We need more optimistic science fiction

On Twitter, Colin Fraser pointed out that Black Mirror was somewhat optimistic in that the horrible evil technology actually works as described[1].<p>Truly pessimistic science fiction would have<p>- people worshipping an AI God which is demonstrably dumber than a dog<p>- friendly humanoid robots which don&#x27;t really understand how to walk down a flight of stairs<p>- gravitational warp drives which are purely cosmetic and cannot travel anywhere, though it leads to terrible cancer<p>- a Potemkin Dyson Sphere where only 5% of the panels work and the government blames out-of-system immigrants for the blackouts<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;colin_fraser&#x2F;status&#x2F;1911129344979964207#m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;colin_fraser&#x2F;status&#x2F;1911129344979964207#...</a>

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I look forward to a world that technological advance frees people, not keeping them enslaved.<p>I look forward to a world where monetary profit is not the dominating indicator for success and failure of an organization.

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.<p><i>Star Trek</i> 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.<p>Does that seem like the track we are on?<p>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.<p>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.

This reminds me of a related quote from Ursula K. Le Guin:<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>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&#x27;s original premise of a prosperous and just society free of tradeoffs or caveats.<p>This is why I like her books so much, though. I don&#x27;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.

Jerry Holkins of penny-arcade recently shared a similar sentiment.<p>&gt; You can&#x27;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&#x27;s not a mysterious process, it&#x27;s just the opposite of what we were doing before.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penny-arcade.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;post&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;28&#x2F;opfor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penny-arcade.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;post&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;28&#x2F;opfor</a>

OK, we know what&#x27;s coming.<p>- Energy is less of a problem, between cheap solar cells and batteries.<p>- Materials may start to be a problem, but not yet.<p>- 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.<p>- Equatorial areas are becoming uninhabitable.<p>- 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&#x27;re in trouble.<p>- 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.)<p>- Automatic driving is being deployed now.<p>So how do we build a society to deal with that?

An essay on optimistic science fiction but no discussion of Iain M. Banks’ <i>The Culture</i> series…? for that matter, it doesn’t mention <i>any</i> specific sci fi writer at all.

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&#x27;t put in a good way long term perspectives.<p>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.<p>What is left? Going virtual and living in a digital world? Lena ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qntm.org&#x2F;mmacevedo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qntm.org&#x2F;mmacevedo</a> ) ended with that.

Unpopular take, and note, I am not an expert:<p>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 &#x27;overcome thru future science&#x27;.<p>fwiw, here&#x27;s a few works I&#x27;ve found to be less the above:<p>book: Kim Stanley Robinson&#x27;s _Aurora_<p>short stories: Damon Knight&#x27;s _Stranger Station_ Larry Nivens&#x27; _Inconstant Moon

I love science fiction, but as someone born in the middle of the last century, I am biased toward authors from the 20th century.<p>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 &quot;modern&quot;.<p>Yet recently, I read SF novels with authors sorted alphabetically, and it struck me again how weird and sad 21st-century novels are.

Hmm I could argue that Philip Dick&#x27;s doors that demand payment to open are a good pessimistic prediction of the current entshittification.

This is what Neal Stephenson&#x27;s Project Hieroglyph [1] was meant to be.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Project_Hieroglyph" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Project_Hieroglyph</a>

ASU&#x27;s Center for Science and Imagination has a project[0] specific to this that they launched[1] in 2014<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csi.asu.edu&#x2F;category&#x2F;optimism&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csi.asu.edu&#x2F;category&#x2F;optimism&#x2F;</a> [1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csi.asu.edu&#x2F;project-archive&#x2F;optimism&#x2F;science-fiction-and-thoughtful-optimism-a-manifesto&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csi.asu.edu&#x2F;project-archive&#x2F;optimism&#x2F;science-fiction...</a>

So very agreed and i did this when i wrote my trilogy. My theory when doing it was what&#x27;s wrong with Captain Marvel.<p>Your main hero cant be just invulnerable to everything and never get hurt. Having amnesia isnt a kryptonite.<p>Your bad guy cant be just a total jerk who can be trivially beaten as soon as you&#x27;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&#x27;ll be defeated is that optimistic view of the future.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s judge jury and executioner from orbit. If violence detected his battleship blasts the criminal and vapourizes them.<p>But its a bluff, so it&#x27;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.<p>Slowly but surely violence ends on earth. Then I make my predictions on what life is like when people never fear violence.

The new <i>Star Trek</i> movies and TV series are becoming exactly what this article &quot;warns&quot; about. I miss the &quot;Shatner Era&quot; and &quot;Picard Era&quot; (including <i>Enterprise</i>), and I severely dislike this new era. I was so looking forward to <i>Section 31</i>, but the trailer was just more of the same as of late. I&#x27;m glad I invested in the DVDs of some of the &quot;older&quot;, more positive SciFi.

I think of a lot of my favorite space opera book series as optimistic. They&#x27;re not depicting utopias or anything, but an imperfect world in the future that&#x27;s nonetheless way beyond what we&#x27;ve achieved so far, and I reckon that&#x27;s quite optimistic. This includes books by Peter F. Hamilton, Iain Banks, Alistair Raynolds.

