I’m still working on how I’d word this, but I get the sense that a big driver of this phenomenon is people engaging with SF stories as Objects rather than Verbs (methods?). And my theory is that absorbing these stories primarily as pieces of content/image/(prophecy/prediction) rather than as an experience of estrangement, present-as-historyification, and mythic metaphor-making strongly pulls you toward a mode of analysis that is always pattern matching, never process matching.

And sci-fi is way better (imo) when you get to play with it as process. Like the idea of an Asimovian world-city was so exciting because of what it was as an imaginative moment in the reader—”holy crap I never thought to imagine something like this… what a new way to begin thinking about urbanization and its many pros and cons“—rather than as a pure prediction of “one day entire worlds will be single cities.” Which is why sci fi tropes wear thin over time: the novelty is a procedural experience.

What it does at its best is break open our imaginations and shake up our conceptions of possible futures. But if you focus entirely on the delivered image of the future in these books, you’re missing the… well method. And science is as much (if not more) a method as it is a body of knowledge.

And it probably doesn’t help that most of these narrative objects are encodified in the LLMs themselves at this point bc they’ve been trained on the SF corpus. The map has oozed over the territory, etc.etc.