I wonder if this is because the UK publishers have not yet caught up with the changing face of technology or whether the US publishers are more adventurous than their British counterparts. This could of course also apply to the Australian SF.

The internet is not a level playing field. The US still dominates it – which is why US sf still sells heavily in the UK and, I suspect, in Australia; but the reverse is not true. Even Sean Williams, an Australian sf author who had several books published in the US and UK, is now out of print on both countries.

Sadly, I have to agree with you about a human mission to Mars, where there are difficulties like inter-planetary radiation.

The principle of science is that you will get the same result from the same set of start up conditions. It’s like saying all swans are white… well they did until they discovered Australia with its black swans. So at the moment we know of no way to travel in short time scales to other stars. It does not preclude that in the future. True, the general opinion is that it is unlikely to happen, but then the medieval times thought similarly about travelling to the moon.

Interestingly, Alastair Reynolds in his Revelation Space series suggests a way inter-stellar travel can happen in slower time, which would lead to colonising the stars.

I think we need to understand the causes for Australia’s SF market being moribund, and I’m the first to admit I would not know where to start looking for them.

We also need to understand what exactly is the difference between the UK, USA and Australian SF markets to see if one market can learn lessons from the other markets. Again, I’m not the person to do such an analysis. The catchment population of these countries does play a part, but in today’s internationalism it is less so than it used to be.

One thing I think we can both agree on is that UK SF is alive and kicking in its various guises. But it would be useful to know why the Australian SF market isn’t, so that the UK market can avoid the same pitfalls.

Storr’s article may have moaned that the sf market (in Australia) is dying, but it sounded like a general moan about the genre – and that’s what I responded to. I suspect the Australian sf market is suffering simply because it is smaller – 23 million to the UK’s 62 million to the US’s 314 million.

The relationship between science and science fiction is complicated enough, without taking into account the complicated and sometimes apparently serendipitous way science progresses. I suspect you may be underestimating where science will lead us in the long term.

The reasons why we haven’t colonised space yet are nothing to do with the engineering and science, but more to do with society and its needs. The relationship here is only really starting to be understood and I would not at this juncture like to predict where that will end up. (You may enjoy my forthcoming short story in autumn issue of Jupiter in the light of this discussion.)

The original article that triggered your blog was written in Australia and it appears that Sf there is moribund according to the blogger concerned. Here in the UK, it’s a very different matter, I’m rather glad to say. Although I’m not sure why there is such difference, I suspect it has something to do with the difference in the economic situations of the two countries.

Boy is this true. We may not have made much forward progress in manned spaceflight, but the flow of media and information in the world we live in is truly astounding.

I was feeling disgruntled the other day because I wanted to watch something on my PHONE, and it was taking its time buffering. Then it hit me, like it often does, that my phone is an absolute miracle and I should quit whining and read the issue of Clarkesworld that was just automatically delivered to my Kindle.

And it is always thus that people think SF is dead. Its a bad joke at this point.