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Comment by suoduandao3 | Hacker News Reader

>They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.

What are some examples of scifi you're referring to there? Because the noteworthy scifi stories I can think of, ones which drew enough attention to be televised at least, are stories like the hunger games (dystopian), divergent (dystopian), the new star trek series (which I haven't seen but I understand shoehorned scarcity back into the startrekverse), Foundation (fall of a golden age), The Expanse (dystopian) etc. I think the only optimistic scifi I've read in the last twenty years or so was Anathem, and there's no way that's getting a miniseries.

Maybe it's a function of the authors I follow, but I just don't see this optimistic contemporary scifi you speak of, naive or otherwise.

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What is this surface skim literary analysis? I'm getting the sense that you have a Whiggist interpretation of history and reality yourself and you are not aware of it. You assume that the society depicted in a work constitutes its tone and philosophy, while the characters apply universal values to save the day. Re-calibrate a bit. The society depicted within inculcated Whiggist "dystopian" sci-fi works represents the previous, backwards, regressive kraken to be slain, while the methods the characters use to correct that society are the manifestation of the author's progressive values applied.

The maximally unequal society of Hunger Games is resolved via a violent revolution in favor of more egalitarian values. Same with Divergent. Star Trek Discovery is about a sexually and ethnically diverse crew somehow (in a future that was supposed to have solved these things) facing bigotry and solving it by simply applying or arguing for the "morally correct" values they already have. In Foundation, enlightened technocrats shorten a regressive civilizational collapse and return to "upward" progress by literally tricking the surrounding cultures into the Foundation's value judgment of the "correct" path (very VERY State Department of them). The Expanse is a TTRPG novelization and subsequent TV adaptation where a near-literal paladin (Holden) applies enlightened egalitarianism, diplomacy, and pacifism to stop an interplanetary faction war.

ALL of the specific stories you mention feature extremely strong Whiggist storytelling, and further than that, Isaac Asiimov (author of Foundation) was a famously outspoken activist for enlightened, Whiggist, progressive, technocratic ideals. Many peoples' first introduction to these ideas was Star Trek, though modern Trek handles its themes with all the subtlety of a mace.

Since we're criticizing reading comprehension, you seem to be shoehorning whiggist interpretations of history into every story that needs a villain, so do be careful not to stare into that abyss too long. My question was about a surface skim literary analysis, 'Golden Age' scifi have many utopias, modern scifi prefer distopias, why is? Since Asimov wrote plenty of utopian scifi, and that's not the portion of his work getting film adaptations today, I don't think your whiggist bogeyman theory really works for the question I was actually asking. And I'm well aware of my whiggist beliefs, though I despise the term. If you want to be polite, you can call me an evolutionary humanist.

I suppose I might have been imprecise in my speech by conflating optimism with utopianism, but 'depiction of future I'd like to live in' and 'optimistic scifi' are close enough concepts to those of us untouched by modern English departments that those of you who are could just disambiguate and move on when you encounter it.

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