The Death of Science Fiction and Its Imperfect Resurrection : The Neoscifi Manifesto

Make it stand out

We killed science fiction. Not through censorship or neglect or even intention, but through a far graver offense: simulation. The growing movement "neoscifi" may be arriving at the party too late, powerless to animate the dormant corpse of a once-vibrant genre. Instead, it stands bewildered, shocked that the lifeless form could ideally be revived by a mere kiss of philosophical respectability.

Yet perhaps this bewilderment itself points toward possibility. If neoscifi recognizes the depth of the problem—that science fiction has become machinery of simulation, manufacturing futures which preempt and obliterate the very concept of the future—then its strategies must be equally radical. The question is not whether neoscifi can restore some imagined purity or even preference, but whether it can forge new paths through the wreckage and prison of commodified speculation.

The Archaeology of a Legacy

The market didn't destroy science fiction; such a bad faith presumption assumes a pristine albeit nonexistent past. Rather, the market "exposed" science fiction's core function as industrial machinery, producing formulaic texts and movies that militarize the infinite and reduce every dystopia to another tediously repetitive holocaust of possibility.

But this exposure also reveals what was lost: the genre's original philosophical ambition. When Stanisław Lem sought to explore "incomprehensible alien intelligence," he understood that the alien might always be us—an embodiment of our own incomprehensibility. Solaris doesn't depict first contact; it reveals the impossibility of ever encountering anything beyond our own simulation, an ocean contemplating our thoughts about it.

Neoscifi's task is not to summon the ghosts of Asimov and Clarke to testify to a purity that never existed, but to excavate the philosophical impulse that animated their work beneath its commercial packaging. The Foundation trilogy may serve as an existential ruin, its psychohistory a prediction of its own impossibility—but ruins can become foundations for new construction.

 Breaking the Panopticon of Speculation

Speculation has become a perfect form of disciplinary technology, creating "speculative subjects" defined solely by their potential for future alteration. Consumers of science fiction are perpetually shaped by the futures they consume, programmed by narratives of enhancement, extinction, and transcendence. They read themselves reading themselves in an ever-deepening spiral of technological self-awareness. A mise en abyme headed nowhere.

Neoscifi can interrupt this cycle through deliberate estrangement from estrangement itself. Instead of providing familiar forms of cognitive displacement, it can create works that make the process of speculation itself strange. This interruption means:

Philosophical Deceleration: Where commercial SF accelerates toward action and resolution, neoscifi can embrace contemplative slowness. Gene Wolfe's call for "contemplation rather than passive consumption" points toward this possibility—but only if contemplation resists its own commodification as "sophisticated entertainment."

Violence Interruption: The formulaic violence that saturates contemporary SF—from dystopian death games to militarized space opera—functions as narrative punctuation, preventing deeper inquiry. Neoscifi can develop alternative forms of dramatic tension rooted in intellectual and ethical complexity rather than physical conflict.

Anti-Enhancement Narratives: Instead of stories about human improvement, enhancement, and transcendence, neoscifi can explore the philosophical implications of limitation, finitude, and acceptance. What futures emerge when we stop trying to optimize ourselves?

Communicating Beyond Conquest

Philip K. Dick understood that there are no aliens, only alienation—that all paranoid androids and simulated humans embody the dynamics of modernity. But neoscifi can push beyond Dick's paranoid recursions toward what might be called "post-paranoid speculation."

The neoscifi movement longs for "first contact scenarios that prioritize communication over conquest." If communication is conquest—if the very act of creating meaning recolonizes consciousness—then genuine communication must begin by acknowledging this violence. True first contact would involve encountering forms of intelligence so genuinely other that they resist translation into familiar categories.

This suggests xenophilosophical SF: stories that don't just imagine alien biologies or technologies, but alien forms of consciousness, value, and meaning that challenge anthropocentric assumptions about intelligence, agency, and existence itself.

Escaping the Simulation Trap

The most insidious aspect of SF's commercialization is how it has turned the future into a product line. Every dystopia becomes a brand, every utopia a marketing campaign. Kim Stanley Robinson's solar panels "gleam with the light of their market value," and every terraformed Mars becomes "a theme park of environmental awareness."

Neoscifi can resist this through strategic unmarketability:

Scale Resistance: Small press publications, academic journals, and experimental venues create spaces less beholden to commercial imperatives. These margins matter not as pure outsides but as laboratories for developing forms of speculation that resist easy commodification.

Cultural Diversification: Writers from different cultural contexts—Liu Cixin, Nnedi Okorafor, Indigenous futurists—bring genuinely different perspectives that resist subsumption into familiar commercial formulas. The challenge is supporting this diversity without tokenizing it.

Medium Experimentation: Interactive media, collaborative storytelling, and hybrid forms create different relationships to market forces. When speculation becomes participatory rather than consumable, it opens possibilities for genuine dialogue about possible futures.

Philosophical Rigor: By taking seriously the philosophical implications of its speculations, neoscifi can create works that reward deep engagement rather than passive consumption. This means developing new forms of SF criticism and pedagogy that treat the genre as worthy of serious intellectual attention.

The Viral Logic of Improvement Reversed

Science fiction has mostly been about betterment, but improvement implies measurement, surveillance, and ultimately control. Every enhancement limits what remains unenhanced. Neoscifi reverses this logic by exploring degradation, limitation, and failure as sources of wisdom rather than problems to be solved.

Instead of cognitive estrangement as market research—orchestrated removal of the familiar designed to predict its return—neoscifi can practice cognitive commitment: sustained engagement with genuinely difficult questions about consciousness, ethics, and existence that resist quick resolution.

Beyond the Neoscifi Event

The future of science fiction may not lie in redeeming the genre but in recognizing its disappearance as an accomplished fact while simultaneously working to create something new from its ruins. This requires acknowledging that philosophy and speculation have already collapsed into their own simulation—while insisting that new forms of philosophical speculation remain possible.

Practical Strategies for Resistance:

1.     Slow Publishing: Resist the demand for constant content production. Develop work over years rather than months.

2.     Difficulty Maintenance: Create works that require active intellectual engagement, that reward rereading and discussion.

3.     Violence Abstinence: Develop dramatic structures that don't rely on physical conflict or spectacle.

4.     Future Agnosticism: Resist the pressure to provide clear visions of "the future" in favor of exploring the philosophical premises that underlie all future-thinking.

5.     Cross-Pollination: Engage seriously with contemporary philosophy, science, and art rather than remaining within genre boundaries.

6.     Educational Integration: Develop curricula and pedagogical approaches that treat SF as philosophical literature worthy of careful study.

The Imperfect Crime

Science fiction may have committed suicide, but corpses sometimes prove more generative than the living. The evidence of SF's death—everything we now categorize as science fiction—also contains the materials for its resurrection in new forms.

This resurrection cannot be a return to origins that never existed, but must be a movement toward futures not yet imagined. Neoscifi's "lethal strategy"—to be more speculative than the speculative, more philosophical than the philosophical—can succeed only if it abandons the logic of competition and surplus in favor of genuine philosophical inquiry.

The perfect crime was the murder of science fiction's philosophical soul. The imperfect resurrection lies in admitting that this soul was always more fragile and partial than we imagined—while insisting that fragments of genuine speculation can still be cultivated in the ruins of the genre's commercial success.

We exist after the end of science fiction while inhabiting the future before it. In this temporal paradox lies both the agony of our condition and its possibility: to write the future differently, one careful sentence at a times we see In the Allegory of the cave.