[HN Gopher] We need more optimistic science fiction
___________________________________________________________________
We need more optimistic science fiction
Author : craig552uk
Score : 117 points
Date : 2025-04-27 20:11 UTC (3 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.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I might just be vulnerable to maudlin storylines but
| Project Hail Mary made me tear up a couple of times. The
| audiobook adaptation is tremendous with sound effects, too.
| cpeterso wrote:
| A film adaptation of _Project Hail Mary_ wrapped filming
| last year and is set to be released in 2026.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary_(film)
| 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...)
| lukewrites wrote:
| Yeah I stopped after that and still find myself thinking
| about it from time to time...if the book gets happier from
| there, I'll pick it up again.
| 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.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Yeah TNG is my go-to for optimistic sci-fi. Voyager a
| close second; Deep Space 9 is a bit more muddled.
|
| Modern Trek is a let-down, although Lower Decks has been
| awesome with lots of member berries sprinkled throughout
| for the TNG-era enjoyers.
|
| I should add that Star Trek: Prodigy (albeit a kids show)
| has been very optimistic and enjoyable too, feels very
| much like TNG-era. Janeway and Chakotay are in as well.
|
| P.S.
|
| On a tangent The Orville (a Star Trek TNG clone by Seth
| MacFarlane) is pretty good; some Star Trek actors even
| show up in it.
|
| Season 4 is apparently in production.
| alganet wrote:
| Star Trek kinda sucks.
|
| It's an attempt at reforming quasi fascistic points of
| view. Strong hierarchies, heavy specialization of
| individuals, etc.
|
| It is also kinda nice, in the sense that it explores this
| idea that you should put yourself in the shoes of the
| places they explore.
|
| It also sucks, because their fans like to put themselves
| in the shoes of the quasi fascistic spaceship troops.
|
| So, in the end, it is a dystopian nightmare. Told from
| the perspective of the ones who brought the dystopia to
| fruition. Which makes it optimistic, I guess! Except for
| all the planets not on their control having to put up
| with them.
| morkalork wrote:
| Lower Decks and Prodigy are very much created by people
| who have fond memories of TNG and Voyager. Even though
| Prodigy is a kids show, I have a soft spot for it since I
| was watching Voyager as a 10-13 year old. It definitely
| works at tapping into the fuzzy nostalgia vibes if you're
| the right age.
| krapp wrote:
| I'd disagree. Modern day Trek is optimistic, just not in
| the naive way the original series and TNG were, where it
| was simply taken for granted that humans had evolved beyond
| their base vices and utopia was simply a natural expression
| of their enlightened nature. That isn't something one can
| aspire to. In modern Trek, humans are humans and human
| nature is realistic, and those utopian ideals have to be
| struggled for.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I'm not sure that being sentimental about and talking up
| genocidal mass-murderers like the Georgiou character etc.
| easily fits your characterization of the franchise.
| krapp wrote:
| The Section 31 series flopped pretty hard though.
| Georgiou isn't portrayed as sympathetically outside of a
| series that's supposed to be a vehicle for Michelle Yeoh.
| 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.
| jlcx wrote:
| The novella "To Be Taught, If Fortunate," the only Becky
| Chambers book not part of either of those series, is also
| 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.
| hoseja wrote:
| You and I must have read different books or imagine vastly
| different things under the term "optimism".
| o11c wrote:
| A Miracle of Science (webcomic, 2002-2007)
|
| https://www.project-apollo.net/mos/
| WillAdams wrote:
| It takes it a long while to get there, but L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s
| "Forever Hero Trilogy" has always felt optimistic to me.
| 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:
| The remaining 11% of 5% would need about 8 seconds to
| generate more energy than humanity currently generates in
| 10,000 years.
|
| Luminosity of the sun: ~380 yottawatts (3.8 * 10^26 watts)
|
| Sunlight conversion efficiency of a silicon based solar
| panel: ~20%
|
| A Dyson swarm around the sun built with silicon solar
| panels: ~76 yottawatts
|
| A Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work:
| ~3.8 yottawatts
|
| The leftovers from a Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of
| the panels work and 89% of the output has been used for
| interplanetary yachts: ~418 zetawatts (4.18 * 10^23 watts)
|
| Primary power production on Earth: ~20 terawatts (2 * 10^13
| watts)
|
| 10000 years times 20 terawatts is 10000 * 365.25 * 24 * 60
| * 60 * 10^12 = 3.16 * 10^24 joules
|
| Since a joule is just a watt-second, it takes 7.6 seconds
| for that 418 zetawatts of leftover Dyson swarm output to
| match up to 10,000 years of current human energy
| consumption.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| ok so are you saying that it is so much that we need 450
| more planets worth of people to be able to use that
|
| or
|
| you're saying that if we can harness that much energy
| amount/density then we can just make matter on spot and
| we do not have to travel anywhere anymore, because we can
| make gold bricks or platinum sieves in particle
| accelerators just for fun? (this is same argument as why
| alcubierre drive is nonsense, having capability to
| manipulate such energy density makes us not want to
| travel anymore)
| Legend2440 wrote:
| We would find new things to do with that energy.
|
| Making matter from energy would still be inefficient
| though. c^2 is a really big number.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| No we wont. Because if you can drive car to your weekend
| house 6 miles away, you wont be taking Boeing 747. If you
| can manipulate such insane energy density you can do
| anything already even before you reach that capability.
|
| Also Dyson sphere is old school idea, new more efficient
| idea is to make small black hole right next to star and
| harvest energy from that more concentrated flow. So
| actually black holes colliding (gravitational waves) can
| be sign of civilization...
|
| Previous post with all those calculations says that you
| can power 4 149 473 current earths with that amount of
| energy. I write this with assumption that person is
| correct (im lazy to calculate that by my self, but it
| roughly has proper orders of magnitude).
|
| My amazon joke was sarcasm.
| nottorp wrote:
| > if you can drive car to your weekend house 6 miles
| away, you wont be taking Boeing 747
|
| No, you will take that elusive flying car because you can
| afford the energy for it now. And it will be much less
| efficient than a 747.
| shawn_w wrote:
| Only 6 miles? That's personal jetpack distance.
| 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...
