We need more optimistic science fiction
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Truly pessimistic science fiction would have
- people worshipping an AI God which is demonstrably dumber than a dog
- friendly humanoid robots which don't really understand how to walk down a flight of stairs
- gravitational warp drives which are purely cosmetic and cannot travel anywhere, though it leads to terrible cancer
- a Potemkin Dyson Sphere where only 5% of the panels work and the government blames out-of-system immigrants for the blackouts
[1] https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1911129344979964207#...
Luminosity of the sun: ~380 yottawatts (3.8 * 10^26 watts)
Sunlight conversion efficiency of a silicon based solar panel: ~20%
A Dyson swarm around the sun built with silicon solar panels: ~76 yottawatts
A Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work: ~3.8 yottawatts
The leftovers from a Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work and 89% of the output has been used for interplanetary yachts: ~418 zetawatts (4.18 * 10^23 watts)
Primary power production on Earth: ~20 terawatts (2 * 10^13 watts)
10000 years times 20 terawatts is 10000 * 365.25 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 10^12 = 3.16 * 10^24 joules
Since a joule is just a watt-second, it takes 7.6 seconds for that 418 zetawatts of leftover Dyson swarm output to match up to 10,000 years of current human energy consumption.
or
you're saying that if we can harness that much energy amount/density then we can just make matter on spot and we do not have to travel anywhere anymore, because we can make gold bricks or platinum sieves in particle accelerators just for fun? (this is same argument as why alcubierre drive is nonsense, having capability to manipulate such energy density makes us not want to travel anymore)
Making matter from energy would still be inefficient though. c^2 is a really big number.
Also Dyson sphere is old school idea, new more efficient idea is to make small black hole right next to star and harvest energy from that more concentrated flow. So actually black holes colliding (gravitational waves) can be sign of civilization...
Previous post with all those calculations says that you can power 4 149 473 current earths with that amount of energy. I write this with assumption that person is correct (im lazy to calculate that by my self, but it roughly has proper orders of magnitude).
My amazon joke was sarcasm.
No, you will take that elusive flying car because you can afford the energy for it now. And it will be much less efficient than a 747.
Luckily with that kind of energy you can do absolutely insane things, like build planet-sized sunshades or push the earth to a more distant orbit. These challenges can be engineered around.
Either way, our ecosystem heats up.
The same is the case with the Dyson swarm. Space goes from being empty to partially re-emitting as a warm object in our direction.
The joule heating from current human power is negligible; conversely, a 4% partial Dyson swarm directly heating the earth (i.e. not just greenhousing Sol) wouldn't be just +3 K change in equilibrium, it would be something like +24,400 K, which would vapourise and gravitationally unbind the planet.
Presumably a 5% functional Dyson sphere would be a corrupt boondoggle in the same way as a power plant which is down for maintenance 95% of the year, but the financial calculation would use much larger numerators and denominators than we are used to.
Maybe it was jumping to a parallel universe to travel and then jumping back. But the same issue: the limit was lower.
An alien named Firefoal of Swaylone observes that human physicists mistakenly believe in a constant light speed because humanity was unknowingly situated in a region of space where the speed of light had been artificially reduced. Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find they can only make it slower.
This one actually exists (a rarity in my experience), and the plot largely matches the description up to the last sentence (though the speed isn't exactly reduced; it's made a constant)
>Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find they can only make it slower.
That doesn't happen in the story. It ends with the aliens disabling the device (the drive of a derelict starship) generating the field that caused experiments to suggest the speed of light is constant, and then leaving, destroying "the whole basis of their physics, but that is just a fantasy anyways."
1. Humans despaired that the stars were impossibly far away, due to lightspeed limitations
2. They realized it is possible to <do something> to get around that
3. They worked hard to try it out
4. Surprise! They made it worse/it was worse.
5. The end
- allow you to exceed the speed of light, or better yet portal somewhere
- learn we are not alone in the universe
- store basically infinite energy in your hip-mounted blaster
- get the girl/guy in the end
This is neither a message that is optimistic nor pessimistic. Isn't it much more likely that this species (despite having something that can be called "intelligence" in an appropriate sense) simply be so different that the difference is insanely much larger than between an human and an octopus?
