Kinda occurred to me today one of the shifts in the tone of classic and modern sci fi... of course it's not a catchall rule, but the sort of "in general" feel of it...

In essence, it seems to me that classic sci fi offers a more utopian view of the future, whereas more modern sci fi offers a more dystopian view of the future.

Like I said, by no means completely generalizable. I mean, you've got the classics of dystopian literature in 1984 and Brave New World and whatnot. But a lot of the spirit of older sci fi was that increasing scientific and technological advancement would eventually solve all our problems, almost like magic. We'd launch ourselves to the farthest stars, war and poverty and famine would be eliminated, the countries of the world would unite, everyone would have all sorts of services at their convenience, etc. etc.

Perhaps dystopian and utopian are not quite the ways to describe it. More that... in classic sci fi, technology usually does what it was made to do, and does it perfectly, be the purpose of it good or evil. Modern sci fi, however, basically creates a new setting by making use of advanced technology, but human problems are never changing and never ending, and technology is not always reliable and more often than not creates undesired consequences.

Uh... gosh this is really hard to describe in clear terms... if you read a lot of sci fi like I do you might get it... but I don't know how else to put it. Just something interesting that occurred to me. Could be reflective of numerous factors: our increasing understanding of scientific principles, the advent of a more cynical generation, the realization of technological prophecies of decades past combined with the realization that these technologies haven't solved all our problems...

... so anyway I've been reading Arthur C. Clarke. Yeah, that's basically it.