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| Luckily with that kind of energy you can do absolutely
| insane things, like build planet-sized sunshades or push
| the earth to a more distant orbit. These challenges can be
| engineered around.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| Or planet wide air conditioning to cool down the earth
| hoseja wrote:
| "anthropogenic climate change" isn't heating the planet by
| literally heating it up with joules from burning stuff but
| by shifting the balance between absorbed and radiated heat
| from the sun.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| The cause of the energy isn't as important as the amount.
|
| Either way, our ecosystem heats up.
| ben_w wrote:
| Yes, and?
|
| The same is the case with the Dyson swarm. Space goes
| from being empty to partially re-emitting as a warm
| object in our direction.
|
| The joule heating from current human power is negligible;
| conversely, a 4% partial Dyson swarm directly heating the
| earth (i.e. not just greenhousing Sol) wouldn't be _just_
| +3 K change in equilibrium, it would be something like
| +24,400 K, which would vapourise and gravitationally
| unbind the planet.
| 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, instead it was because some people didn't
| want the planet to provide the right question to an answer they
| already had, but they didn't realise they didn't need to owing
| to the accidental interference of a dead species that had sent
| away all their telephone sanitisers before being wiped out in a
| pandemic caused by a dirty telephone.
| gcanyon wrote:
| There is a science fiction 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.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Something similar to this comes up in Death's End, the last
| book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.
| cpeterso wrote:
| ChatGPT suggests the story is "Local Effect" by D. L. Hughes,
| published in 1968.
|
| An alien named Firefoal of Swaylone observes that human
| physicists mistakenly believe in a constant light speed
| because humanity was unknowingly situated in a region of
| space where the speed of light had been artificially reduced.
| Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find
| they can only make it slower.
| shawn_w wrote:
| Ah, the joys of trusting a LLM for story IDs...
|
| This one actually exists (a rarity in my experience), and
| the plot largely matches the description up to the last
| sentence (though the speed isn't exactly reduced; it's made
| a constant)
|
| >Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but
| find they can only make it slower.
|
| That doesn't happen in the story. It ends with the aliens
| disabling the device (the drive of a derelict starship)
| generating the field that caused experiments to suggest the
| speed of light is constant, and then leaving, destroying
| "the whole basis of their physics, but that is just a
| fantasy anyways."
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Well, since light travels slower in non-vacuum space, like
| air or water or glass, I'd say we've already discovered that.
| m463 wrote:
| I think optimistic scifi needs to lie a bit:
|
| - allow you to exceed the speed of light, or better yet portal
| somewhere
|
| - learn we are not alone in the universe
|
| - store basically infinite energy in your hip-mounted blaster
|
| - get the girl/guy in the end
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > - learn we are not alone in the universe
|
| This is neither a message that is optimistic nor pessimistic.
| Isn't it much more likely that this species (despite having
| something that can be called "intelligence" in an appropriate
| sense) simply be so different that the difference is insanely
| much larger than between an human and an octopus?
|
| Example:
|
| Stanislaw Lem; Solaris
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)
|
| where the alien species is an intelligent ocean.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Everyone read Solaris.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I think Greg Egan writes very optimistic science fiction that
| only really does 2 sort of. Exceeding the speed of light is,
| from my point of view, so absurd a premise as to make me feel
| that any hard science fiction which tries to get around it is
| not serious.
|
| Its not that I can't enjoy that kind of science fiction, its
| just I can't take it seriously as having anything to do with
| actually reckoning with our position in the universe as human
| beings. Universe Big.
| m463 wrote:
| Without exceeding the speed of light, "Universe Big"... and
| universe too far away to explore. :(
|
| I guess we could have a story set it the far far (far!)
| future...
| IAmBroom wrote:
| "This is exciting! If I live to be 70 I'll get to hear
| the response from the question my great-grandfather's
| generation sent to Omega-5!"
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Life extension sort of solves this problem and is much
| more plausible.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| The movie Brazil is a take on 1984 where the technology does
| not work very well. The thought police is not all-seeing but
| quite inept (although just as brutal). The plot is set off by
| an actual bug getting caught in a typing macine evetually
| causing the wrong guy to get arrested. The rebel hero is a
| rogue plumber who actually fixes things which are broken.
| jeffwass wrote:
| One note - in the 1984 novel the technology (or at least the
| product quality) didn't work very well either. Eg the
| "victory" cigarettes that fall apart, or terrible coffee with
| a daily allocated saccharin pill.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Good point - only the tools of oppression really works in
| 1984, all consumer products are crap. It is suggested this
| is deliberate, but even that might be propaganda.
|
| And apparently it is a common workplace injury to get ones
| arm caught in a novel-writing machine.
| croes wrote:
| Don't forget this scenario:
|
| The file with the life saving code, text, formula etc. can't be
| read because the license server needed to get access doesn't
| exist anymore
| barryrandall wrote:
| Please note that this isn't a call for investments or request
| for startups.
| 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.
| wrp wrote:
| That is why I like 1950's SF cinema. They were mostly B-movies
| aimed at a youth audience, but I enjoy their general tone of
| optimism.
| nottorp wrote:
| I just watched the 1951 The Thing movie last week. The humans
| win at the end.
|
| The 1982 movie... some humans survive. Maybe.
| 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.
| beeflet wrote:
| I think elysium isn't an effective sci-fi in the sense that
| it discusses the effect of technology on mankind. It is just
| a metaphor for the US/Mexico border.
|
| The only takeaway I got from the movie is that the robots
| look cool, it's the same robot design from chappie. Both
| half-baked scifi movies, but I would like to imagine they
| both exist in the same world.