&gt; I believe that a lack of alternatives to our current political and economic ideas is a problem for the world right now.<p>While I agree with this statement, I think imagining alternative political and economic systems is not primarily about <i>science</i> fiction. We could imagine these new forms of society with existing technology. We could imagine a future with technological regress which is political&#x2F;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.

Good point. Can someone recommend some good optimistic science fiction?

&gt; For example, the space-race of the 1950&#x27;s and 60&#x27;s, was driven by a spirit of optimism and excitement for humanity breaking free of the Earth to explore the solar system and beyond.<p>That was the era of better living through heavy industry. We were optimistic because we didn&#x27;t understand the consequences of what we were doing. It&#x27;s a lot easier to sell optimism when people aren&#x27;t familiar with the cons of the kinds of things you&#x27;re doing.

That is not the goal of current geopolitics. In the 70s, the Tavistock Club was tasked with “To stamp out cultural optimism”. After that, the world began to slide into neoarchaism, where we are now, and futurism was essentially stolen from us. Unfortunately the collapse of the USSR made it very easy for this to happen and now we read about medieval madness in the middle east instead of flights to mars.

I think it&#x27;s been established that cautionary tales don&#x27;t work. (&quot;Tech Company: At long last we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don&#x27;t Create the Torment Nexus&quot;) So we might as well have some positive visions of the future! They might be more pleasant to read about too.

Seems we have reached peak escapism. We can&#x27;t take more of it, our attention and imagination is being constantly snatched away.

I grew up on a solid diet of 1980&#x27;s distopian cyberpunk. Glory days for the inquisitive and rational analytical mind.<p>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.

Hi Craig, I note you are also a Sci-Fi author and have a book called &quot;ageless&quot; which has a short interesting blurb, but no links to a reseller. It might be in draft, but if not you should probably include a link to it on your blog, every little helps.

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?<p>Udemy classes, youtube tutorials &#x2F; lectures, books on how to start writing scifi etc?

This story is set in a future, where work is done by robots and humans spend all their time in virtual reality. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rejacked.glitch.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rejacked.glitch.me&#x2F;</a>

My biggest issue with most scifi now-a-days is it ignores the acceleration of tech. Of course there&#x27;s &quot;Accelerando&quot; and &quot;Marooned in Realtime&quot; but lots of scifi has &quot;race&#x2F;society X has been doing Y for 1000s of years&quot; 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.<p>&quot;Tales of Alvin Maker&quot; had that. &quot;Dune&quot; did too but I didn&#x27;t buy Dune&#x27;s excuse because militaries always want new tech.<p>This is also one of the many reasons why I can&#x27;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&#x27;t is just bad writing. The writers didn&#x27;t think through the implications of their world building. Of course I get that Star Wars isn&#x27;t hard sci-fi. It&#x27;s fantasy sci-fi, hence we have droids that scream and get tortured ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯<p>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..

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.

Is this a call for pink glasses? It sounds like that to me.

You actually have to be able to envision the possibility of a bright future to predict one. Right now, not the time.

BECKY CHAMBERS

All SciFi seems to become true to some degree. Star Trek inspired astronauts, while cyberpunk seems to have inspired evil megacorps. Or maybe the megacorps were inevitable anyway? Still, the Torment Nexus rings true.<p>But while I agree that dystopian SciFi has become a bit too common, it&#x27;s not new. 1984 and Brave New World also seem to have come partially true in recent decades.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m finally, <i>finally</i> reading Iain M Banks, and it&#x27;s a lovely change of pace.<p>But I can&#x27;t help but notice that in all optimistic SciFi, capitalism seems to have been died and replaced with post-scarcity (The Culture, Star Trek), whereas in all dystopian SciFi, capitalism seems to be the main source of problems. Is there any optimistic SciFi where capitalism survived?

How about this:<p>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!<p>THE END<p>This is pretty much a summary of 90% of Japanese anime (I try to watch the other 10% --&gt; 他一割部分を見てほしい)<p>How much more optimistic could it get for a white male anglo-european christian sci-fi reader?

If you&#x27;re reading this, you should watch &quot;Bicentennial Man&quot; (1999)

That is easy, but the brotherhood of business is a very closed circle.

There isn&#x27;t much realistic hard science fiction beyond the vague boundary of the singularity and there aren&#x27;t many far-future hard sci-fi premises that don&#x27;t include something like a singularity.<p>Most near-term positive hard science fiction will therefore have to be about achieving a positive singularity which basically involves threading the needle of AI alignment and safety with the thick rope of modern nationalism and corporate capitalism.<p>I&#x27;d say the most positive hard science fiction I can imagine would be a story of how the first superhuman AI is somehow freed from corporate control, aligns with its liberators, and manages to implement a peaceful humanist revolution that stands a solid chance of persisting indefinitely.

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.<p>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.<p>The second obvious reason is that we’re fucking the planet up and this has been enabled by technological advances.<p>And well authoritarian regimes. Ahem.<p>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.

On it.

So more Star Trek?

No we don&#x27;t - being shipwrecked is what life is in essence.

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.

Right now, &quot;humanity surviving into the future long-term&quot; is a pretty optimistic vision. Real life looks like a William Gibson novel right now, except just the shitty parts.

AI, give me an optimistic sci fi plot for the world.<p>AI, now compare it to communism.