[HN Gopher] We need more optimistic science fiction
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We need more optimistic science fiction
Author : craig552uk
Score : 59 points
Date : 2025-04-27 20:11 UTC (2 days ago)
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| luotuoshangdui wrote:
| Good point. Can someone recommend some good optimistic science
| fiction?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| _A Half Built Garden_ was lovely, I thought.
|
| Ada Palmer had a good write-up on _Hopepunk_. Many of the
| example books come towards the latter half of the write-up.
| https://beforewegoblog.com/purity-and-futures-of-hard-work-b...
| luotuoshangdui wrote:
| Thanks, hopepunk is a fun new concept to learn about.
| igor47 wrote:
| i tried "half built garden" and just could not continue
| reading it. why is _everyone_ so obsessed with their genders
| and pronouns?
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Project Hail Mary, The Martian, Contact. Somewhat in line with
| a better future mentioned in the essay, The Ministry for the
| Future and the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson posit some
| solutions to some big technological challenges with a lot of
| time with each side in the political debate, though whether one
| finds it optimistic lies with the reader.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I was as disappointed as everbody else by _Artemis_ , but
| _Project Hail Mary_ was a great return to form and a great
| Space MacGyver Procedura. Definitely left me fired up and
| feeling positive as well. I really appreciate just the joy in
| knowledge that Weir 's books revel in.
| Mithriil wrote:
| _The Ministry for the Future_ , by Kim Stanley Robinson.
| Realistic and optimistic climate fiction.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| But it begins with a nightmarish heatwave that kills hundreds
| of thousands in India, which may be a little hard for some
| people to handle (judging by the reactions of people I've
| recommended it to...)
| gmuslera wrote:
| When you realize all that must work (not in the physical
| world, but in the human one) perfectly for that problem to be
| solved it becomes very pessimistic.
|
| The human part of that book is fantasy, and not a great one.
| At some point the suspension of disbelief crash into pieces.
| porphyra wrote:
| Star Trek is often considered the archetype of optimistic
| science fiction.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Sadly its present-day incarnations are often anything but, so
| it's not an easy rec anymore.
| morkalork wrote:
| The TNG Picard character was a man of _principles_ that you
| just don't see anymore on TV.
| igor47 wrote:
| The "Delta V" books by Daniel Suarez.
|
| I've been recommending "The Deluge" by Stephen Markeley, which
| is simultaneously very dark and quite optimistic.
|
| "Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I liked the _The Deluge_ (great characterization), Doctorow
| is generally good and _Walkaway_ was great, his _The Lost
| Cause_[1] is also a fairly hopeful novel.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Cause_(novel)
| i80and wrote:
| The Monk & Robot books[1] are my personal favorites in the
| whole genre.
|
| [1]: https://us.macmillan.com/series/monkrobot
| igor47 wrote:
| agreed, especially the first book. the other becky chambers
| books in the "long way to a small angry planet" series are
| also quite good.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Literally anything written by Liu Cuxin. Not overtly positive
| all the time but always infused with a deep historical optimism
| about humanity and the power of science + engineering.
|
| Also I second Ministry for the Future.
|
| Reading the newer translation of We right now also and the
| first 1/2 or so is weirdly positive. Not what I remembered at
| all.
| o11c wrote:
| A Miracle of Science (webcomic, 2002-2007)
|
| https://www.project-apollo.net/mos/
| AIPedant wrote:
| On Twitter, Colin Fraser pointed out that Black Mirror was
| somewhat optimistic in that the horrible evil technology actually
| works as described[1].
|
| Truly pessimistic science fiction would have
|
| - people worshipping an AI God which is demonstrably dumber than
| a dog
|
| - friendly humanoid robots which don't really understand how to
| walk down a flight of stairs
|
| - gravitational warp drives which are purely cosmetic and cannot
| travel anywhere, though it leads to terrible cancer
|
| - a Potemkin Dyson Sphere where only 5% of the panels work and
| the government blames out-of-system immigrants for the blackouts
|
| [1]
| https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1911129344979964207#...
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Hilariously, a dyson sphere operating at 5% capacity would
| still generate more power every second than humanity currently
| generates in 10,000 years.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| Sure, but 89 % of that 5% will be still used for
| interplanetary yacht fleet of owner of Choco-Darien Inc.
| philipkglass wrote:
| [delayed]
| ben_w wrote:
| But at even just 4%, the thermal emissions from a partial
| Dyson swarm would still be enough to heat Earth by twice what
| anthropogenic climate change has managed so far: https://www.
| sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092702482...
| AIPedant wrote:
| It would also cost more power to construct than humanity is
| currently capable of generating in 10,000 years, so I am not
| sure what your point is.
|
| Presumably a 5% functional Dyson sphere would be a corrupt
| boondoggle in the same way as a power plant which is down for
| maintenance 95% of the year, but the financial calculation
| would use much larger numerators and denominators than we are
| used to.
| ben_w wrote:
| You may be interested in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
| where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, an entire
| battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. The
| planet on which the dog was located then exploded, but not due
| to the battle fleet.