| antasvara wrote:
| >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.
|
| Given Big Pharma's current ability to get lots and lots of
| money for vital medicine, I'm not optimistic they'd price a
| theoretical medical machine low enough for a government to
| afford.
|
| Plus, if overpopulation is a concern, a wealthy person
| wouldn't necessarily _want_ the machine to get into the hands
| of everyone. Given that the creator of this machine would
| become very wealthy, the incentives would probably lean
| towards offering it to a select group.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Nearly every edifice of modern society relies on the tacit
| consent of other people. Pharma needs patent laws and a
| whole market economy to function.
|
| "One wealthy person controls everyone with robots"
| basically ends up with one wealthy person alone with some
| robots.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Big pharma usually only gets big money until the patents
| run out. Today's expensive treatment is relatively cheap a
| generation from now.
|
| I realize that sometimes there are situations where this
| doesn't hold.
| Animats wrote:
| > Or, everything gets so abundant that we can actually have
| high UBI
|
| Now, that's not as clear. Reaching the point that all the
| essential tasks to keep society going can be done cost-
| effectively by robots is quite a ways off.
| 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.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| another piece of advice, when I wrote I used a keypuller to
| remove my backspace key. Following the example of Phillip K.
| Dick, think like a serial writer, uncanny ideas are the birth
| of great literature
| throwanem wrote:
| I've been a serial writer, but never quite _that_ serial!
| Good grief, though, I can 't help but respect the
| commitment. It reminds me very slightly of the young
| Ellison, up there 'Under Glass' in that store picture
| window, throwing himself at the whole damn world the way he
| never could help himself from doing.
| o11c wrote:
| Good sci-fi must first of all be good writing. Read through the
| _entire_ text of _The Elements of Style_ [1] - the original, by
| Strunk only, is in the public domain now, and almost entirely
| still relevant; newer versions do flesh it out more so get one
| eventually. Remember that since grammar and style aren 't
| really separate concepts, you _can_ break the rules ... but you
| have a "strangeness budget" (my term) that is very important
| not to exceed. And for speculative fiction in general, it is
| very common to have to spend some of the budget on introducing
| new vocabulary and concepts. Remaining similar to widely-known
| works (when possible) is a major way to reduce the cost.
|
| To get good, you also need to actually, you know, write. A
| story of a few thousand words isn't hard to write, whether you
| tend to fall into the trap of endless worldbuilding or whether
| you tend to fall into the trap of writing by the seat of your
| pants.
|
| For the science, there's a lot of reference material in [2].
| Remember that realism doesn't necessarily make a good story,
| but any deviations should be deliberate (e.g. space opera is a
| distinct subgenre). I do personally find sci-fi tends to be
| better than fantasy because authors are more likely to actually
| _try_ to make something coherent. (90% of everything is still
| crap though, whether due to lack of trying or lack of
| competence).
|
| All speculative fiction is political, but try to leave a good
| story even if every part of your personal politics is removed
| from the story. If you can't do this, it's not a good sci-fi
| story (let alone a good overall story), at _most_ it 's a good
| $yourpoliticalfaction propaganda story (for sci-fi, this is
| particularly common for military glorification, weird sex
| stuff, and a whole host of society-ordering utopias/dystopias).
| Regardless, never "surprise" the reader with your take - if you
| have an agenda, put it in the blurb, tags, and in the first
| chapter; if you don't, you have no one to blame but yourself
| when you get (correctly) review-bombed (often, even by people
| who agree with your politics, since we read to escape). If you
| construct a metaphor to attack a real-world target, make sure a
| 5-year-old can't poke a hole in it; don't make your villain
| gratuitously stupid. (Note that "courtly intrigue", although
| in-universe politics, often isn't politics by a real-world
| perspective, just character drama).
|
| The best writing is timeless. This is sometimes difficult for
| writers of genre-defining works, because "Seinfeld" is Unfunny.
|
| [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134 [2]
| https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
| 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?
| 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
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Do we have any complex mechanism which works for last 100
| years nonstop without fail ?
|
| For the following examples, this question is open, and you
| might have a different opinion whether they fit your opinion
| of "complex", but the following are candidates that I am
| aware of:
|
| The 10,000 Year Clock (Clock of the Long Now)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
|
| https://www.10000yearclock.net/index.html
|
| The organ in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt
| (Germany) that is used to play the ORGAN2/ASLSP (As Slow as
| Possible) by John Cage
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible
|
| https://www.aslsp.org/
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| lets say they fit, but they do not work, people expect for
| them to work. but yes they are designed to work that long
| in stress free environment.
|
| your ship needs to be repaired on the way, do you need to
| have repair tools, materials, for that on board ? Seafaring
| cargo ship can not be going 100 years without repair. I bet
| space ship can not go either. What if your 3d printer on
| board which makes your repair tools brakes... etc etc.
|
| you "can" fly 99.99% of speed of light to get there sooner,
| but you smash into grain of dust and what happens? either
| radiation burst or explosion. space is not vacuum as a 0
| particle space.
| Sevii wrote:
| This is really a question of slack. How long can it fail for?
| For a 100 year mission you likely want at least a month of
| slack in your air supply. Things are going to break. You
| build in redundancy.
| rcxdude wrote:
| I mean, we have systems of government and other organizations
| which have lasted (significantly) longer than that. I think
| that's an important indicator of such questions.
| nottorp wrote:
| I wouldn't ever classify Kim Stanley Robinson as "optimistic".
| With maybe the lone exception of the Mars books which are at
| least not completely pessimistic.
| alganet wrote:
| AI, give me an optimistic sci fi plot for the world.
|
| AI, now compare it to communism.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| 97% match!
| alganet wrote:
| I find it particularly hilarious that some AIs insist in deal
| with communism saying stuff like "stated goals" or
| "theoretical", but for the sci fi plot they go full throttle
| on the make believe like "pff, don't worry bro"
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > AI, give me an optimistic sci fi plot for the world.
|
| > AI, now compare it to communism.
|
| Considering how every attempt of communism has turned out, this
| optimistic science fiction plot better turns out to be quite
| different from communism.
| alganet wrote:
| That is exactly what the AI told me.
|
| In theory, communism works but in practice it was different.
|
| The AI also tells me that the sci fi plot is not like that,
| that it will work in practice.
|
| In the words of the famous prophet Dave Mustaine "if there's
| a new way, I'll be the first in line, but it better work this
| time" and also "you know your worth when your enemies praise
| your architecture of aggression".