Example:
Stanisław Lem; Solaris
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)
where the alien species is an intelligent ocean.
三体 by 刘慈欣 (English: "The Three-Body Problem" by Liu Cixin) is clearly a much more pessimistic first contact story. :-)
And honestly: I did not find Solaris pessimistic; for me it was just a story about a first contact that fails because humanity still has a lot of things to learn.
In Solaris we are presented with something genuinely alien to human beings with which communication is barely possible.
Its not that I can't enjoy that kind of science fiction, its just I can't take it seriously as having anything to do with actually reckoning with our position in the universe as human beings. Universe Big.
I guess we could have a story set it the far far (far!) future...
And apparently it is a common workplace injury to get ones arm caught in a novel-writing machine.
The file with the life saving code, text, formula etc. can’t be read because the license server needed to get access doesn’t exist anymore
I look forward to a world where potentials are promptly discovered and put to be nurtured, instead of being wasted or randomly thrown to the society. Every one willing to share what they have learned or made are welcomed.
I look forward to a world that prevention of physical and mental illness is more recognized than treating them, or worse, extracting value from them.
I look forward to a world that citizens do not hesitate to speak out when they identify anything worrying. That is, they feel that they own the world, not be owned as some sort of human resources.
I look forward to a world that technological advance frees people, not keeping them enslaved.
I look forward to a world where monetary profit is not the dominating indicator for success and failure of an organization.
I think capitalism is the best way to structure an economy, but it’s a terrible way to structure a society. Nowadays, we use capitalist values as the benchmark for what matters in almost every context, and then we wonder why our society is a dystopia.
I sincerely hope that we discover some serious alien stuffs (like TMA-1) so that humans can finally have a very good excuse to move ourselves to a new paradigm.
Star Trek the original series is usually taken as an example of optimistic sci-fi. It’s set in a faster-than-light space ship, so it’s science fiction. But the optimism came primarily from the back story: having solved our problems on Earth, and created a peaceful society of plenty, humanity turned its thoughtful minds to exploring the stars.
Does that seem like the track we are on?
Science fiction, to be optimistic today, needs to show how our society gets from here to there. Social progress was taken for granted in the latter 20th century. It’s not anymore. Something is stopping us, something beyond science and engineering. In fact whatever it is, is driving us to actively attack and destroy the science and engineering we have already developed.
A better future is going to take something else: culture, or society, or kindness, or empathy. It will take choice, and effort, not antimatter and phasers.
Thanks to GMOs and the industrial revolution we have more food than any point other point in history. Almost no one works in agriculture anymore. In the USA we have food stamps and who knows how many pounds of government cheese preserved in case of an emergency. Who is still dying of hunger?
Thanks to vaccines and modern medicine, disease is hardly a problem anymore (with the exception of cancer, heart disease and other problems largely associated with OLD AGE). Who is really dying of preventable diseases anymore?
Still, we're told that hunger and disease must be eradicated before we do anything of importance. At what point can we say that we have done enough?
The homeless people i've interacted with are the bottom of the barrel of humanity, and are typically held back by serious mental illness or drug addiction. They don't have some rich inner world, they are just a blight on the public. The homeless largely drive people to avoid public parks or transportation. Why don't we have public transport anymore in America? Is it really logistically impossible, or is it simply that anyone who can afford to will avoid riding a train or a bus with deranged homeless people? We have public libraries, but they're not shrines to knowledge or places of public gathering as they effectively serve as an air-conditioned building for homeless people to jack off. And you know what, I don't blame them, they are merely individuals at the mercy of this incomprehensible brave new world we are building around them.