| gcanyon wrote:
| There is a science story, I don't remember who wrote it or the
| title, where humanity discovers a way to modify the speed of
| light within a region. Excited, they work incredibly hard to
| implement the technology, only to discover they can only make
| it slower.
|
| Maybe it was jumping to a parallel universe to travel and then
| jumping back. But the same issue: the limit was lower.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| I love science fiction, but as someone born in the middle of the
| last century, I am biased toward authors from the 20th century.
|
| I noticed that the novels at the end of Nature (the journal) were
| sad and weird, but I thought it was probably an editorial choice
| to look "modern".
|
| Yet recently, I read SF novels with authors sorted
| alphabetically, and it struck me again how weird and sad 21st-
| century novels are.
| johnea wrote:
| How about this:
|
| Little Jimmy used his space laser pistol to blast the eyeballs
| out of the reptilian space alien invaders from Chinnastan, thus
| saving humanity and getting the girl!
|
| THE END
|
| This is pretty much a summary of 90% of Japanese anime (I try to
| watch the other 10% --> Ta Yi Ge Bu Fen woJian tehoshii)
|
| How much more optimistic could it get for a white male anglo-
| european christian sci-fi reader?
| Animats wrote:
| OK, we know what's coming.
|
| - Energy is less of a problem, between cheap solar cells and
| batteries.
|
| - Materials may start to be a problem, but not yet.
|
| - Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries, but
| continues to grow in Africa and among the religious groups which
| keep women at home.
|
| - Equatorial areas are becoming uninhabitable.
|
| - AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but
| if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire,
| you're in trouble.
|
| - Robots for unstructured tasks are just beginning to work.
| Maybe. The mechanical problems of building robots have been
| pretty much solved. Motors, sensors, controllers, etc. work well
| and are not too expensive. There are well over a dozen humanoid
| robots that can walk now. (Unlike the days of Asimo, which barely
| worked over two decades of improvement.)
|
| - Automatic driving is being deployed now.
|
| So how do we build a society to deal with that?
| walterbell wrote:
| Step 1: kindergarten through university simulator-based
| training for remedial omnipotence.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| - Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries,
|
| This is a problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
|
| - AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but
| if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire,
| you're in trouble.
|
| Or, everything gets so abundant that we can actually have high
| UBI
|
| This reminds me if why I disliked to movie Elysium. They had a
| robots that effectively gave free perfect medical care. I
| didn't buy the premise of the movie that only that rich would
| be able to use them. Given they were robots, governments,
| hospitals, could and would make them readily available since
| ultimately it would massively lower their medical costs.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| you assume their compotence and forethought. Such things
| cannot be taken for granted.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| actually materials may be not a problem, - 40% of all transport
| is for transporting of fossil fuels !
|
| so after we lower amount of fossil fuels mined, transported,
| refined, we can start focusing on working with other materials
| or start using freed workforce/manufacturing capacity for other
| kinds of terraforming activities.
|
| AI - how many connections in human brain? google says 100
| trillion, how many transistors in one NVIDIA Blackwell GPU -
| 200 billion. so you need just 500 GPUs to have number of
| connections as brain does. those are transistors only for
| connections, you need much more transistors for processing
| which is connected thru said connections, so does one
| datacenter holds one brain worth of biological level processing
| already ?
| bitwize wrote:
| Right now, "humanity surviving into the future long-term" is a
| pretty optimistic vision. Real life looks like a William Gibson
| novel right now, except just the shitty parts.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Agreed on all counts. Any advice on how so start writing some
| short amateur scifi from folks who have a writing practice or are
| at the start of developing one?
|
| Udemy classes, youtube tutorials / lectures, books on how to
| start writing scifi etc?
| throwanem wrote:
| 500 words a day, dead or alive.
| abeppu wrote:
| > I believe that a lack of alternatives to our current political
| and economic ideas is a problem for the world right now.
|
| While I agree with this statement, I think imagining alternative
| political and economic systems is not primarily about _science_
| fiction. We could imagine these new forms of society with
| existing technology. We could imagine a future with technological
| regress which is political /economic retro-utopia where everyone
| has adequate food, housing, access to healthcare, education,
| green-space ... but no screen-based brain-rot, AI, space
| exploration or other fancy tech.
| userbinator wrote:
| _which is political /economic retro-utopia_
|
| Mid-century America?
