Why is it so hard to find hard sci-fi in anime and manga? Even sci-fi as a whole seems to be a dead genre

Why is it so hard to find hard sci-fi in anime and manga? Even sci-fi as a whole seems to be a dead genre.

But there was almost nothing but scifi pre 2000, not hard but it was scifi. Hell anime has it's roots in stuff like Astro Boy.

In any case if you're looking for hard scifi have you seen Rocket Girls?

Anime doesn't lend itself to scrupulous realism that well.
Sci-fi was never that common, but we got a space show earlier this year.

Because scifi is already a small niche niche, and hard scifi is a an even smaller sub niche.

I like all genres, but anytime I watch sci-fi, I want the designs and technology to seem somewhat grounded in reality.

Even time machines or spaceships capable of FTL travel is fine, as long as designs look realistic and practical, like something you'd expect to see in the future.

Planetes is a good example of this, the technology seems believable decades from now, and the designs seem utilitarian.

However, stuff like Gundam mechs or certain animes that takes place hundreds of years in the future, yet you still have people wearing aristocratic, outdated, gaudy outfits really puts me off the show.

When is hard scifi ever interesting for its story instead of tech wanking? You can't name an example that isn't Planetes.

examples of tech wanking? I've heard of brief descriptions, but never any actual tech wanking.

Cause the future looks more bleak every day.

I just don't want giant robots fighting like DBZ characters, is that too much to ask?

What are you even talking about. All over the 80s and 90s.

This, there are fads, and we still get cool stuff now and then. Space Brothers is about as hard as science fiction can get, it just finished airing a few years ago.

>hundreds of years in the future, yet you still have people wearing aristocratic, outdated, gaudy outfits
>why are we wearing monochrome jumpsuits? after the social pressures unique to our society and technology forced us to adopt a feudal society I'd rather wear something that instantly declares my status and class-
>BECAUSE IT'S 2516

If things turn out well with the moon tourists and the martian landings we'll see resurgence of it in all media. It just died out in the 70's and 80's along with space exploration (boring telescopes and nerdy solar panel toys don't inspire people).

>Because it's [CURRENT YEAR]

there's nothing wrong with giant robots fighting like dbz characters u pretentious wanker

Anime's the perfect medium for scrupulous realism.

Those moon tourists better watch out for land mines.

>society is ruled by fuedal lords in 2516

Is that really a thing in sci-fi anime? because that sounds dumb as hell. Assuming that spaceships and planetary colonies are a thing by then, they'd be ruled by powerful governments.

Even in the future, technology like that is expensive as hell, no way some feudal lord is running that.

Because good sci-fi takes too much effort for too little profit.

If your idea of feudalism is based on tv depictions of it especially in generic (read bad) fantasy I guess it doesn't make sense. But awful lot of other things wont as well.

I'm talking about the feudalism that occurred historically. Unless I'm getting that wrong, what else would you describe it as?

>I know the exact conditions under which society will function in five hundred years

People who can't suspend their disbelief are the worst.

Planetes zero gravity scenes took double the frames of a normal scene to look right, it isn't practical.

Then take into account the feudals will have access to 2516 technology as well.

Science got complicated and there are too many nitpicky nerds running around that would rate your show 2/10 because of small mistakes. Easy slut-fi genres just have to show unrealistic tits but because the nerds never saw one in real life they'll eat that shit and buy figures and pillows.

Feudal lords could handle expensive things just fine. In fact, in a future society with a light-speed communication gap between colonies you would probably be better served by autonomous fiefdoms than by a bureaucracy where decisions must be routed through the central office.

Medieval feudalism was similar in many ways to modern libertarian theory, just with an extreme personal loyalty element to keep lords from going full NAP and seceding. A lot of SF authors, Poul Anderson in particular, use elements of feudalism to describe some future societies. I'd say some of it comes from a desire to describe the future in a way that doesn't sound like you just think the status quo will continue but get bigger, some of it comes from genuinely studying feudalism and believing it'd work well in space, some of it comes from trying to comment on or extrapolate the consequences of our present, atomized society.

What's more practical? Live-action like in The Expanse where your options for zero-g are:
>build a wire rig
>jarring CG
>$60,000 plane flight
or animation, where you give your animators a library book and tell them to draw some more.

