Stross has a theory about that:

http://io9.com/5034107/charles-stross-explains-why-uk-scifi-is-more-hopeful-than-us-scifi

The paucity of near-future US scifi is about the country becoming pessimistic, not being able to see the future clearly. There’s a trend in US scifi towards militarism and far-future stuff.

I suppose in a year or two we should get some Obama-era sci-fi: wonder what that will be like.

Well, yes, but Miriam is a worldwalker, for heaven’s sake. She can leave Gruinmarkt even more easily than you could have left India! I thought that Miriam’s reaction was just meant to show that she was a rather spoiled person from a sheltered upbringing – a selfish, high-maintenance prig. She’s basically a grown-up Eustace Scrubb.

Ah, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

(Actually, the Eustace Scrubb line is really quite good—but don’t you see the resemblance to some the people you meet in SF fandom as well?)

Similarly, an Indian person living in India has to deal with social limitations which a first world person wouldn’t be subject to, and could, in the end, avoid by leaving.

Cherryh’s Foreigner series, as well as some of her other work, indeed succeed where most other science fiction writers fail at imagining truly alien cultures. And I really can’t praise Banks enough, though I don’t think he’s actually that interested in examining alien cultures. He’s very much writing about us.

Yes, I know that science fiction readers “in the community” argue about this constantly. But, you know, I read a lot of books. A very lot of books, including most of those which are so-called “great”. I know what a truly good novel can do. Most science fiction fails at this. Most science fiction is entertainment. Which is fine, it’s why I still read so much of it and don’t apologize to those who sneer at it for doing so. But I think it could be better than it is. It’s hamstrung by its early legacy. And many of its readers, too, of course, because of their expectations.

Incidentally, I’m almost finished with The Knife of Never Letting Go, and it is indeed quite good. I think it might also be targeted to the YA audience because the solution to the central mystery seemed obvious to me very early on and I am finding it very belabored at this point. I also question the author’s choice for the speech patterns of the community—it’s pretty hackneyed. Still, I think it’s a convincing idea of how people might react to the situation he’s conceived.

There are plenty of science fiction written by people who comes from other than male dominated fields. I will skip the obvious females such as Cherryh, Le Guin, or Butler. How about Iain Banks or Richard Morgan? Going a bit further afield, Murakami and Vonnegut, and leaving alone Atwood’s disposition? These are all the obvious people, man, so I kinda find your comments (Ellis) pretentious. It is really not as if we don’t have a controversy about this every year in the community. I don’t think Science fiction has ever been dominated by writers with a scientific background. In fact, I think hard science fiction, which is dominated by people with some sort of technical background like Peter Watts or Greg Egan. However, there is also such a thing as hard social science fiction (which of course is what Merchant Princes aspires to be). The thing is, hardness almost ALWAYS limits the audience to reasonably educated people at high school reading level or better. Greg Egan is never going to sell as well as Bujold, who isn’t going to sell as well as Rowling. To talk about aspire the way the comment does it, is mildly narcissic.

Or Czarist Russia circa 1902 (although, of course, that was in part a deliberate anachronism on the apart of the Singularity Sky society in question)

Ursula leGuin comes to mind immediately, but yeah. The ‘history’ thing is particularly bad, because lots of SF writers seem to follow Asimov in taking history as the writer’s secret weapon, but what they mean by that is “I know, I’ll write about the Roman/British Empire/ Vietnam/Aztecs/blah blah blah – but in space!”

While I’m here a random recommendation – The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness. It’s YA because it has a teenage protagonist (and moves very quickly), but is very well done. There are no biology, engineering, sociology or economics lectures, it’s all show, not tell. Worth a look.

All this is to say, I think maybe it’s unrealistic to except Stross’s Gruinmarkt to be an informed and fully realized hypothetical medieval society. In the context of science fiction as a genre.

But maybe we should expect more.