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| I'll add the nuance that some systems like communism have
| proven to work well at specific scales (typically small,
| like kibbutzim) and be horrendous at others. Not too unlike
| how different rocket propulsion architectures are suited
| for different levels of the atmosphere.
| alganet wrote:
| Good point. Anyone else wants to comment though?
| o11c wrote:
| To be fair, we have a grand total of _two_ independent
| examples to learn from.
|
| No form of economy/government will protect you from being
| pillaged by a more powerful neighbor. (There's some word I'm
| trying to think of that refers to international analysis, but
| I can't remember it ...)
| alganet wrote:
| ok, you have a fair point, that is actually a very original
| observation.
|
| Anyone else?
| hoseja wrote:
| "No form of economy/government will protect you from being
| pillaged by a more powerful neighbor."
|
| Perhaps a form of government that doesn't turn you into a
| weaker neighbor?
| bccdee wrote:
| > Considering how every attempt of communism has turned out
|
| People make too much of ideology. "Communism" was the table
| stakes for getting the USSR to support your government during
| the 20th century, in the same way that "democracy" [1] was
| table stakes for US support. You can't really talk about
| "every attempt" at communism--it's mostly the story of a
| single superpower and its proxies.
|
| [1]: "Democracy" in quotes, because US intervention in South
| America in the 20th century was overwhelmingly to the
| detriment of actual democracy.
|
| The USSR had a lot economic failures, but consider that it
| began the 20th century as a pre-industrial backwater before
| suffering an extremely bloody civil war and sky-high
| casualties during WWII. And they still did industrialize. A
| lot of their command-economy stuff was highly unsuccessful,
| but plenty of capitalist economic projects have been
| unsuccessful too. The Great Depression was a homegrown
| capitalist catastrophe--2008 too, to a lesser extent--and
| capitalist economics learned from those mistakes. The USSR
| was in a much worse position to survive its mistakes, and it
| didn't. In the aftermath, America imposed shock-doctrine
| economics on Russia to make it capitalist, and that in turn
| caused even more damage. Conversely, China modernized in
| style, on its own terms, and retains substantial state
| control over private enterprise. Is that a "communist success
| story"? It depends how you define communism. Is it a command
| economy? A totalitarian dictatorship? A red colour scheme?
|
| Communism generally defines itself as a classless society: an
| egalitarian democracy of workers without aristocrat,
| bureaucrat, or plutocrat. It's a set of ideals for founding a
| nation--ideals which have never really materialized anywhere.
| In the aftermath of bloody revolutions, the people who come
| out on top are generally military strongmen with little
| interest in democracy, no matter what ideology they tout. So
| Mao said he stood for democracy! So did Pinochet, so did
| Assad. They're just words. The differences between how
| "communist" and "capitalist" societies have worked out is
| mostly just historical circumstance. Governments that put
| ideology before success tend not to last. Neither the US nor
| China nor the USSR fit into that category, though they've all
| had their hyper-ideological moments (the US is in one now!).
| In the long run, a powerful state with a big bureaucracy will
| be ruled mostly by pragmatism. That doesn't mean that policy
| positions don't exist, but China certainly wasn't shackled by
| any particular economic position. The upshot is that China
| basically looks like the rest of the world now, modulo better
| infrastructure, greater political stability, and fewer civil
| rights.
|
| The real question has less to do with capitalism or communism
| and more to do with whether founding a nation on principles
| really means anything in the long run. Can we really build a
| better world, or do we just naturally cohere into
| predetermined social structures as a product of material
| factors? Ironically, Marx basically believed the latter. He
| was just optimistic that new technological developments would
| change the natural structures of society into something more
| egalitarian, where the oligarch would go the way of the
| aristocrat. History, unfortunately, has proven him wrong.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I suspect some of it is the natural outcome of revolution.
| No matter how noble the cause, those who actually rule
| after the revolution are those who are willing to be the
| most ruthless in seizing and welding power.
| 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.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I grew up with sci-fi as it was one of the very few genres
| allowed in Communist Romania. It was a mix of authors from
| Asimov to Strugatski, from Philip K. Dick to Ursula K Le
| Guin. It was sometimes very dark, sometimes moderate, but
| overall even Asimov's future is not optimistic in many ways,
| but I don't think I missed anything or it was better to be
| different. I did not become a grumpy pessimist nor an
| antisocial geek, I think reading a lot made me a better
| person overall, including the mix of sci-fi that was for sure
| not optimistic.
| 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.
| bmn__ wrote:
| These are ideals of humanism.
| ainiriand wrote:
| We are not the best species to achieve that, as we have
| selfishness in our mind. We need a mind capable of collective
| effort for greater good and we are just not able to do that, we
| are shaped to protect what we have and try to get more at the
| expense of others. Being truly generous and selfless is a
| conscious act that requires quite a bit of sacrifice.
| dimal wrote:
| I agree with all of this and hope it comes to pass. I don't see
| how it's possible without drastically changing the capitalist
| values that underpin our society.
|
| I think capitalism is the best way to structure an economy, but
| it's a terrible way to structure a society. Nowadays, we use
| capitalist values as the benchmark for what matters in almost
| every context, and then we wonder why our society is a
| dystopia.
| 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
| pessimizer wrote:
| The problem with that sentiment is that cynicism isn't
| deconstruction. It's often an accurate assessment of current
| trends and a prediction of where they might lead, not a
| collapse into abstractions.
|
| On the other hand, pining for "aspirational" works is the real
| collapse into abstractions and magical, associative thinking:
| get rid of the bad and bring in the good, sad is bad. A lot of
| people have the aspiration of wiping out entire cultures;
| idealizing aspirations is nothing but idealizing desires, and
| in a commercial environment that just means pandering to
| middle-class power fantasies.
|
| In short, I accuse this sentiment of being a covert desire to
| deconstruct the _present_ in order to quiet middle class fears.
| "Actually what we've been doing will work! If we ever need to
| change course, I'm sure we will. We'll defeat the evil."
