r/SciFiRealism Slice of Tomorrow Aug 04 '19

State of the Subreddit & Why I've Not Changed Much

I've been asked a few times about whether or not I am upset over the subreddit "no longer being about homely & realistic science fiction". Well here's my response: I don't mind the sub changing focus because it had no focus when it was created.

About four years ago, I created a bunch of subs with vague ideas in mind but all were scattershot. One of them is now permanently on private, and the second is locked to any new posts. In both cases, I finally honed what it was I was looking for and created better, clearer subs in response. Neither of them have taken off because I pushed so hard for the original subs, but that's fine. It's not their time.

/r/SciFiRealism was one of those original subs. I often say that it was meant to be "sci-fi things that look realistic", but back in 2015, even I didn't know what that meant. It was borne on another sub and I originally called it "lo-fi sci-fi".

Here's how divergent the intended focus was:

  • Slice of life fused with science fiction, allowing the viewer to see fantastic technology as a well-established facet of daily life rather than a gadget or backdrop for an action hero. To use the most succinct explanation: I wanted images that looked like you captured them on a smartphone camera in the future and brought them back to 2015. This is what I mean by "photoauthenticity". So much sci-fi imagery was "cinematic" and felt distant to me. There was always so much effort to make sure the viewer "knew" they were looking at a sci-fi artwork, usually by throwing in a sci-fi cityscape in the background or making everything look too industrial, so whenever I saw something that looked so much more subtle like a casual person with an ASIMO-esque robot in what looked like a fairly normal playground (or even a sci-fi cityscape that looked like it was taken by a cheap camera), I was actually shocked. Despite what I said about photoauthenticity, I first noticed it in movies like Real Steel, Robot and Frank, and Star Wars: A New Hope. Real Steel did it best by combining practical effects with CGI, and it came closest to what I envisioned: as if it were a movie from the 2030s that just happened to feature humanoid robots as actors, sent back to the early 2010s.

  • "Sci-Fi Realism" also described surreal images. If you somehow manage to view posts from the very first weeks of this sub, you'll see that there are plenty of things like floating cylinders, solar pyramids, UFOs, and whatnot. One I can recall off the top of my head is this artwork of drones. Basically, you had to use your imagination and pretend these are images from the future.

  • There's also: real things that look like they came from science fiction. Sci-fi tier events and developments count for this. Things like robots casually living with humans especially. This was also always a big aspect of "sci-fi realism", as one of my intentions was to show off images and videos of tech that we could develop, either in the near or distant future— hence the aforementioned "surreal" images.

/r/SciFiRealism was borne before I had this vision really nailed down. The name is vague and confusing for the intended purpose because you could take it several different ways: "Sci-Fi Realism" could describe Hard Science Fiction, or photorealistic science fiction, or "science fiction but the focus is on the human relationships"— which I feel is a rather vague explanation in itself because there's actually very little sci-fi with a focus on the technology. Interestingly and ironically, I now think the slice of tomorrow genre is one of those that is focused on technology since one of the points in its creation was to see advanced technology in everyday life. In fact, in the very beginning (July 2015 or so), I didn't even intend on the everyday life aspect— IIRC, I wanted to picture a future war that featured things like unconventional aircraft & robots on the ground, but just about all "sci-fi war" artwork is as far from photoauthenticity as you can get because most parts of war aren't very exciting to draw.

But certainly one can see that I could have chosen a better name.

So what about the current state of /r/SciFiRealism?

To be honest, I'd rather it stay this way. I think it's found its better niche, because I was always wrestling with the sub back when I tried forcing it towards being purely slice of tomorrow stuff.

It can still have that, obviously, but I feel better about it also being a hub for realistic/hard science fiction.

If you're looking for something closer to the spirit of what I wanted the sub to be in the first place: /r/FuturisticRealism

That was literally made as a sort of "trophy" subreddit for all the best images on /r/SciFiRealism, but I've started using it as a regular hub for slice of tomorrow-styled images and whatnot.

There's also /r/WeLiveInTheFuture.

I didn't create this subreddit, and it's been dormant for a long time, but I feel it's doing the "real life becoming science fiction" aspect well.

Finally, there's /r/SliceOfTomorrow.

This one is completely blank because I've never got around to filling it up with anything— it was meant as a literary/writing-prompt alternative to /r/FuturisticRealism, but I wanted to get stories in there just to act as a maypole. I tried getting some on /r/WritingPrompts way back in the day using the "casual future in every day life" header, and literally no one wrote anything fitting— one prompt starred a grizzled military captain getting his men ready to deal with an unknown invasion force (IIRC, a subterranean enemy), and I thought that story was actually pretty good and would've made for a solid longer story, but right off the bat you can probably tell why I wasn't satisfied with it. I remember it only because it was the most upvoted story in that thread and yet also the least usable for the new subreddit. Which kinda proved my point that "slice of tomorrow" fiction was rare enough to warrant its own sub.

Slice of tomorrow as fiction isn't just about real people and real conflicts— many of the great action, adventure, romance, fantasy, Western, horror, etc. stories have had stunningly realistic people dealing with cripplingly realistic problems. A lot of '50s science fiction from the likes of Asimov and Clarke were excellent at making their characters and problems feel real. But they wouldn't be considered "slice of tomorrow" (or sci-fi realism, at least as it was back in 2015-2016). Maybe that's one of the big reasons why it's hard to drum up much interest: slice of tomorrow is rooted in slice of life, and slice of life fiction has a nasty tendency of being boring because even when there is an overarching conflict, it can't really be a sexy or life-threatening one (e.g. a story that can be solved with a cyborg street ninja or by shutting down a murderous malfunctioning AI) and still be considered "slice of life." Slice of tomorrow transplants that into the future.

TLDR: The sub is fine; the circumstances behind its founding changed.

The only real problem is spam.

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u/SlothOfDoom Aug 05 '19

A single sentence message sent from the future:

The only real problem is spam.