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Interesting.

"In the totalitarian-dystopian genre, the prototypical narrative content elements — e.g., setting, character, plot, and story morals — are relatively clear and consistent; thus, they are “filled in” according to widely shared genre conventions."

Writers can thus write in such worlds without extensive world-building. It's like grinding out police procedurals or zombie novels. Not every writer can build worlds like Charles Stross. It's also easier for readers. Reading Ian Banks is hard work.

More generally, we have a decided lack of novels describing a better future. We have no shared conceptual model of what a better future should look like. We did once, up to 1970 or so. To a considerable extent, futurism is still stuck in the 1960s. What passes for futurism today is a minor tweak on the present.

("Futures: 1) Utopia 2) Dystopia 3) the future in which your cell phone takes slightly better pictures.")

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> More generally, we have a decided lack of novels describing a better future.

Maybe that's because it's hard to be optimistic about the future starting from now? The worst case is that the environment goes to hell and we die, or the economy crashes and life becomes hell, or killer robots kill us all (at the behest of some state actor or just because they loooove paperclips). The best case is we get humans to not behave like humans (so some people are less miserable), and then we either upgrade ourselves into unrecognizable transhumans or we become pets to transhumans or incomprehensible AIs.

> To a considerable extent, futurism is still stuck in the 1960s. What passes for futurism today is a minor tweak on the present.

Maybe that's just because we've picked most of the low hanging fruit that we could see in the '60s, and what remains still feels pretty far off? The best possible future that we can hope for can be summed up as "now, but don't fuck it up."

Honestly, the first part of your response sounds pretty much like the very symptom of the problem discussed here. You presented a very bleak outlook, no doubt informed as much by dystopian fiction (and the culture enjoying it) as it is by rational analysis.

If everything seems destined to hell, with no one capable of doing anything about it, people just give up and live their lives focused on short-term needs. This ends up directly contributing to those world problems we're all worried about. Maybe an influx of positive fiction could help change the overall mood towards the idea that the brighter future is both possible and worth fighting for?

Honestly, everyone here owes themselves to watch Disney's "Tomorrowland". Yes, it's a bit clichéd. But it's also heartwarming, and for me it was the first thing since many years that left me smiling and full of energy. The movie asks some very pointed questions about the state of the world, and covers this very topic: that our obsession with dystopias is forming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that this is a kind of dumb thing to do to ourselves.

Cheerful concurrence. It is worth remembering that most of history and indeed the present can be described in very bleak terms given a little bit of effort.

Humans have good reason to fear the future. The future is very scary. However, the future has always been very scary, and it isn't any scarier now than it has been since the invention of record keeping, where basically the same threats were present. The past is also very scary to anyone who sits down and realises that the people in the past are basically the same as the people in the present.

The future isn't going to be any bleaker than the past, it will be just as full of hope, success and vibrancy.

Well, any dystopia you can conceive is probably going to be utopia to someone.

Everyone here owes themselves to watch Disney's "Tomorrowland".

"'We saved a seat for you?' That's a commercial."

I was just looking at stills from Tomorrowland, for inspiration for things to build in Second Life. Second Life is a good test for futuristic architecture, because, after you build it, you get to live, work, and play in it. You find out if anyone else wants to. Not much passes that test.

Tomorrowland is a theme park. Swooping roads with no offramps. Big round unflyable craft that land in cradles. Giant tubes full of plants. It's not a working future.

"Minority Report" is considered one of the better examples of futuristic urban design in film. It suffers from the usual problems. Giant arcology structures mean nobody in the interior volume has a window. The road network's connectivity is far too low. Overall, though, it looks halfway workable.

"I, Robot" is a bit more workable. Worlds with a lot of "nature", like "Avatar" and "Jurassic Park" do OK. The giant tree thing tends to be overdone.

There's a whole world building department at USC's film school.[1] Their videos are not impressive. There's a startup in this space.[2] Mostly they do title sequences and ads.

[1] http://worldbuilding.institute

[2] https://www.imaginaryforces.com/

Oh, so Second Life is still a thing? I was meaning to check it out for close to a decade now.

> Tomorrowland is a theme park. Swooping roads with no offramps. Big round unflyable craft that land in cradles. Giant tubes full of plants. It's not a working future.

Yeah, the architecture definitely isn't. It just looks nice. But that wasn't the thing I meant in my comment. I meant the underlying theme. Better future through competence, dreams and - yes - technology. And (spoilers) how all was almost lost when they unleashed the positive feedback loop of expecting dystopia and giving up. I like that movie because it's the first thing in a long time that rekindles this, perhaps childlike, positive thinking, that we can make things better.