For all the silly Napoleonic space battles in LoGH there were occasionally some really cool scenes.

the problem with this is that the technology developed for space travel is really fucking expensive. No lord has more power than big governments with fuck loads of money to spend.

Nobody is looking to make a mars or Moon colony. Only governments with massive amounts of money like America are willing to.

So chances are, if there's going to be some future space society on another planet, it's likely going to be controlled by a country on earth or internationally. However, if a colony were to decide to break off from, chances are, they'd adopt a similar government to they're origin country.

Right, you're thinking like the status quo will continue, as if all our space colonies will be seeded and resupplied by launching Saturn Vs to them.

>No lord has more power than big governments with fuck loads of money to spend.
Right now the two entities with the most advanced plans for space colonization are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They are not big governments.

Eh, if governments see a benefit to something and really wants it, they will beat every business in that field.

What you're saying is what they said about space travel 20 years ago, when private space travel companies weren't remotely a thing but look at where we are now, the government largely couldnt care less, and NASA is lagging while SpaceX and others are blasting off ahead.

>Right, you're thinking like the status quo will continue, as if all our space colonies will be seeded and resupplied by launching Saturn Vs to them.

Just because a colony becomes self-sustaining does not mean that they're willing to break away from their government. Also if they do break away, they'd likely just adopt a similar government to their predecessors. You don't see Canada, America, or Australia becoming fuedal lordships.

I'm sure Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will make a lot of sweet money from government contracts, but they certainly won't be feudal lords of a future Mars colony. Elon Musk for example, probably has some of the more ambitious plans, but a good deal of that is actually funded by NASA. Space exploration is just too expensive right now, and not profitable.

>NASA is lagging while SpaceX and others are blasting off ahead
They do? Have the private space companies achieved anything really spectacular?

Sci fi is harder to write an isekai of compared to videogame fantasy.

You don't see them becoming constitutional monarchies either. They all, especially the US, tried to improve on old systems, which got that way by trying to improve on older systems. Five hundred years ago the feudal system was being phased out as communication and organization improved. Five hundred years from now our present systems will have been phased out for systems that work better, and for environments that feature huge communication lags and frontier environments. I'm not saying they'll straight-up lift feudalism from old books, but the system they have may well look like it.

And maybe it'll be status quo, maybe it'll be The Expanse with nation-states and decolonization and a cold war. Personally that takes me out of the narrative more than space barons, but it's a literature of ideas. Do what you want.

SpaceX is actually funded a great deal by NASA. They also rely a lot on previous research that was done by NASA to build their rockets.

Space travel might be profitable in the distant future, but so far, most of the funding and research is being done by the government. But why are we talking about corporations? I don't think they're the same thing as feudal lords.

Right, all that is true, but the big point is you can't tell your SF author that things certainly won't look a certain way in the future because you don't know. Strange things happen, history changes, old things are made new again. If you can't conceive of the status quo changing you should really look into genres that aren't SF.

>Even sci-fi as a whole seems to be a dead genre.
Depends on how strict your definitions are, really. Currently airing shows that are arguably SF:
Inuyashiki
Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou
UQ Holder (mostly fantasy, though)
Gintama
Infini-T Force
Time Bokan
Fireball Humorous

They are:
1. Closer to feudal lords than to governments
2. Different than the sort of thing we thought we'd have 50 years ago
The point isn't that anyone thinks a return to feudalism is inevitable. The point is that we don't think anything other than current society continuing on as is forever is ludicrous.

Sci-fi and especially hard sci-fi are difficult to make. The writers/authors would need to actually know some science. Isekai/magic much easier, you can just make shit up.

To make good isekai/magic you have to make consistent things up, which is why most of it sucks.

We do get very decent SF in manga, though, Wombs is really good.

It would probably be a little bit easier if there were tons more interesting modern literature for it, which can itself only happen if the whole of society is also getting more interested in it and puts most of its brilliant minds to that task.
So far, our current world society is more interested in digitalization, automatization and globalization. With a little bit of biogenetics.
We really need some new space race.

You licked to much government propaganda m9

They made a rocket capable of landing on a platform successfully and they only developed it for less than a decade iirc

Re-usable rockets

there were like 50 years of pure cosmos shit in all the media, people got tired. It's empty and it's costly. The hype is dead.

Read a fucking book.

Can't I read books AND watch anime?