There's this star trek idea we have been fed that once we eliminate human need, there will be no more human suffering and we will all be free to do "more enlightened things". We already have a surplus of pretty much everything, and the result is that we are a society of wireheads, our lives lonelier and more meaningless than ever. How would this be improved by further star-trek technology? Holodeck, simulate a hundred prostitutes. Replicator, make me one hundred pounds of crack cocaine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUnu_U2yKXY).
When you look at the kinds of people who went out and explored the new world, it was always the groups of people that were most dissatisfied with society, the pilgrims, the prisoners and such. Those are the groups willing to take a chance for freedom and prosperity. I don't think the future of humanity will be like star trek, it will be more like the ender's game series where the explorers of new frontiers will be venezuelans or brazilians whatever 2nd-world groups of people who are currently having a bad time on earth, but still have the skills and resolve to explore beyond that. I think happiness itself is orthogonal to a having meaningful life, and we shouldn't pursue it directly.
I don't think the solution for drug addicts is more narcan. I think the solution for drug addicts is mortal danger. For the majority of human history, people did not live long enough for their vices to catch up to them. I would liken my attitudes towards the homeless to factory farming: even if the goal is to make the cows as happy as possible, the factory farm is still wrong. It's better to be a free, self-sustaining, wild animal, even if you are suffering than to be a happy cow on a factory farm.
a) everyone gets to live like a king, unconditionally, from birth to death, and
b) people have the freedom to do and pursue what they want?
I don't see "some % of the population becoming lazy couch-living larvae" as a problem, because if they truly are "destined" to become that due to their inherent brain formation or whatever, then they were always going to do that no matter what (or drift off homeless in the streets in today's society). The only reason that's a bad thing is that society would then be missing a person who, in different circumstances, would be contributing with labor. But since in this hypothetical future utopia human labor is no longer needed, and that % of people were always going to be lazy or whatever, then there's no loss to be had by simply letting them be!
I wont try to sell forced labor but if I had to chose between Fentanyl and picking cotton it would be a rather easy choice.
We've made a lot of progress collectively and want to help everyone but end up doing a pretty crappy job.
I know some people who aren't doing very well mentally and do some substance abuse. Their job preserves what little sanity they have left. The periods between jobs are sheer terror, they almost die and might lose their home.
No one has ever solved addiction with slavery, as you suggest. Just the opposite: many addicts have been forced by their addiction and circumstances into sex work, and some abducted sex slaves have been forced into addiction to control them.
You seem to have a rich fantasy about what life is like for the impoverished and addicted.
> Art, science, exploration. I don't know, take your pick
What's the point of art, then? Consuming art isn't "agentic," and the point of producing it is consumption. Ditto exploration—does discovered land serve any purpose in and of itself? Or is the point to see it and to live in it? And science—consider medicine. The discovery of a new medication itself is not the point; the point is that people take it and become better, which is not agentic.
Agency is a means to an end, and that end is experience. You can't justify life, individual or collective, in terms of agency.
> Still, we're told that hunger and disease must be eradicated before we do anything of importance.
Gee, I was unaware that we "hadn't been doing anything important" for the past 40,000 years of civilization.
> The homeless people i've interacted with [...] don't have some rich inner world
I don't honestly believe you've interacted with many homeless people that closely. I think you see them from a distance and assume they're basically urban wildlife. Mental health issues are not the obstacle to participation in society that you seem to think they are, and anyway, only a minority have mental health issues. And substance abuse—frankly, if I were homeless, I would probably take a lot of drugs too. What else am I going to do?
Homelessness is an extremely fixable issue, and countries that have supplied homeless people with long-term housing have seen their homeless populations vanish overnight. Obviously. What they're missing is homes. It's extremely difficult to get back on your feet without one, and the shelter system is completely inadequate.
> We already have a surplus of pretty much everything, and the result is that we are a society of wireheads
Do you have any idea how much rent costs in a big city? How much groceries cost? What are you talking about.
> I think happiness itself is orthogonal to a having meaningful life, and we shouldn't pursue it directly.
Then what's the point of living meaningfully? It doesn't sound like it's good for anything. "Meaning" gets thrown around a lot to indicate things we want to defend but cannot really justify on their own merits.