"- Huxley's "Brave New World", Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", Orwell's "1984": once considered fiction, these futuristic novels are actually happening right now and they seem to be getting worse. Yes, Miss Newton?

- Can we fix it?

- Sorry?

- I get things are bad, but what are we doing to fix it?"

Thanks for the thoughts on urban design in other sci-fi movies. I admit I never thought much about it when I watched them; I'll likely pay more attention from now on. Also anything in Second Life you recommend checking out?

EDIT: Also for "commercial", it was great. I almost jumped out of my seat when I saw rockets landing old sci-fi/SpaceX style, and a launch loop just casually shooting a rocket the next moment. Sci-fi porn that scene was for sure.

I’m not sure why we need to be sarcastic about a future in which “we upgrade ourselves into transhuman”. There is nothing special about “humanity”. Emotions are likely result of chemicals. We will transform ourselves and what those beings feel most likely will not resemble what we feel today. They will have their culture and art and they will not care about ours at all. It is inevitable if there is no disastrous event happening. We just need to accept that. We are one tiny step in evolution like dinosaur.

>Emotions are likely result of chemicals.

Your entire brain is the result of chemicals. Emotions, as such, are a result of your interoceptive cortical systems.

Almost makes you wish it were the 1930s, eh?

Radium, the wonder drug!

Interestingly enough, Isaac Asimov pioneered the Sci-Fi detective story. Read somewhere that Campbell thought it couldn’t be done since it requires explaining technology and would ruin the reader’s enjoyment.

Spoiler: Chekov’s Gun, and the assumption that new technologies are so seemless as to be unnoticeable or rarely commented on.

I found the citation, from the introduction to The Caves of Steel.

"Campbell had often said that a science-fiction mystery story was a contradiction in terms; that advances in technology could be used to get detectives out of their difficulties unfairly, and that the readers would therefore be cheated.

I sat down to write a story that would be a classic mystery and that would not cheat the reader—and yet would be a true science-fiction story. The result was The Caves of Steel. It appeared in Galaxy as a three-part serial in the October, November, and December 1953 issues, and in 1954, it was published by Doubleday as my eleventh book.

There was no question but that The Caves of Steel was my most successful book to date. It sold better than any of my earlier books; it elicited nicer letters from readers; and (best proof of all) Doubleday smiled at me with greater warmth than ever before. Until that point, they wanted outlines and chapters from me before handing me contracts, but after that I got my contracts on my mere statement that I was going to write another book."

Really good points. I found this video ("Is Utopia always Dystopia?") fascinating, delving into similar territory about expanding our idea of what utopia, and thus a better future, can be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n20ZbRJyKPM

One of the major arguments of postmodernism is that the "shared model" of modernist progress -- universal "progress" had some bad side effects. Destroying cultures and languages in the name of progress doesn't really empower people. And modernity brought other new large problems, from global warming to weak communities to mass propaganda. There were so many excesses that we had to put on the brakes.

That said, postmodernism does support a "whatever works" approach, and we desperately need some sort of positive futurism, lest we end up implementing the coal-powered AI hellscape by default.

> Destroying cultures and languages in the name of progress doesn't really empower people.

Languages don't get destroyed by rearing children in isolation so they're left unable to speak. Languages die when their population shifts over to a language with more to offer. (Generally, the ability to participate in a larger market.)

You can go pretty much anywhere rare languages are spoken and hear parents tell you they hope their children will grow up to speak something more useful. Where do you get the idea that this doesn't empower people?

And it's not just small, dying languages. Typical Czech parent will push their kid to learn English and German everyday.

I agree with you wholeheartedly until you stated this:

> (Generally, the ability to participate in a larger market.)

It all hinges on your use of market: I would have written society. It's extremely telling that nowadays ‘market’ and ‘society’ have become almost synonymous, not because markets have subsumed the role of societies at large, but because monetary exchanges have become the de facto be-all and end-all of social interaction. Implicit in your choice of words is the notion that the only thing that merits making the effort to interact with others is the exchange for the sake of profit.

I'm an economist but this kind of stuff saddens me profoundly. If this isn’t a path straight to dystopia then I don't know what is.

"monetary exchanges have become the de facto be-all and end-all of social interaction"

Now that's a dystopian theme- I presume you mean that a lot of social interactions these days are on technological platforms that are themselves seeking to make a profit (or a at least a return on investment if not an actual operating profit)?