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| Applied cynicism is deconstruction in the sense that all that
| is being offered is criticism and disbelief in a thing. There
| is no message of doing something else because it is better,
| only a message to do something else because it isn't the
| thing the cynicism is targeting. Sometimes not even an
| alternative is offered. The thing just sucks and it shouldn't
| be done, according to the critic.
|
| You will notice how in current political conversations that
| no matter what the problem being discussed is, the solution
| is almost always the destruction of something or someone.
| There's this stubborn perspective that X would be resolved if
| we could just somehow eliminate Y.
|
| To be crude, the pattern I described isn't aspirational, it's
| bitchy. You'll also notice how very little gets accomplished
| in the current cynical environment for the same reason that
| nagging people doesn't motivate them as much as inspiring
| them does.
| jerf wrote:
| The "optimistic" science fiction that people are pining for
| was written during the World War period, during the social
| unrest of the 1960s, during the inflation and oil shock of
| the 1970s, during periods of racial violence, during the
| heights of the Cold War (the Fallout series came from real
| societal trama, not just a neat schtick about putting a 1950s
| face on disaster movies), during environmental scares,
| nuclear disasters, terrorism, during social upheavals and
| economic crises and international crises.
|
| The 20th century was not a cakewalk either. I'm not saying it
| was or was not better than today, I _am_ saying, "gee
| there's an awful lot of reasons to be depressed" isn't new.
| 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..
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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)_/-
|
| The genre of Star Wars is "Space Opera":
|
| > https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceOpera
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| We don't know how technological acceleration will continue into
| the future. We may start hitting very hard
| physical/chemical/material limits that make further progress
| hard, resulting in progress becoming more logarithmic in
| growth.
|
| Or, there's always the potential for war and decline. Advanced
| civilizations have risen before, then crumbled and lost a lot
| of their technology. The same could happen on a larger scale.
| 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.
| beeflet wrote:
| Is the purpose of mankind to support drug-addled hobos?
| bccdee wrote:
| Yes, at least proximately. If you walked up to anyone on the
| street and asked them, "should we help desperate people,"
| they'd say _yes._ This isn 't even controversial.
| beeflet wrote:
| I am not opposed to helping homeless people, I'm opposed to
| this idea that humanity's main purpose is essentially to
| harbor as many people as possible who have no agency. I
| think that we should have greater goals far beyond that.
| Art, science, exploration. I don't know, take your pick.
|
| Thanks to GMOs and the industrial revolution we have more
| food than any point other point in history. Almost no one
| works in agriculture anymore. In the USA we have food
| stamps and who knows how many pounds of government cheese
| preserved in case of an emergency. Who is still dying of
| hunger?
|
| Thanks to vaccines and modern medicine, disease is hardly a
| problem anymore (with the exception of cancer, heart
| disease and other problems largely associated with OLD
| AGE). Who is really dying of preventable diseases anymore?
|
| Still, we're told that hunger and disease must be
| eradicated before we do anything of importance. At what
| point can we say that we have done enough?
|
| The homeless people i've interacted with are the bottom of
| the barrel of humanity, and are typically held back by
| serious mental illness or drug addiction. They don't have
| some rich inner world, they are just a blight on the
| public. The homeless largely drive people to avoid public
| parks or transportation. Why don't we have public transport
| anymore in America? Is it really logistically impossible,
| or is it simply that anyone who can afford to will avoid
| riding a train or a bus with deranged homeless people? We
| have public libraries, but they're not shrines to knowledge
| or places of public gathering as they effectively serve as
| an air-conditioned building for homeless people to jack
| off. And you know what, I don't blame them, they are merely
| individuals at the mercy of this incomprehensible brave new
| world we are building around them.
|
| There's this star trek idea we have been fed that once we
| eliminate human need, there will be no more human suffering
| and we will all be free to do "more enlightened things". We
| already have a surplus of pretty much everything, and the
| result is that we are a society of wireheads, our lives
| lonelier and more meaningless than ever. How would this be
| improved by further star-trek technology? Holodeck,
| simulate a hundred prostitutes. Replicator, make me one
| hundred pounds of crack cocaine
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUnu_U2yKXY).
|
| When you look at the kinds of people who went out and
| explored the new world, it was always the groups of people
| that were most dissatisfied with society, the pilgrims, the
| prisoners and such. Those are the groups willing to take a
| chance for freedom and prosperity. I don't think the future
| of humanity will be like star trek, it will be more like
| the ender's game series where the explorers of new
| frontiers will be venezuelans or brazilians whatever 2nd-
| world groups of people who are currently having a bad time
| on earth, but still have the skills and resolve to explore
| beyond that. I think happiness itself is orthogonal to a
| having meaningful life, and we shouldn't pursue it
| directly.
|
| I don't think the solution for drug addicts is more narcan.
| I think the solution for drug addicts is mortal danger. For
| the majority of human history, people did not live long
| enough for their vices to catch up to them. I would liken
| my attitudes towards the homeless to factory farming: even
| if the goal is to make the cows as happy as possible, the
| factory farm is still wrong. It's better to be a free,
| self-sustaining, wild animal, even if you are suffering
| than to be a happy cow on a factory farm.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Why do you think that it would be impossible to make a
| society where
|
| a) everyone gets to live like a king, unconditionally,
| from birth to death, and
|
| b) people have the freedom to do and pursue what they
| want?