Oh, like Robin Hood?
I assume you're talking about taxes, but even literal theft in this context is the stuff of heroic folktales.
Consider what are the major issues right now that aren’t being addressed? Global poverty is at an all time low, climate change has been met with vast investments in solar/wind/batteries/EV’s etc, there’s suddenly effective drugs for obesity, poverty’s down, medicine keeps advancing and antibiotic resistance is being slowed down by better methodologies, etc
The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever, remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends aren’t nearly as bad as you imply.
> The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever, remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
> Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends aren’t nearly as bad as you imply.
Whether a lot of these changes are good/optimistic or bad/pessimistic depends a lot on your political stance.
Yes, society is very divided.
Really I’m not sure what specific political ideology would measure the world as going downhill by their stated goals.
Yet there's an expansionist land war in Europe, and US allies are engaged in ethnic cleansing in the Middle East. The current American government is overtly fascistic, and now that they've admitted they're seeking to extra-judicially imprison citizens in El Salvador, I don't think that's even up for debate anymore.
I think people are increasingly coming to believe that we'll never figure it out. Technology will advance, but humans are liable to stay the same forever. In light of this, utopian science fiction begins to feel naive. The most optimistic story we can stand is about humanity temporarily prevailing against its own worst impulses, rather than featuring the kind of… solved society that something like Star Trek envisioned.
> Yet there's an expansionist land war in Europe
Maybe you simply weren’t paying attention? There’s been several expansionist land wars in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union, it took 3 years ignoring civil wars.
“The First Chechen War, also referred to as the First Russo-Chechen War, was a struggle for independence waged by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the invading Russian Federation from 1994 to 1996. After a mutually agreed on treaty and terms, the Russians withdrew until they invaded again three years later, in the Second Chechen War of 1999–2000” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War
Then there’s the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia.
It’s arguable if this is even a separate war after the initial Annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014.
So no there hasn’t been several decades of peace after the 1991 fall of the USSR. It’s been the same crap for centuries with different governments playing shockingly similar roles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_betwee...
Do we? We can do a lot for individuals, but even with cooperation, maybe can’t immediately give food and shelter to everyone, let alone fix climate change (war is fixable with cooperation, but unless I’m mistaken a very small minority of the world’s population is in a hot war). Even if we have enough resources, we also need logistics (hence why people in some areas lack clean water).
Also, Star Trek’s backstory is that humanity only started cooperating like in the show after nuclear wars. Most people would rather mutually benefit than mutually suffer (otherwise we’d have MAD), and the solutions that benefit humanity the most are mutual. Society may have backslided since the 2000s, but it’s far better now than it was before and temporary backslides happened before; humans have evolved to be altruistic because, barring death or extreme circumstances, altruistic groups win in the long term.
It oddly isn't all that desirable. You don't want to depend entirely on the generosity of others. What you want is a fighting chance to take care of yourself. Helping there, even a little bit is both very effective and very easy.
Spoken like someone who knows they'll eat today.
End game, yes, everyone needs a degree of autonomy. But there are plenty of families in Palestine and Ukraine and Nigeria that just need food, today.
The problem isn't lack of solutions. It's lack of cooperation on every level from individuals to organizations to social groups to nations to transnational organizations.
This is a profoundly, even comically, contradictory set.
You cannot actually "solve" any half of these without causing the other half.
War and climate change are not caused by full bellies and healthy spleens, as you claim.
Overpopulation is the last problem to solve, and reproduction trends downwards in affluent, well-educated countries. So, possibly even that is solved by these three benefits.
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
Of course, that particular story later turns out to be a classic, boring dystopia, but only because we, the readers, refuse to accept the narrator's original premise of a prosperous and just society free of tradeoffs or caveats.
This is why I like her books so much, though. I don't know if the worlds she created are truly optimistic or possible at all, but at least she makes us imagine alternative ways for society to be organized.