Science fiction has been dominated by technologists and hard scientists, and within this limited domain of informed science the genre has generally excelled. There’s a long history of an alternative movement within the genre that most disavows the hard science and takes its cue from the arts and humanities. What’s been missing is a movement that is informed by the other sciences and rigorous disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, history and such. It truly seems peculiar to me that the two genres which are all about “world building” (and the term really means culture building atop a technological or magical structure), fantasy and science fiction, are generally so uninformed about the sciences which would most benefit these aims. This recently struck me the strongest as I’ve read Steven Erikson’s Malazan series—Erikson (a pseudonym) is an anthropologist by training and (I believe) trade, and it shows in his writing. He creates alternative cultures with such convincing depth and complexity, that it really shows how shallow are almost all other attempts at the same.

I haven’t read Stross’s Merchant Princes books, but on the basis of this seminar, I think I’ll order them from Amazon. I don’t plan to hold it against him if Gruinmarkt seems under-realized. It’s the norm.

My problem with the other books of Stross’s I’ve read, including Accelerando is that they’re authorially smug. (Which is why I couldn’t get more than a few pages into Infinite Jest, by the way.) In Stross’s case, as I expect is true for many other CT readers, I seem to share a great deal of the experience and ideas which form the background to his speculation. And he’s always flying right at the edge of his intellectual competency (I’m not one who should throw aspersions, to be sure) and occasionally beyond. That he’s a brilliant man is beyond doubt. But I’m not sure this makes for good novels. He’s inventive with ideas the way a jazz musician is inventive with notes. The problem is that these ideas, and his particular virtuosity with them, are extremely contemporary—if you strip them away, as readers will in twenty years when many of them seem wrong-headed or anachronistic or archaic, the brilliance fades.

I quite enjoyed Saturn’s Children. Although I’m sure there are many of us, I’m the only person I know who truly grew up reading Heinlein. (Despite Jack Williamson living only blocks away from me.) It’s impossible not to immediately recognize what Stross was doing—and he did it well. It’s clever as both an homage and a satire (those that fail to comprehend the feminist objections to Heinlein’s writings might clue-in while reading Stross’s book) and a decent story in its own right. But, to me, it exemplifies Stross’s biggest faults (as do his Laundry books, which I couldn’t finish). It’s really, really clever. Brilliantly clever. “Clever” in the American sense; which connotes something aside, or in addition to, intelligence. The con artist is clever. Stross is intelligent and clever, but I’m not sure he’s a very good artist. That’s a criticism common against science fiction writers.

I’d like to read a Stross novel that actually makes me feel something. I’d like him to turn his brilliance and cleverness and intelligence and inventiveness to something that actually means something. It’s hard for me to explain why I feel like breath-taking “big ideas” are not, in themselves, that enduring. Here’s a counter-example: my favorite novel is War and Peace. Tolstoy had a Big Idea. He, unfortunately for the reader, felt the need to expound on it at length in his epilogues, but we’ll set that aside. (And a few monologues, besides.) The real enduring genius of W&P is that Tolstoy managed to examine his Big Idea in a way that truly made it meaningful to individual human lives. Incredibly real-seeming peoples’ lives.

Most of the time, science fiction writers have Big Ideas that they examine schematically. It’s a sketch on a chalkboard backed up by the rapid patter of varyingly competent lecturers. But the reason that any of us really and truly care about these Big Ideas is because—other than their whiz-bang ingenuity—they often actually come to matter to how we live and be. And yet most science fiction authors provide us with only barely realized characters who inhabit these worlds of Big Ideas. The writers are sort of missing the trees for the forest.

In this sense, I feel that Stross is a bit of a throw-back to Heinlein and Asimov and the others writers of science fiction’s Golden Age who placed a large premium on wowing the audience with more weird ideas than they’ve encountered elsewhere, while giving the deepest relevance of these ideas short-shrift. Like many of the Golden Age novels, I don’t think that Stross’s work (extent till now) will age very well.

He’s still among the very best writing currently in the genre, however. As a side note, can anyone tell me why it is that the US is seeing a real dearth of science fiction (bad novelizations from other media excepted) while the UK is seeing a boom? Meanwhile, the situation seems to be reverse with regard to fantasy. It’s odd; and I can’t help but think it is saying something about the two respective cultures.