I fear that so much of our story telling is driven by our worst fears. We end up not being able to hold a vision in our head of a good future because of all those fears.
Having fears in the front of your mind makes sense for an animal that can primarily shape their future by avoiding danger. But humans are very much in power of our own destiny. So if all we can imagine is dystopia that's what we get.
That's why we need not only fiction that shows effective resistance to dystopian tendencies, which is important, but (realistic) fiction that depicts stories where we are clearly on our way from something bad towards something much better. Such stories are important because they give us hope and we dearly need hope in those dark hours, to encourage us to act. And to make it more clear to everyone involved what 'act' should mean. I find those types of stories kind of rare. Suggestions are appreciated. C Doctorow and U Le Guin comes to mind.
> Suggestions are appreciated. C Doctorow and U Le Guin comes to mind.
Its always weird to me when people use U Le Guin as an example of "optimistic" sci fi. Some of her writing is extremely bleak. Of course she is pretty prolific and has written a lot of different types of things.
Fundamentally i think the issue is that novels usually have to be about conflict. If everything is peachy you dont have a novel. I think it takes much more skill to write an interesting optimistic near future sci fi novel that is actually about the technical change instead of just using it as a setting.
Most of the optimistic technology novels i can think of that i liked were far future - Iain banks. Maybe greg egan although optimistic isnt exactly the right word. They show an interesting world, but its clearly not our world. Is it really an optimistic take on the future of technology if the technology in question is hundreds of years in the future?
Perhaps you'd like something like "Song for a new day" by Sarah Pinsker.
I dont really know if it fits as "optimism", but i'd like to mention "The Fortunate Fall" as a really interesting novel about technology.
> Its always weird to me when people use U Le Guin as an example of "optimistic" sci fi. Some of her writing is extremely bleak. Of course she is pretty prolific and has written a lot of different types of things.
Some of it is, yeah. But I think part of what made her novels interesting was how she was (often) able to resolve conflict without violence. I think that's where the optimism comes from.
Yeah I've only read The Dispossessed and a few short stories so I might have a tilted view of her bibliography.
I've tried to get into Ian Banks. One feeling I get is that there's two kinds of optimist sci fi. Technology magically solves our problems - or technology can be both force for good and bad, let's use it for good. I have a feeling that Ian M Banks writes the former but I'm probably wrong here?
There can still be interesting conflict even if the bigger problems have been solved. Dispossessed is one good example I think. The conflict is partially about flaws inherent in the "better" society that they created.
And in Star Trek and to some degree in "The long way to a small angry planet" the conflict is between the larger society and the hold outs.
When I was learning to drive, I was afraid of hitting the curb. It made me a bad driver. My driver's ed guy told me the common sense advice of 'don't pay attention to the curb - watch the road'. When I internalized that, I drove much better.
It was so simple.
We cannot even conceive of a good future today. We have no vision of what the better future looks like. We need positive fiction to help paint the picture.
Paying attention to the negative just gives you more negative.
The hard question is why it is so hard to imagine a good future. Maybe because we no longer understand our own core problems deeply.
I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundations safety course before getting my motorcycle license. They have a similar mantra about avoiding something in the road (puddle, pot hole, car with no taillights).
Look where you want to go.
I don't know where I'm supposed to look right now.
To me at least it's hard to imagine a good future because I understand climate change will ruin quality of life for most of humanity. I know what must be done to combat it will not be done due to the economic systems that dominate most countries. It's easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision the end of capitalism.
Just knowing we do have the ability to slow things down, but actively choose not to in the name of profits and comfort is incredibly depressing and demotivating. The future looks bleak because it will be.
It rather reminds me of a recent Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) interview where he lamented what seems to be an emerging excess focus on villains, not "good guys" - and making them way too glamorous:
Even when we encounter actual utopian (or even just wholesome, positive) fiction, we have become so cynical that we are constantly waiting for that plot twist where we learn that underneath the utopia is actually a dystopia, and everything good and positive was an illusion.
Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built, its sequel, and to a lesser degree her Wayfarer series are very hopeful. Not exactly hard sci-fi so maybe not to HN’s taste but they check a lot of good tech boxes. A plot device in the former is their world’s version of a smartphone, a scrib, which is designed to last a lifetime and genuinely serve the user
I think just writing and reading such stories is a good start. I can vouch for that reading such stories is enjoyable and I want to do more of it. Which to me is a small proof that it is possible.
My childhood was spent reading Clarke, Asimov and the likes. Not for the gloom of runaway AIs or societal collapse, but from the glimmers of technology and advancement that was hidden in their stories.
The only way the future is better is if we solve some new problems between now and then. So there's no "imagining a better future" without anticipating the existence of both problems and their solutions.
And you don't run out of problems. When you solve some problems, you're left with better problems than the ones you just solved. You might not yet know about the new better problems, but rest assured they're there.
My Favorite Le Guin quote on science fiction is very appropriate"
SCIENCE FICTION IS OFTEN DESCRIBED, AND EVEN DEFINED, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.
Almost any Kim Stanley Robinson novel. In Pacific Edge he explicitly mentions he doesn’t want to write about utopia, he wants to describe the path, the struggle.
Also, “Another Now” by Yanis Varoufakis is very explicit in a path to a better future.
Recent works by Robinson seem very pessimistic, perhaps even misanthropic.
EDIT: Going to correct myself here for being harsh. I'm just remembering 2015's "Aurora" as being particularly annoying. Some of his other recent work has a pro-human message (e.g. NY2140)
Worst fears? Are you sure it's not the fears that are more exciting and visceral and on some level more fun than our actual worst fears that get into popular story telling?
That the setting is dystopian seems obvious given the background here. But the plot can be driven by overcoming the dystopian setting, making something better.
"Hieroglyph" [0] was an attempt to address this and write positive science fiction. It was a project at ASU and a book[1] of short stories accompanied by a webpage with essays describing the genesis of the stories and responses to the stories. The book included pieces by Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and others.
I heard about it late last year and picked up a used copy. I ended up reading about 2/3 of the stories and, 10 years after the book's publication, my general feeling was:
1. The stories are overwhelmingly positive and sometimes compelling. But a decade later, the real-life uses of most of the technologies used a plot devices has fallen short of the aspirations in the stories. Reading the stories left me with a feeling of disappointment, seeing that we as a society opted to use most of the technologies in more negative ways (mass surveillance, continued indifference to the amount of carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere, etc.). As a result the stories also felt very naive.
2. The book contains copious links to essays that are hosted on the webpage [0]. They are all gone now; from what I can tell, none of the essays are available at the original URLs. There are also no redirects. The essays have disappeared.
I suppose point 2 is perhaps simply ironic and not much more. I am not sure how to take point 1 though; maybe it is just difficult to read positive predictions that turned out to not happen. Maybe they had an impact though, and things could've been worse in the absence of the books? I am not sure.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Maybe some people here won't like it's libertarian bent, but it's basically the scifi story about successful resistance to tyranny (and the libertarian themes are mostly subverted in the end. The new government ultimately finds most of the libertarian dogma too impractical.)
If you're open to an oddball suggestion, New Atlantis by Francis Bacon is worth considering.
I fear the likes of you, caught in halkucinated optimistic visions of mankind, handing out "toys"like replicators or antimatter to those idealizations . This baby called mankind is retarded, it needs help, please stop hitting it.