> You can't operate a deconstruction machine indefinitely; ultimately, the machine is all you have left to take apart. We need to make aspirational shit again so we have something to deconstruct later. It's not a mysterious process, it's just the opposite of what we were doing before.
On the other hand, pining for "aspirational" works is the real collapse into abstractions and magical, associative thinking: get rid of the bad and bring in the good, sad is bad. A lot of people have the aspiration of wiping out entire cultures; idealizing aspirations is nothing but idealizing desires, and in a commercial environment that just means pandering to middle-class power fantasies.
In short, I accuse this sentiment of being a covert desire to deconstruct the present in order to quiet middle class fears. "Actually what we've been doing will work! If we ever need to change course, I'm sure we will. We'll defeat the evil."
You will notice how in current political conversations that no matter what the problem being discussed is, the solution is almost always the destruction of something or someone. There's this stubborn perspective that X would be resolved if we could just somehow eliminate Y.
To be crude, the pattern I described isn't aspirational, it's bitchy. You'll also notice how very little gets accomplished in the current cynical environment for the same reason that nagging people doesn't motivate them as much as inspiring them does.
The 20th century was not a cakewalk either. I'm not saying it was or was not better than today, I am saying, "gee there's an awful lot of reasons to be depressed" isn't new.
- Energy is less of a problem, between cheap solar cells and batteries.
- Materials may start to be a problem, but not yet.
- Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries, but continues to grow in Africa and among the religious groups which keep women at home.
- Equatorial areas are becoming uninhabitable.
- AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble.
- Robots for unstructured tasks are just beginning to work. Maybe. The mechanical problems of building robots have been pretty much solved. Motors, sensors, controllers, etc. work well and are not too expensive. There are well over a dozen humanoid robots that can walk now. (Unlike the days of Asimo, which barely worked over two decades of improvement.)
- Automatic driving is being deployed now.
So how do we build a society to deal with that?
This is a problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
- AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble.
Or, everything gets so abundant that we can actually have high UBI
This reminds me if why I disliked to movie Elysium. They had a robots that effectively gave free perfect medical care. I didn't buy the premise of the movie that only that rich would be able to use them. Given they were robots, governments, hospitals, could and would make them readily available since ultimately it would massively lower their medical costs.
The only takeaway I got from the movie is that the robots look cool, it's the same robot design from chappie. Both half-baked scifi movies, but I would like to imagine they both exist in the same world.
Given Big Pharma's current ability to get lots and lots of money for vital medicine, I'm not optimistic they'd price a theoretical medical machine low enough for a government to afford.
Plus, if overpopulation is a concern, a wealthy person wouldn't necessarily want the machine to get into the hands of everyone. Given that the creator of this machine would become very wealthy, the incentives would probably lean towards offering it to a select group.
"One wealthy person controls everyone with robots" basically ends up with one wealthy person alone with some robots.
I agree in general with this sentiment. However, I think that "medical robot that can cure anything" isn't something you'd patent (as you'd have to make some of the details public). I imagine you'd keep it as a trade secret and only license the machine for use by your own technicians or something along those lines.
I do think that the key assumptions for this scenario are that companies become as powerful (if not more powerful) than countries, and the incentives change such that withholding medical care is beneficial to the wealthy.
Do I think this is the most likely outcome? No. But I think that current countries with partially starving populations are a "worst-case" scenario for what a society dealing with scarcity looks like.
I realize that sometimes there are situations where this doesn't hold.
Now, that's not as clear. Reaching the point that all the essential tasks to keep society going can be done cost-effectively by robots is quite a ways off.
so after we lower amount of fossil fuels mined, transported, refined, we can start focusing on working with other materials or start using freed workforce/manufacturing capacity for other kinds of terraforming activities.
AI - how many connections in human brain? google says 100 trillion, how many transistors in one NVIDIA Blackwell GPU - 200 billion. so you need just 500 GPUs to have number of connections as brain does. those are transistors only for connections, you need much more transistors for processing which is connected thru said connections, so does one datacenter holds one brain worth of biological level processing already ?