>humanity in Mars in 7 years
Feels good

>reading genre fiction

I've been watching anime for nearly too decades and the good sci-fi I've seen are a handful. If you want good sci-fi, especially hard sci-fi, your best bet is manga. There are plenty good, not only in terms of story but also art.

Nono

Best girl.

Watch Victory Gundam. Giant robots fight but tons of people actually die when they try suicidal stuff and Tomino finally expressed his anti-war themes in a meaningful way.

Also watch the Patlabor OVA and movies. They're more like low sci-fi but I know if you're intelligent you'll probably love Patlabor 2.

Just a few more months until the new Space Jam anime comes out.

Scifi is back!

>Even sci-fi as a whole seems to be a dead genre.
What are you talking about? I don't know if it was hard or not, but Centaur no Nayami was totally sci-fi. And there's tons of sci-fi shows every season, and a lot of variety.

I think the problem might be that you're a moron.

yes yes

No.
Adults read books
Kids watch cartoons

What have you been into? I'm waiting impatiently for Hox to finish Wombs, and Joshi Kouhei has been surprisingly solid mil-SF so far, though that list of tags has me worried. I've become completely apathetic about Aposimz.

Men read literature and create good times.
Manchildren read genre fiction and create hard times.

>mfw gay basketball crew somehow nail the LoGH spirit and bring out aspects of Tanaka's vision impossible for anyone else

>recommending that shitty Centaur anime
>calling someone else a moron
Who am I quoting hahaha

I'm not recommending it, I didn't even finish it.

But it's notable because it absolutely is sci-fi, but nobody in this thread realizes it because they're all weekendfags who think sci-fi has to involve spaceships and lasers.

Protip: Centaur no Nayami is more sci-fi than Star Wars.

>making protips
>acting like serious aficionados would call it sci-fi and not SF
>not knowing what hard SF is
You're not a pro, dude.

I never said I was a "serious afficionado" or whatever, but I do know sci-fi when I see it.

Compared to a group of people who think sci-fi has to involve spaceships, yes, I am a pro.

Honestly, Centaur is pretty hard despite focusing on the social side of things. Its entire premise was grounded in a very definite counterfactual of human evolution. That counterfactual was used to flesh out a not-very-hard basic premise, but then the rest of the delivery was very hard. The show was concerned with the realistic implications of its premise throughout. The idea that something like it has to count as "soft" is actually kind of insulting in this age of molecular biology and quantitative social science.

"Hard sci-fi" is a meme for astronomers and engineers who think that being good at science automatically makes them a good author.
It's also retarded to judge the quality of a show/book/comic based only on how "realistic" it is.

That said, Gasaraki is a great "muh realism" mecha anime and more people should watch it. It's a good example of a creator knowing what's possible IRL and what needs to be handwaved with alien space magic.

Its expensive. The only solid backgrounds Japan can do consistently in TV animation budget are Japanese streets. Watch almost any TV anime set in Europe or a different era and it will likely look undetailed and unrealistic as shit. Just wait for Netflix to give some studio the budget and time to finally pull of a sci-fi setting like what Castlevania was able to do with medieval fantasy.

Yep, totally a pro to those morons who think "sci-fi" is a useful genre tag for Star Wars because it has spaceships and "fantasy" is a useful genre tag for CnN because it has satyrs.
>feeling insulted on behalf of social science
>imagining social sciences are sciences

Stop user, she is minor!

No

Sometimes miracles happen.

Then read a book and stop watching anime.

>we should label shows based on the most superficial criteria and not on their content
t. cancer

>>imagining social sciences are sciences
I'm saying they're becoming harder by the day. We're starting to get to the point where there's enough data being generated and collected that we may be able to fine useful regularities, i.e. laws, in the social realm.
>implying all of human behavior isn't the result of natural phenomena
>implying all of human behavior can't be explained as natural phenomena
fucking christcucks, no wonder you want fantasy shit like star wars to count as sci-fi

Kuroko no Basuke had some of the most unsubtle and contrived delivery I've seen in an anime, some of that was probably the original mangaka, but still. I'm imagining the Kuroko team handling this is kind of like asking a 5 year old to interpret Shakespeare.

NASA is still struggling to glue several shuttle parts together without the shuttle whose goal is to be dropped into the sea once every few years. For a lot of money. Meanwhile spacex is now responsible for about half of the global launches and it's going to get better. They also land rockets which was supposed to be impossible. At this point NASA is just a glorified corporate welfare and prestige title for hipsters.