|
| I don't see "some % of the population becoming lazy
| couch-living larvae" as a problem, because if they truly
| are "destined" to become that due to their inherent brain
| formation or whatever, then they were always going to do
| that no matter what (or drift off homeless in the streets
| in today's society). The only reason that's a bad thing
| is that society would then be missing a person who, in
| different circumstances, would be contributing with
| labor. But since in this hypothetical future utopia human
| labor is no longer needed, and that % of people were
| always going to be lazy or whatever, then there's no loss
| to be had by simply letting them be!
| 6510 wrote:
| You never hear people talk about what slavery did for
| homelessness. One can be quite deranged, if a mean and a
| bed are provided and we beat you with a stick you are
| motivated to do the manual labor. It is also a sound
| method to overcome addiction. If pampered people living
| the good life cant quit smoking, stop drinking, cant quit
| Valium, cant stop eating. What would it be like to wake
| up under the bridge with an empty stomach and a crack
| addiction?
|
| I wont try to sell forced labor but if I had to chose
| between Fentanyl and picking cotton it would be a rather
| easy choice.
| bccdee wrote:
| This is just slavery fanfiction. Mentally ill,
| uncooperative slaves would more likely have been killed
| to "send a message" to the others, and I expect
| functional addiction would be encouraged for manual
| labourers so long as it didn't harm productivity. I don't
| know what would lead you to draw assumptions like this
| (well, beyond the obvious).
| 6510 wrote:
| I find it quite paradoxical how a person making great
| effort towards taking care of themself can some how turn
| out worse than care from someone who doesn't care about
| you.
|
| We've made a lot of progress collectively and want to
| help everyone but end up doing a pretty crappy job.
|
| I know some people who aren't doing very well mentally
| and do some substance abuse. Their job preserves what
| little sanity they have left. The periods between jobs
| are sheer terror, they almost die and might lose their
| home.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Fortunately that choice is pure fiction.
|
| No one has ever solved addiction with slavery, as you
| suggest. Just the opposite: many addicts have been forced
| by their addiction and circumstances into sex work, and
| some abducted sex slaves have been forced into addiction
| to control them.
|
| You seem to have a rich fantasy about what life is like
| for the impoverished and addicted.
| bccdee wrote:
| > harbor as many people as possible who have no agency'
|
| > Art, science, exploration. I don't know, take your pick
|
| What's the point of art, then? Consuming art isn't
| "agentic," and the point of producing it is consumption.
| Ditto exploration--does discovered land serve any purpose
| in and of itself? Or is the point to see it and to live
| in it? And science--consider medicine. The discovery of a
| new medication itself is not the point; the point is that
| people take it and become better, which is not agentic.
|
| Agency is a means to an end, and that end is experience.
| You can't justify life, individual or collective, in
| terms of agency.
|
| > Still, we're told that hunger and disease must be
| eradicated before we do anything of importance.
|
| Gee, I was unaware that we "hadn't been doing anything
| important" for the past 40,000 years of civilization.
|
| > The homeless people i've interacted with [...] don't
| have some rich inner world
|
| I don't honestly believe you've interacted with many
| homeless people that closely. I think you see them from a
| distance and assume they're basically urban wildlife.
| Mental health issues are not the obstacle to
| participation in society that you seem to think they are,
| and anyway, only a minority have mental health issues.
| And substance abuse--frankly, if I were homeless, I would
| probably take a lot of drugs too. What else am I going to
| do?
|
| Homelessness is an extremely fixable issue, and countries
| that have supplied homeless people with long-term housing
| have seen their homeless populations vanish overnight.
| Obviously. What they're missing is _homes._ It 's
| extremely difficult to get back on your feet without one,
| and the shelter system is completely inadequate.
|
| > We already have a surplus of pretty much everything,
| and the result is that we are a society of wireheads
|
| Do you have any idea how much rent costs in a big city?
| How much groceries cost? What are you talking about.
|
| > I think happiness itself is orthogonal to a having
| meaningful life, and we shouldn't pursue it directly.
|
| Then what's the point of living meaningfully? It doesn't
| sound like it's good for anything. "Meaning" gets thrown
| around a lot to indicate things we want to defend but
| cannot really justify on their own merits.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Is providing better mental health care for people off the
| table?
| hoseja wrote:
| Are they my relatives? Are they desperate because their own
| preventable actions? Will you steal from me to help them?
| bccdee wrote:
| > Will you steal from me to help them?
|
| Oh, like Robin Hood?
|
| I assume you're talking about taxes, but even literal
| theft in this context is the stuff of heroic folktales.
| hoseja wrote:
| Huh? If you wanna go there by the way, Robin Hood stole
| from tax collectors even in the embellished fairytale.
| Also Lionheart was a bad king, away on vain adventure.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Stay on topic. We aren't discussing minutia of English
| kingship.
| Retric wrote:
| That negative view doesn't match the underlying reality of the
| world today. We're simply getting a closer look at just what
| most people are like on social media/reality TV/streaming etc.
| Meanwhile the past sucked.
|
| Consider what are the major issues right now that aren't being
| addressed? Global poverty is at an all time low, climate change
| has been met with vast investments in solar/wind/batteries/EV's
| etc, there's suddenly effective drugs for obesity, poverty's
| down, medicine keeps advancing and antibiotic resistance is
| being slowed down by better methodologies, etc
|
| The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever,
| remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial
| marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
|
| Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends
| aren't nearly as bad as you imply.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Consider what are the major issues right now that aren't
| being addressed? Global poverty is at an all time low,
| climate change has been met with vast investments in
| solar/wind/batteries/EV's etc, there's suddenly effective
| drugs for obesity, poverty's down, medicine keeps advancing
| and antibiotic resistance is being slowed down by better
| methodologies, etc
|
| > The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever,
| remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial
| marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
|
| > Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general
| trends aren't nearly as bad as you imply.