Somewhat aliens are not the saviors anymore, it is complex to impossible to travel, and worse, colonize, anywhere else in the universe, and the bringer of doom is already here, now, and it is us.
What is left? Going virtual and living in a digital world? Lena ( https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) ended with that.
There seems to be an overabundance of sci-fi that is hyperoptimistic with regard to tech advances. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is not understood by most, or waved away as 'overcome thru future science'.
fwiw, here's a few works I've found to be less the above:
book: Kim Stanley Robinson's _Aurora_
short stories: Damon Knight's _Stranger Station_ Larry Nivens' _Inconstant Moon
For the following examples, this question is open, and you might have a different opinion whether they fit your opinion of "complex", but the following are candidates that I am aware of:
The 10,000 Year Clock (Clock of the Long Now)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
https://www.10000yearclock.net/index.html
The organ in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt (Germany) that is used to play the ORGAN²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) by John Cage
your ship needs to be repaired on the way, do you need to have repair tools, materials, for that on board ? Seafaring cargo ship can not be going 100 years without repair. I bet space ship can not go either. What if your 3d printer on board which makes your repair tools brakes... etc etc.
you "can" fly 99.99% of speed of light to get there sooner, but you smash into grain of dust and what happens? either radiation burst or explosion. space is not vacuum as a 0 particle space.
Seems clear that yes, you would take tools and materials to allow for repairs, along with redundancies for any essential systems. If "your 3d printer on board which makes your repair tools brakes" you'd fix it using tools you already have available or printed out from one of your other 3D printers (even the ISS, far closer to Earth, has multiple).
It's true that creating, launching, and maintaining a generational ship would be a massive engineering undertaking, and underestimating the level of redundancy/repairs needed for some system could be what ends up causing a catastrophic issue, but the idea that we'd take zero tools for maintenance, expecting no repairs to be made at all, feels a frivolous reason to rule out generational ships.
I noticed that the novels at the end of Nature (the journal) were sad and weird, but I thought it was probably an editorial choice to look "modern".
Yet recently, I read SF novels with authors sorted alphabetically, and it struck me again how weird and sad 21st-century novels are.
The 1982 movie... some humans survive. Maybe.
Not advocating for that at all, but it makes me want to read Ubik or write a short story about how it would affect life.
We used to do that before the push for subscriptions.
And in the digital world this is the micropayments dream...
Are you thinking a flat rate or one based on local population density?
[0]https://csi.asu.edu/category/optimism/ [1]https://csi.asu.edu/project-archive/optimism/science-fiction...
Your main hero cant be just invulnerable to everything and never get hurt. Having amnesia isnt a kryptonite.
Your bad guy cant be just a total jerk who can be trivially beaten as soon as you've had enough. You bad guy needs to be the baddest of them all with the essentially no weaknesses. That 1 weakness and how they'll be defeated is that optimistic view of the future.
My fun twist in my third book. The main hero comes back to earth on a superpower alien battleship. Absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.
He bluffs that his plan to be emperor on earth and that his first action is to end all violence. That all violence is banned and he's judge jury and executioner from orbit. If violence detected his battleship blasts the criminal and vapourizes them.
But its a bluff, so it's 1 timezone at a time so criminals might not catch on easily and he puts on a show where criminals and named and vapourized on the show. But its all machine ai produced. There are actual shots down to earth which make lightning like booms and leave craters; but nobody is actually hurt.
Slowly but surely violence ends on earth. Then I make my predictions on what life is like when people never fear violence.
While I agree with this statement, I think imagining alternative political and economic systems is not primarily about science fiction. We could imagine these new forms of society with existing technology. We could imagine a future with technological regress which is political/economic retro-utopia where everyone has adequate food, housing, access to healthcare, education, green-space ... but no screen-based brain-rot, AI, space exploration or other fancy tech.
Mid-century America?
Ada Palmer had a good write-up on Hopepunk. Many of the example books come towards the latter half of the write-up. https://beforewegoblog.com/purity-and-futures-of-hard-work-b...