The year is 2058, I drive up to my home after working at the amazon warehouse for 14 hours, it's my 6th day of work, I finally get my day off. I drive home in my amazon basics SUV listening to "NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL AMAZON BASICS 54". After filling up my car at the amazon basic recharging station I pull into my amazon basics car shed and open my front door after verifying my prime membership to my amazon basics branded Ring doorbell. I get my amazon basics hungry man TV meal and sit down to watch some flicks on my amazon basics fire TV. Stranger Things finally entered it's 7th season, and I'm so excited I pissed my amazon basics boxer briefs on the way home. The show leaves me foaming in the mouth it was so good, I came into my amazon basics fleshlight 4 times. I go to clean it out in my complete amazon basics full bath, I'm all out of amazon basics bar soap, fuck. I walk into what used to be my home office and go to the nearest wall of amazon dash buttons. I press the amazon basics dash button and receive a notification on my amazon basics fire tablet that my amazon basics checking account has overdrawn. My account gets charged a $50 overdraft fee and I hear a knock on my door. The amazon basics SWAT came to my house, beat me to the ground with their amazon basics batons, and cuffed me with amazon basics handcuffs. They throw me into the back of an amazon basics crown vic for the next 30 minutes. The windows are tinted with amazon basics 100% tint, can't see shit outside. The car comes to a stop and the door opens. I've been brought to the amazon basics prison for delinquents. I'm now forced to work 16 hours a day making amazon basics clothes hangers for the next 35 years to pay off my amazon basics overdraft fees. I'm amazon basically fucked.
In the grim dark future there is only ~~war~~ the quarterly reports of the last two corporations (BerkshireComcastDisneyExxonMobil and AlphabetAmazonAppleAramco).
Its not even technically correct as the original sentence was "...generate profit so great their boss was able to finance his own private space program." They didn't say he funded his space project with amazon profits, they are saying that as a result of the profits bezos was able to fund a space program. Which is undoubtedly true as the amazon equity wouldn't be worth much if amazon wasn't making any money .
These days, the formal difference between the two is really hard to grasp, and mostly depends on which way accountants find they’ll pay less taxes.
There is no point nitpicking someone because they used one term instead of the other: Bezos’ fortune is derived from Amazon’s activity, and the rest of us has no interest in changing our vocabulary to abide by some obscure tax code rule.
Adding to that, most of these workers are probably working on Amazons unprofitable or barely profitable business. AWS is most of Amazons profits, retail was losing money till very recently and maybe recently is profitable
Readit News
Having fears in the front of your mind makes sense for an animal that can primarily shape their future by avoiding danger. But humans are very much in power of our own destiny. So if all we can imagine is dystopia that's what we get.
That's why we need not only fiction that shows effective resistance to dystopian tendencies, which is important, but (realistic) fiction that depicts stories where we are clearly on our way from something bad towards something much better. Such stories are important because they give us hope and we dearly need hope in those dark hours, to encourage us to act. And to make it more clear to everyone involved what 'act' should mean. I find those types of stories kind of rare. Suggestions are appreciated. C Doctorow and U Le Guin comes to mind.
Its always weird to me when people use U Le Guin as an example of "optimistic" sci fi. Some of her writing is extremely bleak. Of course she is pretty prolific and has written a lot of different types of things.
Fundamentally i think the issue is that novels usually have to be about conflict. If everything is peachy you dont have a novel. I think it takes much more skill to write an interesting optimistic near future sci fi novel that is actually about the technical change instead of just using it as a setting.
Most of the optimistic technology novels i can think of that i liked were far future - Iain banks. Maybe greg egan although optimistic isnt exactly the right word. They show an interesting world, but its clearly not our world. Is it really an optimistic take on the future of technology if the technology in question is hundreds of years in the future?
Perhaps you'd like something like "Song for a new day" by Sarah Pinsker.
I dont really know if it fits as "optimism", but i'd like to mention "The Fortunate Fall" as a really interesting novel about technology.
Some of it is, yeah. But I think part of what made her novels interesting was how she was (often) able to resolve conflict without violence. I think that's where the optimism comes from.
That said, Ursula K. LeGuin did author such a book, _Always Coming Home_, which is far more interesting and engaging than it has any right to be.
That said, my go-to reading for when I'm really depressed is her _The Lathe of Heaven_....
I've tried to get into Ian Banks. One feeling I get is that there's two kinds of optimist sci fi. Technology magically solves our problems - or technology can be both force for good and bad, let's use it for good. I have a feeling that Ian M Banks writes the former but I'm probably wrong here?