|
| Whether a lot of these changes are good/optimistic or
| bad/pessimistic depends a lot on your political stance.
|
| Yes, society is very divided.
| Retric wrote:
| Are you including anything blind how accepting mainstream
| society is in the US in that assessment? Because there's
| other examples like abortion, lower crime, etc are
| definitely seen as positives by the other side of the
| political spectrum.
|
| Really I'm not sure what specific political ideology would
| measure the world as going downhill by their stated goals.
| bccdee wrote:
| Perhaps... but for a couple decades after the Berlin wall
| fell, it had sorta seemed like we (collectively) were
| _figuring it out._ Granted, 9 /11 damaged that narrative, but
| that was "barbarians" attacking "civilization." The
| assumption was that winning the war on terror could end
| history the same way the fall of the Soviet bloc was supposed
| to.
|
| Yet there's an expansionist land war in Europe, and US allies
| are engaged in ethnic cleansing in the Middle East. The
| current American government is overtly fascistic, and now
| that they've admitted they're seeking to extra-judicially
| imprison citizens in El Salvador, I don't think that's even
| up for debate anymore.
|
| I think people are increasingly coming to believe that we'll
| never _figure it out._ Technology will advance, but humans
| are liable to stay the same forever. In light of this,
| utopian science fiction begins to feel naive. The most
| optimistic story we can stand is about humanity temporarily
| prevailing against its own worst impulses, rather than
| featuring the kind of... _solved society_ that something like
| Star Trek envisioned.
| beeflet wrote:
| I think that we are approaching a "solved" state of
| society, but that solution involves some level inequality.
| It is "solved" in the sense that a game of Monopoly is
| "solved" and approaches steady-state as one player wins.
| _Hypernormalization_ is a good movie that presents this
| thesis.
| Retric wrote:
| > Perhaps... but for a couple decades after the Berlin wall
| fell, it had sorta seemed like we (collectively) were
| figuring it out.
|
| > Yet there's an expansionist land war in Europe
|
| Maybe you simply weren't paying attention? There's been
| several expansionist land wars in Eastern Europe since the
| fall of the Soviet Union, it took 3 years ignoring civil
| wars.
|
| "The First Chechen War, also referred to as the First
| Russo-Chechen War, was a struggle for independence waged by
| the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the invading
| Russian Federation from 1994 to 1996. After a mutually
| agreed on treaty and terms, the Russians withdrew until
| they invaded again three years later, in the Second Chechen
| War of 1999-2000"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War
|
| Then there's the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia.
|
| It's arguable if this is even a separate war after the
| initial Annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014.
|
| So no there hasn't been several decades of peace after the
| 1991 fall of the USSR. It's been the same crap for
| centuries with different governments playing shockingly
| similar roles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_
| conflicts_betwee...
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Do we? We can do a lot for individuals, but even with
| cooperation, maybe can't immediately give food and shelter to
| everyone, let alone fix climate change (war is fixable with
| cooperation, but unless I'm mistaken a very small minority of
| the world's population is in a hot war). Even if we have enough
| resources, we also need logistics (hence why people in some
| areas lack clean water).
|
| Also, _Star Trek_ 's backstory is that humanity only started
| cooperating like in the show after nuclear wars. Most people
| would rather mutually benefit than mutually suffer (otherwise
| we'd have MAD), and the solutions that benefit humanity the
| most are mutual. Society may have backslided since the 2000s,
| but it's far better now than it was before and temporary
| backslides happened before; humans have evolved to be
| altruistic because, barring death or extreme circumstances,
| altruistic groups win in the long term.
| 6510 wrote:
| > We can do a lot for individuals, but even with cooperation,
| maybe can't immediately give food and shelter to everyone
|
| It oddly isn't all that desirable. You don't want to depend
| entirely on the generosity of others. What you want is a
| fighting chance to take care of yourself. Helping there, even
| a little bit is both very effective and very easy.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| > You don't want to depend entirely on the generosity of
| others.
|
| Spoken like someone who knows they'll eat today.
|
| End game, yes, everyone needs a degree of autonomy. But
| there are plenty of families in Palestine and Ukraine and
| Nigeria that just need food, today.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| It's not either/or. We can provide both jobs and a safety
| net.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| We could, though. Absolutely. Literally feeding all the
| starving people in the world would cost a fraction of the
| world's surplus wealth, and a briefly disruptive but
| manageable readjustment of global logistics. The rest of it
| would be costly, but still totally doable at the cost of some
| inconvenience for the world's top 10%.
|
| The problem isn't lack of solutions. It's lack of cooperation
| on every level from individuals to organizations to social
| groups to nations to transnational organizations.
| hoseja wrote:
| > (hunger, homelessness, many diseases, overpopulation, climate
| change, war)
|
| This is a profoundly, even comically, contradictory set.
|
| You cannot actually "solve" any half of these without causing
| the other half.
| bmn__ wrote:
| What's the name of the common fallacy, "I can't imagine it
| therefore it cannot exist"?
| hoseja wrote:
| Can you, truly?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| How would access to food and freedom from hunger, sickness,
| and homelessness cause war and climate change? We already
| have enough food; it's poorly distributed. Medicinal
| challenges aren't solved with substantially more energy;
| they're solved with more information. Housing: plenty of room
| on this planet, just not situated between your San Fran tech
| job and the mall.
|
| War and climate change are not caused by full bellies and
| healthy spleens, as you claim.
|
| Overpopulation is the last problem to solve, and reproduction
| trends downwards in affluent, well-educated countries. So,
| possibly even that is solved by these three benefits.