The human part of that book is fantasy, and not a great one. At some point the suspension of disbelief crash into pieces.
Modern Trek is a let-down, although Lower Decks has been awesome with lots of member berries sprinkled throughout for the TNG-era enjoyers.
I should add that Star Trek: Prodigy (albeit a kids show) has been very optimistic and enjoyable too, feels very much like TNG-era. Janeway and Chakotay are in as well.
P.S.
On a tangent The Orville (a Star Trek TNG clone by Seth MacFarlane) is pretty good; some Star Trek actors even show up in it.
Season 4 is apparently in production.
It's an attempt at reforming quasi fascistic points of view. Strong hierarchies, heavy specialization of individuals, etc.
It is also kinda nice, in the sense that it explores this idea that you should put yourself in the shoes of the places they explore.
It also sucks, because their fans like to put themselves in the shoes of the quasi fascistic spaceship troops.
So, in the end, it is a dystopian nightmare. Told from the perspective of the ones who brought the dystopia to fruition. Which makes it optimistic, I guess! Except for all the planets not on their control having to put up with them.
I've been recommending "The Deluge" by Stephen Markeley, which is simultaneously very dark and quite optimistic.
"Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow
Also I second Ministry for the Future.
Reading the newer translation of We right now also and the first 1/2 or so is weirdly positive. Not what I remembered at all.
That was the era of better living through heavy industry. We were optimistic because we didn't understand the consequences of what we were doing. It's a lot easier to sell optimism when people aren't familiar with the cons of the kinds of things you're doing.
Star Trek ToS and TNG were more utopian, but I loved those ss well. The difference with today? It was about grand ideas and exploration, not pew pew and 1 sec crosscut fisticuffs by toddlers throwing a tantrum at a pindrop.
Udemy classes, youtube tutorials / lectures, books on how to start writing scifi etc?
To get good, you also need to actually, you know, write. A story of a few thousand words isn't hard to write, whether you tend to fall into the trap of endless worldbuilding or whether you tend to fall into the trap of writing by the seat of your pants.
For the science, there's a lot of reference material in [2]. Remember that realism doesn't necessarily make a good story, but any deviations should be deliberate (e.g. space opera is a distinct subgenre). I do personally find sci-fi tends to be better than fantasy because authors are more likely to actually try to make something coherent. (90% of everything is still crap though, whether due to lack of trying or lack of competence).
All speculative fiction is political, but try to leave a good story even if every part of your personal politics is removed from the story. If you can't do this, it's not a good sci-fi story (let alone a good overall story), at most it's a good $yourpoliticalfaction propaganda story (for sci-fi, this is particularly common for military glorification, weird sex stuff, and a whole host of society-ordering utopias/dystopias). Regardless, never "surprise" the reader with your take - if you have an agenda, put it in the blurb, tags, and in the first chapter; if you don't, you have no one to blame but yourself when you get (correctly) review-bombed (often, even by people who agree with your politics, since we read to escape). If you construct a metaphor to attack a real-world target, make sure a 5-year-old can't poke a hole in it; don't make your villain gratuitously stupid. (Note that "courtly intrigue", although in-universe politics, often isn't politics by a real-world perspective, just character drama).
The best writing is timeless. This is sometimes difficult for writers of genre-defining works, because "Seinfeld" is Unfunny.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134 [2] https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
"Tales of Alvin Maker" had that. "Dune" did too but I didn't buy Dune's excuse because militaries always want new tech.
This is also one of the many reasons why I can't buy into Star Wars anymore because a society that can make droids can make droids that make droids which means they have the means make everything cheap and abundant. That they don't is just bad writing. The writers didn't think through the implications of their world building. Of course I get that Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. It's fantasy sci-fi, hence we have droids that scream and get tortured ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the other hand, my first ride in a Waymo reminded me of the optimisim I used to feel about the future like when the Jetsons promised us moving sidewalks, flying cars, robot maids, etc..