There can still be interesting conflict even if the bigger problems have been solved. Dispossessed is one good example I think. The conflict is partially about flaws inherent in the "better" society that they created.
And in Star Trek and to some degree in "The long way to a small angry planet" the conflict is between the larger society and the hold outs.
When I was learning to drive, I was afraid of hitting the curb. It made me a bad driver. My driver's ed guy told me the common sense advice of 'don't pay attention to the curb - watch the road'. When I internalized that, I drove much better.
It was so simple.
We cannot even conceive of a good future today. We have no vision of what the better future looks like. We need positive fiction to help paint the picture.
Paying attention to the negative just gives you more negative.
The hard question is why it is so hard to imagine a good future. Maybe because we no longer understand our own core problems deeply.
The world waits for the new story.
Look where you want to go.
I don't know where I'm supposed to look right now.
Deleted Comment
Just knowing we do have the ability to slow things down, but actively choose not to in the name of profits and comfort is incredibly depressing and demotivating. The future looks bleak because it will be.
It rather reminds me of a recent Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) interview where he lamented what seems to be an emerging excess focus on villains, not "good guys" - and making them way too glamorous:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/vince-gilligan-...
If our fiction is only ever showing us dystopias and villains - it's not hard to see how that could be problematic for the wider collective psyche...
Humankind by Rutger Bergman
He's also written Utopia for Realists, which is on my to read list.
And you don't run out of problems. When you solve some problems, you're left with better problems than the ones you just solved. You might not yet know about the new better problems, but rest assured they're there.
SCIENCE FICTION IS OFTEN DESCRIBED, AND EVEN DEFINED, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.
Also, “Another Now” by Yanis Varoufakis is very explicit in a path to a better future.
EDIT: Going to correct myself here for being harsh. I'm just remembering 2015's "Aurora" as being particularly annoying. Some of his other recent work has a pro-human message (e.g. NY2140)
I heard about it late last year and picked up a used copy. I ended up reading about 2/3 of the stories and, 10 years after the book's publication, my general feeling was:
1. The stories are overwhelmingly positive and sometimes compelling. But a decade later, the real-life uses of most of the technologies used a plot devices has fallen short of the aspirations in the stories. Reading the stories left me with a feeling of disappointment, seeing that we as a society opted to use most of the technologies in more negative ways (mass surveillance, continued indifference to the amount of carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere, etc.). As a result the stories also felt very naive.
2. The book contains copious links to essays that are hosted on the webpage [0]. They are all gone now; from what I can tell, none of the essays are available at the original URLs. There are also no redirects. The essays have disappeared.
I suppose point 2 is perhaps simply ironic and not much more. I am not sure how to take point 1 though; maybe it is just difficult to read positive predictions that turned out to not happen. Maybe they had an impact though, and things could've been worse in the absence of the books? I am not sure.
[0] https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/
[1] https://www.book-info.com/isbn/0-06-220471-8.htm
If you're open to an oddball suggestion, New Atlantis by Francis Bacon is worth considering.
Dead Comment
(Also I'm fairly sure that the Amazon Dash is an un-product, so that's thoughtcrime for a start.)
NOT the Amazon Basics Wed Wun! Don't EVER push the Amazon Basics Wed Wun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_IE_0-Xlis&t=181s
He funded it with equity (or probably debt against his equity). His equity is valued at 34 times the Amazon profits annualized.
The workers did make Amazon valuable but it wasn’t profits.
Its not even technically correct as the original sentence was "...generate profit so great their boss was able to finance his own private space program." They didn't say he funded his space project with amazon profits, they are saying that as a result of the profits bezos was able to fund a space program. Which is undoubtedly true as the amazon equity wouldn't be worth much if amazon wasn't making any money .
There is no point nitpicking someone because they used one term instead of the other: Bezos’ fortune is derived from Amazon’s activity, and the rest of us has no interest in changing our vocabulary to abide by some obscure tax code rule.
I bought it anyway, mostly out of guilt. But I have had POD's like this one for half the price via amazon when shipping is accounted for.