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.
I always thought that should have been named "hazard fixation," though.
I suppose it's a lizard brain thing. Our ancestors that didn't fixate on the lion got got!
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.
Yes, so let us try to envision the end of capitalism; in a myriad different stories. That's one thing I want sci fi writers to do.
A very broad brush view might be that it took 60 years for automations in the workplace to finally match pace with demand, but increasing automation in knowledge work vs the potential for aggregate demand to fall means we'll have to come to terms with the "required" level of productivity, rather than assuming more growth is the objective.
If we can get this right, we might see the globe get more equal, more leisure time, and a shrinking of the investment sector since the pursuit of growth might get more nuanced. All of that would take a long time, though.
Like imagine if we suddenly got access to replicator technology. Why would we need to care about the stock market? No more factories or shipping, just throw in your old bike and get a new back. Not saying that this is a likely scenario, but there's a sliding scale of far-fetchedness between having replicators and having no difference from today that Sci-fi can explore.
Or at least some industry advocacy group would resurrect the "You wouldn't download a car!" ad campaign.
It does seem like everyone on this thread wants that as the main authors mentioned are ursula le guin (e.g. the dispossed) and iain m banks.
Is it? Or have people just convinced themselves that everything except their personal utopia is capitalism?
There are diverse examples that are much better for this than China. E.g. Bhutan or North Korea. There are also non-national societies such as the Amish.
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.
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.
It remindsme a bit of how internet communities work.
I think it takes its premise much more seriously than star trek does. E.g. Star trek has free replicators for everyone and yet everyone is spending tons of money at Quark's for some reason. Which is fine, star trek has a lot of other good qualities, but i don't think it does a great job of exploring the implication of its technologies.
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.
I was watching the recent tv adaptation of asimov's foundation series, and one of the most striking things was how much characters (including the good guys) resorted to violence. Where in the books the entire theme was that brain beat brawn and the main characters almost never solved their problems with violence.
Optimism is powerful, but it usually comes with impatience. We've shown an ability to decrease the prevalence of war globally, but the fact that improvements have taken longer than a generation and have not been monotonic or absolute makes it very hard to maintain a belief in the possibility of future improvements. The pace of change in the world can't keep up with the emotional rhythm of human optimism, disappointment, and disillusionment.
Also, many well-meaning people fight to tear down optimism because they identify it with complacency. Other well-meaning people fight to tear down optimism because they want people to focus on a different problem, so they want them to believe that there can be no progress on X without progress on Y.
As a result it is fashionable to deny that anything done in centuries of human struggle has made any positive difference in the world. How that is supposed to motivate anybody to add their own efforts to the struggle is left as an exercise for the reader I guess.
Consider classics like "The Cold Equations", where the institutional solution to space stowaways is to execute them, without so much as bothering to put up a warning sign first.
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_....
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...
For some reason we have no problem imagining dystopias as something that can be a sliding scale of misery but utopia has to be something absolute - like a heaven on earth.
This is why I don't like the term utopia to describe what I'm looking for. Because people are always there to point out that utopia is something that doesn't exist by definition. Fine, so what do we call a fiction that realistically paints a world that is ever so slightly better? Anti-dystopia? Counter-dystopia?
Humankind by Rutger Bergman
He's also written Utopia for Realists, which is on my to read list.
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.
If you're open to an oddball suggestion, New Atlantis by Francis Bacon is worth considering.
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.
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.
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.