - take a sci-fi book of the shelf, any of them, current (Weir, Pierce Brown, etc) or classic (Asimov, PKD, etc). Almost always, you will find paper-thin characters and themes, written with the crutch of 'worldbuilding'. Here's the lineup - a downtrodden nerd, usually the protagonist, some stereotypical caricature of a woman, like a nagging wife, or ditz, or hag. A few archetypes for a boss, and some equally stereotypical villain. You won't find a Karamazov in sci-fi.
This is the problem with sci-fi in a nutshell, the characters fall flat in even the most seminal works. They are nor memorable at all and somewhere between uninspired and just downright bad. It's the status quo.
Sci-fi and fantasy fans talk about worldbuilding like it is some esoteric art. In the end worldbuilding is literally just plot, and it's well understood that plot is not the most important part of literature, not compared to deeper themes and characters. Is that because of "literary snobs"? No, it's because when you come back to a book in 20, 50, or 200 years you don't remember whether the protagonist's third neural implant was made of vibranium or aluminum, you remember how that book tackled incredible subject matter with layered characters, and pushed the limits of language in a way only possible in prose. When's the last time you heard of a sci-fi author that wrote like Woolf, or Joyce? Never.
Even in more literary sci-fi, for example Dune, the appeal is because it's basically just a medieval story transplanted into space. The focus is on politics and the human experience, not "what if storms lasted longer".
It's so obvious that sci-fi stories are generally better suited to the medium of film, they can capture the unreality in a more believable way, visually, and take less advantage of the ambiguity of text. It's not like sci-fi novels are pushing boundaries in prose anyways. It's much more pretentious to say they are by calling them equally "literary" than to just accept that novels which exemplify the medium are instead.
Great comment. Even lots of sci-fi shows and movies suffers from the "talking heads" trope you describe, where a paper thin character mouths dialogue that makes no character sense in order to push the plot forward or to dump a ton of lore onto the watcher/reader to introduce the world.
The first few Asimov Foundation novels were notorious for talking heads.
> Even in more literary sci-fi, for example Dune, the appeal is because it's basically just a medieval story transplanted into space. The focus is on politics and the human experience, not "what if storms lasted longer".
Yeah well if you dismiss more literary SF because it focuses on human experience rather than vibranium or whatever, it's not surprising that what remains has flat characters. Don't you see the circular logic?
This is the problem with sci-fi in a nutshell, the characters fall flat in even the most seminal works. They are nor memorable at all and somewhere between uninspired and just downright bad. It's the status quo.
Sci-fi and fantasy fans talk about worldbuilding like it is some esoteric art. In the end worldbuilding is literally just plot, and it's well understood that plot is not the most important part of literature, not compared to deeper themes and characters. Is that because of "literary snobs"? No, it's because when you come back to a book in 20, 50, or 200 years you don't remember whether the protagonist's third neural implant was made of vibranium or aluminum, you remember how that book tackled incredible subject matter with layered characters, and pushed the limits of language in a way only possible in prose. When's the last time you heard of a sci-fi author that wrote like Woolf, or Joyce? Never.
Even in more literary sci-fi, for example Dune, the appeal is because it's basically just a medieval story transplanted into space. The focus is on politics and the human experience, not "what if storms lasted longer".
It's so obvious that sci-fi stories are generally better suited to the medium of film, they can capture the unreality in a more believable way, visually, and take less advantage of the ambiguity of text. It's not like sci-fi novels are pushing boundaries in prose anyways. It's much more pretentious to say they are by calling them equally "literary" than to just accept that novels which exemplify the medium are instead.