I think it's more like this: most parents want their children to be better off. The vast majority of people is a couple steps away from poverty, holding themselves afloat only through decades of hard work. Not surprisingly, the core consideration is the child's ability to find a well-paying job.

And if you really think about it, "monetary exchanges" have been "the de facto be-all and end-all of social interaction" for a very, very long time now. A part of growing up is the ongoing realization that all the things you believed are done because they're needed are actually incidental, and done primarily to make money. It's a sad state, but not new.

Parents generally do not value the opportunity for their children to abandon the parents' society in favor of some external one. But they do value the opportunity for their children to earn money. Market access is what they want. If they could do it without culture access, they would.

The contrast is live in the US in deaf communities. Deaf community leaders have a strong and unconflicted opinion on surgery to restore the hearing of deaf children: it's bad, it's a denial of the inherent worth of deaf people, and you should be ashamed for even thinking that a deaf child's hearing needs to be "fixed".

They think that way because they have a direct personal interest in the size of the deaf community: the larger the community is, the more power community leaders wield. But they have zero interest in the well-being of any specific child, and less in the well-being of a child who isn't even part of their community.

In contrast, the deaf parents of deaf children are often very conflicted. They know a child is better off being able to hear. But the child is unlikely to participate much in the deaf community (important to the parents) if its hearing is restored.

But still, I think it's hard to argue that it would be an example of disempowerment to exterminate sign language by restoring everyone's hearing so they can learn a spoken language and communicate with the people around them.

Are you a native speaker? Maybe you just have trouble understanding what leads to people learning English.

My anecdote:

I have enough people around me (literally several millions in my city) that speak my language. All books, movies and TV shows I ever wanted to see are available translated in very high quality. There is so much original content that a lot of people simply don't even crave foreign content, that includes any science you would think of (and our countrymen are the pioneers of many), programming guides etc. The sole purpose of learning English in my country as viewed by the government (that sets up schools) is to take advantage of foreign profit and then return back home with the money and participate in our society, and that view reflects the wishes of the majority of our society - we prefer to interact with our people because the people and especially the language "make sense" (Czech language is regarded for its internal consistency and hard rules combined with freeform sentences - that makes the language a form of wild art where you can completely change logical meaning of the whole 10-sentence block with a single tone pronounced differently, if you wish to do that).

This purpose ("to be worthy on the job market") is said to you numerous times (I heard it at least once a week the whole 12 years I had English class) your whole childhood by your parents (who truly believe that our culture is big enough and English is not for that purpose), youe teachers, your school principal and of course the government.

Yes, I am a native English speaker (British on my mother's side, education), but I'm also a native Italian speaker (father's side, raised in Italy).

My concern was primarily directed at the fact that it's strange to indicate that one is learning a language to participate in a market which is a subset of all social interactions.

> it's strange to indicate that one is learning a language to participate in a market which is a subset of all social interactions.

Is it really? I'm sure it's strange to you - as a native English speaker, there is no language that would offer you significant new opportunities.

However I've never met a Czech person who doesn't learn English because of the market (academic/job/business opportunities) - as I said, this purpose is frequently highlighted from the youngest age (I was 4 when I was first told I need to learn English because of my future job). Also consider that until 1989 our borders were closed - meaning WE couldn't travel. It has became perfectly normal during the past 90 years to participate socially only within our own culture (and language).

> My concern was primarily directed at the fact that it's strange to indicate that one is learning a language to participate in a market which is a subset of all social interactions.

It's not strange, especially wrt. in particular English. People really don't learn English (or make their kids learn English) to immerse themselves in the British or American culture (the latter is pushed worldwide anyway). They do it because jobs require it, and will for the predictable future. In fact many people nowadays, including my wife & I, are talking about getting kids to learn Chinese along with English, to hedge our bets for who will be the dominant economic power 20 years from now.

(Also note that when people learn English, they don't expect talking just with the English or Americans. They want to be able to talk with everyone else in the world, since all the other people are know or are learning English too.)

> not because markets have subsumed the role of societies at large, but because monetary exchanges have become the de facto be-all and end-all of social interaction.

This was part of the joy of Burning Man: it felt like an experimental laboratory where we could try out non-exchange-based modes of society. After a week in an environment which was, thrillingly, both utopia and dystopia at once, we could then go home and see about recreating the good parts of those experiences in our everyday lives.

(I don't know if it still feels that way - it got too big and too institutional for me to feel like I belonged there anymore, but it's possible that it still works for people who are less sensitive about the presence of complex power structures.)