>Only governments with massive amounts of money like America are willing to.
The ones looking to space right now are private companies, more so than governments. America basically gave up it's space program leaving Russia to take up the slack, but it's still the private companies sending supplies to their station.

>t.fedora with che shirt

>we can only label shows one thing based on one other thing
Star Wars is science fiction because it has spaceships and fantasy because it has magic, but is more fantasy than science fiction. People with more than 105IQ can easily grasp this concept.

>We're starting to get to the point where there's enough data being generated and collected that we may be able to fine useful regularities, i.e. laws, in the social realm.
We've actually been doing that for thousands of years, it's why every successful society has marriage, music, etc. but I'm sure Fedora-kun already knew that.

I haven't read manga in a while, but my usual recommendations for less popular series would be literally anything by Hoshino Yukinobu, Murasakiiro no Qualia, Ultra Heaven, Mother Sarah, etc.

>positivism

>Protip: Centaur no Nayami is more sci-fi than Star Wars.
Star Wars was always sci-fi fantasy though.

>if you're intelligent you'll probably love Patlabor 2
Hilarious.

>more people should watch it
This is very true. All of what you said, plus it's a great watch in its own right.

>every successful society has marriage
well, you can have marriage but also belong to a moiety where if you happen to meet people from a different tribe with the same moiety in the forest your expected to fuck them, presumably to prevent inbreeding depression

I'm talking about moving our understanding of these things away from traditionalist asspull

I don't think you know what that word means

welcome to the 105iq club, I guess. FAGSA!

>he doesn't like Oshii
Someone isn't making it into FAGSA

Hoshino Yukinobu is a treasure. He doesn't try to push the medium too hard, honestly his SF mostly reminds me of Golden Age shorts, and it's great to have that kind of sincerity around. I loved Qualia but I feel like I'm missing out on something by not reading the novel.

Ultra Heaven looks like PKD druggie stuff and I was never into that, what am I missing out on?

This.
The Golden Age of SF happen back when you could literally make a living writing short fiction.

>he doesn't like Oshii
The TV series and the OVAs are good,

*YOOOOOOoooo in the distance*
AYO HOL UP
*dances gasara*
SO YOU BE
*flexes oni muscle*
YOU BE SAYIN
*approaches heart rate of 300 bpm*
WE WUZ
*brings back terror*
KUGUTSU AND SHIEEEEEEEEET

To be fair, you have to have a *very* high IQ to understand Mamoru Oshii. The plotting is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of military engineering most of the references will go over a typical viewers head. There's also Oshii's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his pacing- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these long pauses, to realise that they're not just faux-deep- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Oshii truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the symbolism in the soldier in Patlabor 2 standing under a sign labeled "Lumiere et Ombre," which itself is a cryptic reference to the French for "Light and Shadow". I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Oshii's genius wit unfolds itself on their movie screens. What fools.. how I pity them.
And yes, by the way, i DO have a Sky Crawlers tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid

This needs to die.

Wait, have you never read Koike Keiichi, one the greatest mangaka? You are missing a lot. All of his works are pure genius and it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that his works are ones of the few that make the most out of the medium and push its boundaries.

Because its hard to pull off and done better in books. A future machine loses some its charm when you have to try and draw it since its hard to get across its workings without spending too much time on it ruining the pacing. In books however you can get away with using a few pages to show a concept off.

If you wrote stuff that Campbell liked.
>tfw hordes of pulp writers had to get day jobs or go to war when all the paper got sucked up for WWII propaganda
>tfw they came back to Astounding controlling the market and publishing only Campbell's autistic brand of hardish SF
>tfw you and your entire milieu are now only remembered for the campy TV it inspired twenty years later
>tfw people think you were just about priggish space captains and stupid barbarians
it hurts

>it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that his works are ones of the few that make the most out of the medium and push its boundaries.
But I don't want to read things that push the boundaries of the medium, I want to read things that understand the medium and use it well. I've almost never truly enjoyed boundary-pushing stuff, it also pushes suspension of disbelief and undercuts whatever theme or point the author was trying to make.

On the other hand if you do draw it well you can do things that non-picture books can't. Books and comics are good at different things.

...

I'd call you autistic retard but you are probably diagnosed already.

10/10

I've only seen one episode but now I want to watch the rest.