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| i really apologize but this had to be done, in current
| situation:
|
| From 1918 to 1987 the Soviet government executed,
| slaughtered, starved, beat or tortured to death, or otherwise
| killed 60 500 000 OF ITS OWN PEOPLE. University of Hawaii
| Professor Rudolph Rummel
| socalgal2 wrote:
| So did China - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwoyko4uuvI
| lif wrote:
| Unpopular take, and note, I am not an expert:
|
| There seems to be an overabundance of sci-fi that is
| hyperoptimistic with regard to tech advances. The 2nd law of
| thermodynamics is not understood by most, or waved away as
| 'overcome thru future science'.
|
| fwiw, here's a few works I've found to be less the above:
|
| book: Kim Stanley Robinson's _Aurora_
|
| short stories: Damon Knight's _Stranger Station_ Larry Nivens'
| _Inconstant Moon
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| Exactly ! Just simple : Do we have any complex mechanism which
| works for last 100 years nonstop without fail ? Answers
| question of generational ships towards other solar systems. XD
| alganet wrote:
| AI, give me an optimistic sci fi plot for the world.
|
| AI, now compare it to communism.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Is this a call for pink glasses? It sounds like that to me.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I think it's a call for being aspirational. I grew up with
| optimistic, aspirational sci-fi in my childhood, and I feel
| it's given me a solid grounding and the ability to notice when
| things are not right and not going well. I, too, worry about
| society losing that ability.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I look forward to a world where people no longer need to
| sacrifice their curiosity to earn bread, clothes and basic
| housing. UBI would be a good start, but with the resources at
| hand we should be able to do more.
|
| I look forward to a world where potentials are promptly
| discovered and put to be nurtured, instead of being wasted or
| randomly thrown to the society. Every one willing to share what
| they have learned or made are welcomed.
|
| I look forward to a world that prevention of physical and mental
| illness is more recognized than treating them, or worse,
| extracting value from them.
|
| I look forward to a world that citizens do not hesitate to speak
| out when they identify anything worrying. That is, they feel that
| they own the world, not be owned as some sort of human resources.
|
| I look forward to a world that technological advance frees
| people, not keeping them enslaved.
|
| I look forward to a world where monetary profit is not the
| dominating indicator for success and failure of an organization.
| wirdnok wrote:
| Jerry Holkins of penny-arcade recently shared a similar
| sentiment.
|
| > You can't operate a deconstruction machine indefinitely;
| ultimately, the machine is all you have left to take apart. We
| need to make aspirational shit again so we have something to
| deconstruct later. It's not a mysterious process, it's just the
| opposite of what we were doing before.
|
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2025/02/28/opfor
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| You actually have to be able to envision the possibility of a
| bright future to predict one. Right now, not the time.
| gmuslera wrote:
| The difference between science fiction and fantasy is feeling
| that it might become possible somewhat, or that it is consistent.
| In present world our culture has advanced enough to rule out or
| at least make it too complex things like FTL or time travel, and
| our current civilization struggles don't put in a good way long
| term perspectives.
|
| Somewhat aliens are not the saviors anymore, it is complex to
| impossible to travel, and worse, colonize, anywhere else in the
| universe, and the bringer of doom is already here, now, and it is
| us.
|
| What is left? Going virtual and living in a digital world? Lena (
| https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) ended with that.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| My biggest issue with most scifi now-a-days is it ignores the
| acceleration of tech. Of course there's "Accelerando" and
| "Marooned in Realtime" but lots of scifi has "race/society X has
| been doing Y for 1000s of years" and now I immediately tune out
| because no society is going to remain static enough to do Y for
| thousands of years unless there is some premise in the book
| preventing anyone from inventing anything new.
|
| "Tales of Alvin Maker" had that. "Dune" did too but I didn't buy
| Dune's excuse because militaries always want new tech.
|
| This is also one of the many reasons why I can't buy into Star
| Wars anymore because a society that can make droids can make
| droids that make droids which means they have the means make
| everything cheap and abundant. That they don't is just bad
| writing. The writers didn't think through the implications of
| their world building. Of course I get that Star Wars isn't hard
| sci-fi. It's fantasy sci-fi, hence we have droids that scream and
| get tortured -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| On the other hand, my first ride in a Waymo reminded me of the
| optimisim I used to feel about the future like when the Jetsons
| promised us moving sidewalks, flying cars, robot maids, etc..
| aaomidi wrote:
| BECKY CHAMBERS
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Optimistic science fiction shows humanity applying unique
| ingenuity to solve tough problems. Our lived reality today is
| that we already know the technical solutions to many tough
| problems (hunger, homelessness, many diseases, overpopulation,
| climate change, war) but simply refuse to apply them. Of course
| people don't believe optimistic sci-fi anymore.
|
| _Star Trek_ the original series is usually taken as an example
| of optimistic sci-fi. It's set in a faster-than-light space ship,
| so it's science fiction. But the optimism came primarily from the
| back story: having solved our problems on Earth, and created a
| peaceful society of plenty, humanity turned its thoughtful minds
| to exploring the stars.
|
| Does that seem like the track we are on?
|
| Science fiction, to be optimistic today, needs to show how our
| society gets from here to there. Social progress was taken for
| granted in the latter 20th century. It's not anymore. Something
| is stopping us, something beyond science and engineering. In fact
| whatever it is, is driving us to actively attack and destroy the
| science and engineering we have already developed.
|
| A better future is going to take something else: culture, or
| society, or kindness, or empathy. It will take choice, and
| effort, not antimatter and phasers.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| An essay on optimistic science fiction but no discussion of Iain
| M. Banks' _The Culture_ series...? for that matter, it doesn't
| mention _any_ specific sci fi writer at all.
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