Right, so you're a modernist, and that's ok. You have an implicit assumption that the larger culture is better, and that being more economically productive is desirable. Many hunter-gatherer societies offered more leisure time than modern cultures. If that's your point of reference, Western culture is an abject failure.

I think there's a view that both admits the merits of hunter-gatherer societies and still prefers the modern one.

The way I see it, we've made a huge step back in order to be able to move forwards. Hunter-gatherers may have had more leisure time, but they could never have developed airplanes, vaccines, modern medicine, plumbing, Internet or space travel. To achieve those things, we had to specialize and build large-scale economies. Hunting/gathering was a dead end, whereas our culture still has open possibilities for tremendous improvement.

I wasn't actually taking the side against civilization, just saying that reasonable arguments exist. But you get that.

One thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is the amount of things that I'm wrong about. Some of them minor, but also likely something that a future man would find abhorrent, equivalent to slavery or cockfighting or something. Extrapolate from how often people are wrong on the Internet (!!11), and I'm probably wrong a lot. Extrapolate from HN, less so. Civilization as a whole must also have these systemic errors which are unnoticed by almost everyone; modernism definitely had such errors.

The single most modernist institution remaining today is the Olympics, which attempts to use athletic competition to maintain international peace. We all know that the IOC and related bodies have serious problems, but the mission itself is still valuable. Even if it does implicitly promote nationalism.

No, I have no assumption that a larger culture is better than a smaller one. I do assume that being more economically productive is better then being less economically productive, but that is not relevant here.

Languages die when people judge that those languages are worthless, because those people, who might have spoken the languages, would like to be economically productive instead. I'm saying that when a person or group of people choose to abandon their language, in order to achieve their own personal goals, and the language dies as a result, that is an example of people being empowered. It's not an example of people not being empowered.

You seem to have confused "empowered" with "good".

Star Trek is arguably utopian. At least that’s how it is intended and perceived. I personally abhor the primacy of the military it glorifies, and also the fashion choices.

To be fair to Star Trek, the shows generally focus on the people on Starfleet vessels, not the civilians on planets. It's implied that war and poverty on Earth and other "developed" planets is over and the only conflict is in border regions where the Federation borders hostile civilizations. You may have a point in regard to fashion, however.

At least in TNG era (TNG/DS9/VOY), Starfleet was only technically "a military". While everyone still wore uniforms and followed a chain of command, the show made a huge point of Starfleet's goals being primarily diplomacy, exploration and scientific research; occasional force projection was considered a secondary and unfortunate task.

The militarism I was referencing isn't defined so much in violence, but in values, organisational structure (, and fashion).

It's arguably worse for the trappings of the military (rigid hierarchy, loyalty as the core value, etc) to be used in the context of functions that are civilian by nature, such as science and diplomacy. The essence of life as it's portrayed is that of a benevolent military dictatorship.

I know Star Trek has some storylines grappling with some of these issues. But any allusions to civilian life I remember seem rather tacked-on. Politicians were usually frightened & helpless, in need of rescue. They did get to wear nicer clothes, though.

(this is almost exclusively based on TNG–I did not watch enough of the other incarnations to comment on those)

I see. True, TNG didn't deal that much with civilian life directly - as viewers, we're following a Starfleet flagship on an exploratory mission. But the show does try to communicate in the background that it's just Starfleet that's the military branch, and the wider Federation is a fully civilian effort.

In DS9 civilian life is almost the primary focus of the first few seasons, as the titular DS9 has only skeleton Starfleet representation onboard, and most of the protagonists aren't part of it. The series also had portrayed an attempt by some Starfleet personnel to turn Federation into actual military dictatorship ("for the greater good", of course).

Honestly, the optimism/pessimism common in fictional is a decade thing more than anything else. Every medium seems to go through periods of negative, dark storytelling and positive, upbeat storytelling alike, usually flipping once people are sick of how saturated the previous style has become.

Go back through TV history and note how stuff like Star Trek and Doctor Who flips between being dark and upbeat every decade or so. Or how comic books went through a cheery silver age before a depressing dark age and a more upbeat modern one.

And yes obviously there's a cultural aspect too. Compare something like Doctor Who's reboot to Black Mirror; you can tell which one started in 2005 and which one started in 2011 by the tone of the whole affair.

Still, it'll come to pass eventually. Optimistic sci-fi fiction will come back in vogue soon enough, especially when people start getting sick of the 'everything and everyone is doomed' tone that much of today's fiction seems to have.

The subtext of almost all dystopian fiction is to be highly suspicious of grand visions for better futures.

Phones today make really great pictures though.

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