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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else weary of dystopian sci-fi?

I'd love to see a setting where technology has made the world a practical utopia, and people generally don't have to be wary of each other. It would be tricky to introduce interesting conflict and challenges into such a setting, yes.

There are some anime/manga like that, for example Aria [0], which is basically Venice on Mars and the main characters are aspiring gondoliers, with the story centered on their training or daily life etc.

But you could have a utopian human society and have the conflict come from an alien species or some kind of cosmic cataclysm.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria_(manga)

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Utopias by themselves are typically rather boring, so you either end up with the drama coming from interpersonal friction (think soap opera) or from some external antagonist, making the story about that conflict instead. Contrast that with dystopian fiction, where the things that make it a dystopia are also often what makes the story interesting.

There are a few that come to mind, but nothing I can think of as super recent.

- After Life, Simon Funk: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/

- Most of Ted Chiang, but particularly Liking What You See: A Documentary: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnv...

- Also Ted Chiang: The Lifecycle of Software Objects (not really pessimistic or optimistic, just thoughtful)

- Her (Movie), melancholy but ultimately hopeful

- HPMOR (Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality): http://www.hpmor.com

- True Names, Vernor Vinge: http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf

- Permutation City, Greg Egan (accurately predicts AWS 20yrs early along with a host of other super interesting ideas)

- Star Trek TNG is the classic example of optimistic Sci-Fi, but the more recent Enterprise is also good.

- The San Junipero Black Mirror episode

- I wouldn't call The Expanse optimistic, but it's probably the best sci-fi show on today.

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For some contrarian anti-recommendations which can be just as useful:

- I thought the culture series was bad, in plot/characters/writing - I found it tedious and kind of dumb.

- I disliked the three body problem for similar reasons.

It's plausible to believe that we'll make all kinds of technological advancements, solve world hunger and such kinds of scarcity, go to Mars, or whatever. However, it's unlikely that humans will ever overcome their greatest enemy, themselves. Such a utopian fantasy is still hard to take in for most people, while it's much easier to imagine things going to shit and degenerating to a cyberpunk dystopia. Humans make the technology and so technology will never be the answer to solving human nature.

> However, it's unlikely that humans will ever overcome their greatest enemy, themselves.

I believe in nurture > nature, and I see it in the differences between different human settlements (cultures, nations) and in attitudes over time.

In some places you're more likely to get robbed, in others you're more likely to get help. In some cities you're more likely to see casual litter, in other places more people cleaning up after themselves.

For every decade you go back in time there will be more and more classes of people who had a much harder time of fitting into society, along with the lack of many other freedoms that we take for granted now.

Once nobody has to constantly struggle for basic comforts, I think humanity will be able to chill the fuck out.

I think that's very wishful thinking. Firstly, we're assuming that this will happen:

>"Once nobody has to constantly struggle for basic comforts,"

It's definitely possible. Humans have an immense amount of potential for good. But I don't believe the people in power, with the influence to enact meaningful change, will ever let this fly. Simply because of the reason that they greatly benefit from the current state of the world. People in this class have most of the capital and generate money from their existing wealth while doing basically nothing of value. They need us commoners to consume, consume, and consume. They need us to work and labor away, as cogs in the machine that makes them profit, so that they will not have to work like us. Yes, automation will come. But who will own the factories and machines? Exactly. But even then, there will still be many things that they require laborers for. And in the future, the common people will be fighting each other over the privilege of serving this owner class at the continued threat of destitution. Just like how it's always been...

Here are some videos of everyday street life from a few different countries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91w4GkdGfVA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u3IB3Jygus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnDxHTaeNX0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUcTGx-pfvI

You can browse more on your own, just search for random travelogues.

Why hasn't every place devolved into chaos? Why are some places better off than others? Why can't that success be replicated?

Even if dethroning the current power structure does not happen, the ordinary people can still live increasingly comfortable lives as to make the differences practically irrelevant.

Look at the comforts we have access to now. Unprecedented in the history of humankind. Sure, not everyone has a private jet, but everyone can fly. Not everyone can eavesdrop on any conversation in the world, but everyone can have conversations all over the world. We may not have access to military satellites that can peer through buildings, but we do have Google Earth.

You speak of factories and production lines. What if they're all run by robots? Or better, everyone has a 3D printer in their kitchen that can just build an iPhone 42 right there?

How about matter replicators? Cloning pods? Medical immortality? Terraforming and colonizing multiple planets? With everything powered by an endless supply of fusion energy.

Nevermind if all that will be possible any time soon. Cyberpunk gets carried away with pessimistic predictions. I just think there's room for a genre of fiction that runs with optimistic prediction.

I think what has made dystopian sci-fi compelling in the past, is that it points out the flaws of our ideals, and resonates with many of us in an acknowledgement that perfection is impossible, even if we shift society to give more of an appearance of perfection, there's always a significant cost.

Yes, these ideas are played out, and there's tons of bad examples of media that just replays these ideas without bringing anything novel to the table. But I still find the idea of a 'realistic' dystopian sci-fi more potentially compelling than a sugarcoated 'impossible' utopia because I fundamentally believe it can't exist. I cannot conceive of a real utopia in practice, and what someone else may call a utopia I would surely call some sort of nightmare.

Refer to Brave New World as a good example of exactly this dynamic.

> what someone else may call a utopia I would surely call some sort of nightmare.

The very definition of a utopia (colloquially, regardless of where the word actually came from) is a state where nobody feels like its a nightmare.

Where everybody has basic comforts and the freedom to do what they want (as long as it doesn't harm anyone) and decide their future and has safety nets against misfortune.

You can still have plenty of interesting trials and tribulations in such a setting (competing in sports, getting good at art, exploring the cosmos) and I'm sure that if done right it will be a refreshing change from the usual tired old trope of "Everything's fucked! And will always be fucked!"

Ergo Proxy is somewhat that. The success of the utopia is questionable (kinda the starting point of the story), but the plot is more akin to existential-crisis drama.

I'd bet you know about Psycho Pass, it also shakily satisfies your description.

[0] https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_Proxy

Psycho Pass is a straight-up dystopia, in my view.

The Culture series by Iain M. Banks is like this, but perhaps set a little far into the future to be easily translated into games or movies.

The closest thing I can think of to a practical, popular example of this was the television series "The Good Place" - nominally about the experience of a person who was incorrectly sent to heaven and their internal discomfort with being in paradise.

In terms of written fiction, Greg Egan's Amalgam setting has all the space-capable denizens of our outer galaxy effectively in a vast sprawling Utopia. Figuring out what to do with yourself in that circumstance is the story driver.

The Neil Gaiman run of Miracleman is about the Utopia constructed by Miracleman during the Alan Moore run of Utopia. Presumably the next series is about how that goes tragically wrong, but it has never been published. But the Golden Age (Gaiman run) is pretty interesting. People living in a Utopia are still people.

> Alan Moore run of Utopia

s/Utopia/Miracleman/

Brave new world is a utopia - that it’s dystopian is something that is left to the reader to infer. Which is ultimately the point - if a modern human found themselves in such a world, could they be happy?

The backstory of Ken MacLeod's "The Cassini Division" involves an Earth with a practical socialist utopia, but the main action involves the unceasing war against the uploaded capitalist class who have taken over Jupiter...

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