| 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.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| If you're reading this, you should watch "Bicentennial Man"
| (1999)
| raymond_goo wrote:
| This story is set in a future, where work is done by robots and
| humans spend all their time in virtual reality.
| https://rejacked.glitch.me/
| marc_abonce wrote:
| This reminds me of a related quote from Ursula K. Le Guin:
|
| "The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants
| and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather
| stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is
| the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of
| evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
|
| Of course, that particular story later turns out to be a classic,
| boring dystopia, but only because we, the readers, refuse to
| accept the narrator's original premise of a prosperous and just
| society free of tradeoffs or caveats.
|
| This is why I like her books so much, though. I don't know if the
| worlds she created are truly optimistic or possible at all, but
| at least she makes us imagine alternative ways for society to be
| organized.
| d--b wrote:
| The fact that sci fi has gotten more pessimistic is debatable.
| But if we had to pinpoint a reason, I'd say that Silicon Valley
| selling the world technological utopia and delivering attention
| farming algorithms is a good culprit.
|
| Now every time there is some kind of tech progress, we can't
| avoid imagining how its monetization is going to affect people in
| a bad way.
|
| The second obvious reason is that we're fucking the planet up and
| this has been enabled by technological advances.
|
| And well authoritarian regimes. Ahem.
|
| That said, to me there's plenty of recent sci fi that isn't too
| pessimistic. The Martian, Interstellar, Arrival, Her, to name a
| few.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| This is what Neal Stephenson's Project Hieroglyph [1] was meant
| to be.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph
| incomingpain wrote:
| So very agreed and i did this when i wrote my trilogy. My theory
| when doing it was what's wrong with Captain Marvel.
|
| Your main hero cant be just invulnerable to everything and never
| get hurt. Having amnesia isnt a kryptonite.
|
| Your bad guy cant be just a total jerk who can be trivially
| beaten as soon as you've had enough. You bad guy needs to be the
| baddest of them all with the essentially no weaknesses. That 1
| weakness and how they'll be defeated is that optimistic view of
| the future.
|
| My fun twist in my third book. The main hero comes back to earth
| on a superpower alien battleship. Absolutely nothing anyone can
| do about it.
|
| He bluffs that his plan to be emperor on earth and that his first
| action is to end all violence. That all violence is banned and
| he's judge jury and executioner from orbit. If violence detected
| his battleship blasts the criminal and vapourizes them.
|
| But its a bluff, so it's 1 timezone at a time so criminals might
| not catch on easily and he puts on a show where criminals and
| named and vapourized on the show. But its all machine ai
| produced. There are actual shots down to earth which make
| lightning like booms and leave craters; but nobody is actually
| hurt.
|
| Slowly but surely violence ends on earth. Then I make my
| predictions on what life is like when people never fear violence.
| rini17 wrote:
| Seems we have reached peak escapism. We can't take more of it,
| our attention and imagination is being constantly snatched away.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm I could argue that Philip Dick's doors that demand payment to
| open are a good pessimistic prediction of the current
| entshittification.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| I do think it's a genuinely interesting speculation--what
| happens if we paid real-life things not as a subscription, but
| based on usage, like an API.
|
| Not advocating for that at all, but it makes me want to read
| Ubik or write a short story about how it would affect life.
| nottorp wrote:
| > if we paid real-life things not as a subscription, but
| based on usage, like an API.
|
| We used to do that before the push for subscriptions.
|
| And in the digital world this is the micropayments dream...
| acuozzo wrote:
| > if we paid real-life things not as a subscription, but
| based on usage
|
| Are you thinking a flat rate or one based on local population
| density?
| zblevins wrote:
| From time to time I'll read a title that's not dystopian and
| usually walk away feeling disappointed. There's usually a utopian
| bend to it that comes across as naive and disingenuous. Maybe
| that's just a me problem though.
| aurelien wrote:
| That is easy, but the brotherhood of business is a very closed
| circle.
| palmotea wrote:
| > For example, the space-race of the 1950's and 60's, was driven
| by a spirit of optimism and excitement for humanity breaking free
| of the Earth to explore the solar system and beyond.
|
| That was the era of better living through heavy industry. We were
| optimistic because we didn't understand the consequences of what
| we were doing. It's a lot easier to sell optimism when people
| aren't familiar with the cons of the kinds of things you're
| doing.
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| I wonder if Roman art took on a bleaker tone around the time of
| the fall of the republic too. That fictional art is a partial
| predictor of the sociological unconscious.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| I think of a lot of my favorite space opera book series as
| optimistic. They're not depicting utopias or anything, but an
| imperfect world in the future that's nonetheless way beyond what
| we've achieved so far, and I reckon that's quite optimistic. This
| includes books by Peter F. Hamilton, Iain Banks, Alistair
| Raynolds.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I grew up on a solid diet of 1980's distopian cyberpunk. Glory
| days for the inquisitive and rational analytical mind.
|
| Star Trek ToS and TNG were more utopian, but I loved those ss
| well. The difference with today? It was about grand ideas and
| exploration, not pew pew and 1 sec crosscut fisticuffs by
| toddlers throwing a tantrum at a pindrop.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| So more Star Trek?
| mediumsmart wrote:
| No we don't - being shipwrecked is what life is in essence.
| NoSalt wrote:
| The new _Star Trek_ movies and TV series are becoming exactly
| what this article "warns" about. I miss the "Shatner Era" and
| "Picard Era" (including _Enterprise_ ), and I severely dislike
| this new era. I was so looking forward to _Section 31_ , but the
| trailer was just more of the same as of late. I'm glad I invested
| in the DVDs of some of the "older", more positive SciFi.
| ricopags wrote:
| ASU's Center for Science and Imagination has a project[0]
| specific to this that they launched[1] in 2014
|
| [0]https://csi.asu.edu/category/optimism/
| [1]https://csi.asu.edu/project-archive/optimism/science-
| fiction...
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