Why the Future Needs NeoSciFi: How a New Scientist Review Proves the Genre Needs Saving
By Paul Privateer
A recent New Scientist review celebrating the year’s “stellar” science fiction does something it never intended: it shows exactly why the genre is in crisis. Emily H. Wilson’s column highlights recent favorites, especially Hal LaCroix’s Here and Beyond, a generation-ship tale in which 600 passengers head to a habitable Super Earth, knowing only their descendants—the "Seventh Generation"—will live to see it. On board, reproduction is controlled, lifespans are extended for the sake of the Mission, and sacrifice is the defining ethic.To Wilson, this is “encouraging.”
To anyone aligned with the NeoSciFi Movement, it’s a warning flare. Because while Here and Beyond may be well-written, it embodies the exact kind of imaginative dead-end NeoSciFi is trying to correct.
The Illusion of the Future
As the NeoSciFi Manifesto makes clear, today’s mainstream science fiction doesn’t imagine new futures—it recycles signs of them. The genre has become what Jean Baudrillard might call a “precession of simulacra”: stories that simulate possibility while enforcing the inevitability of status quo systems. Here and Beyond isn’t imagining a future—it’s decorating inevitability with starlight. The "Mission" isn’t questioned. The reproductive regime isn’t challenged. The social structure aboard Shipworld is presented not as a constructed ideology, but as a given. This is what NeoSciFi calls the temporal conquest: the foreclosure of alternatives under the guise of progress.
Where Suffering Becomes Entertainment
Even when there’s no violence, the emotional logic of suffering-as-purpose still reigns. In LaCroix’s world, no one currently alive will see the payoff of their journey. Yet this deprivation is framed as noble. That’s what the manifesto critiques as emotional biopolitics—turning deep human costs into consumable meaning, training readers to derive satisfaction from slow-burn sacrifice.When stories like this dominate the landscape, pain becomes product. And pleasure comes not from transformation or breakthrough, but from watching others endure and comply. The Failure to Ask "Why?"Old-school sci-fi had its own ideological blind spots, but at least it asked questions. Le Guin imagined worlds without gender. Butler examined control through biology. Dick questioned the nature of reality itself. These were not just “futures”—they were thought experiments.Here and Beyond, like so many contemporary tales, fails this test. It doesn’t interrogate its premise. It doesn’t challenge its social architecture. It reinforces what already is, dressed in cosmic travel and character arcs. What’s missing is precisely what NeoSciFi calls for: ethical experimentation, genealogical storytelling, and ontological revolt. Not stories that simply ask “What if we go to another planet?” but stories that ask “What if we lived differently?”Spectacle vs. SubstanceThe New Scientist review, by calling this kind of fiction “encouraging,” proves how normalized this aesthetic has become. NeoSciFi was created to resist this very normalization—the slow erasure of speculative depth by the rise of polished passivity.As the manifesto warns, mainstream sci-fi has become a “disciplinary-spectacular complex,” not designed to liberate imagination, but to pacify it. Why NeoSciFi MattersNeoSciFi isn’t nostalgic. It isn’t about returning to some mythical golden age. It’s about unearthing the lost capacities of the genre—the critical, the philosophical, the confrontational.It’s a movement of writers, readers, and thinkers who believe science fiction should interrogate rather than entertain, explore rather than reassure, provoke rather than sedate. We don’t want better gadgets—we want better questions. We don’t need more simulations—we need possibility.
Join the Rebellion of the Imagination
The future isn’t a marketing device. It isn’t a setting for hero myths or a dumping ground for aestheticized trauma. It’s what we make it. But first, we have to reclaim the tools of making it.If you’re tired of genre comfort food, if you hunger for stories that think, question, and challenge—then NeoSciFi is your home.We don’t want more futures that have already been sold to us. We want futures that haven’t yet been thought. Interested in working with the NeoSciFi Movement? Email me directly at paul@paulprivateer.com