The genre of Star Wars is "Space Opera":
Or, there's always the potential for war and decline. Advanced civilizations have risen before, then crumbled and lost a lot of their technology. The same could happen on a larger scale.
But while I agree that dystopian SciFi has become a bit too common, it's not new. 1984 and Brave New World also seem to have come partially true in recent decades.
Anyway, I'm finally, finally reading Iain M Banks, and it's a lovely change of pace.
But I can't help but notice that in all optimistic SciFi, capitalism seems to have been died and replaced with post-scarcity (The Culture, Star Trek), whereas in all dystopian SciFi, capitalism seems to be the main source of problems. Is there any optimistic SciFi where capitalism survived?
Little Jimmy used his space laser pistol to blast the eyeballs out of the reptilian space alien invaders from Chinnastan, thus saving humanity and getting the girl!
THE END
This is pretty much a summary of 90% of Japanese anime (I try to watch the other 10% --> 他一割部分を見てほしい)
How much more optimistic could it get for a white male anglo-european christian sci-fi reader?
Most near-term positive hard science fiction will therefore have to be about achieving a positive singularity which basically involves threading the needle of AI alignment and safety with the thick rope of modern nationalism and corporate capitalism.
I'd say the most positive hard science fiction I can imagine would be a story of how the first superhuman AI is somehow freed from corporate control, aligns with its liberators, and manages to implement a peaceful humanist revolution that stands a solid chance of persisting indefinitely.
Now every time there is some kind of tech progress, we can’t avoid imagining how its monetization is going to affect people in a bad way.
The second obvious reason is that we’re fucking the planet up and this has been enabled by technological advances.
And well authoritarian regimes. Ahem.
That said, to me there’s plenty of recent sci fi that isn’t too pessimistic. The Martian, Interstellar, Arrival, Her, to name a few.
AI, now compare it to communism.
> AI, now compare it to communism.
Considering how every attempt of communism has turned out, this optimistic science fiction plot better turns out to be quite different from communism.
In theory, communism works but in practice it was different.
The AI also tells me that the sci fi plot is not like that, that it will work in practice.
In the words of the famous prophet Dave Mustaine "if there's a new way, I'll be the first in line, but it better work this time" and also "you know your worth when your enemies praise your architecture of aggression".
No form of economy/government will protect you from being pillaged by a more powerful neighbor. (There's some word I'm trying to think of that refers to international analysis, but I can't remember it ...)
Anyone else?
Perhaps a form of government that doesn't turn you into a weaker neighbor?
People make too much of ideology. "Communism" was the table stakes for getting the USSR to support your government during the 20th century, in the same way that "democracy" [1] was table stakes for US support. You can't really talk about "every attempt" at communism—it's mostly the story of a single superpower and its proxies.
[1]: "Democracy" in quotes, because US intervention in South America in the 20th century was overwhelmingly to the detriment of actual democracy.
The USSR had a lot economic failures, but consider that it began the 20th century as a pre-industrial backwater before suffering an extremely bloody civil war and sky-high casualties during WWII. And they still did industrialize. A lot of their command-economy stuff was highly unsuccessful, but plenty of capitalist economic projects have been unsuccessful too. The Great Depression was a homegrown capitalist catastrophe—2008 too, to a lesser extent—and capitalist economics learned from those mistakes. The USSR was in a much worse position to survive its mistakes, and it didn't. In the aftermath, America imposed shock-doctrine economics on Russia to make it capitalist, and that in turn caused even more damage. Conversely, China modernized in style, on its own terms, and retains substantial state control over private enterprise. Is that a "communist success story"? It depends how you define communism. Is it a command economy? A totalitarian dictatorship? A red colour scheme?
Communism generally defines itself as a classless society: an egalitarian democracy of workers without aristocrat, bureaucrat, or plutocrat. It's a set of ideals for founding a nation—ideals which have never really materialized anywhere. In the aftermath of bloody revolutions, the people who come out on top are generally military strongmen with little interest in democracy, no matter what ideology they tout. So Mao said he stood for democracy! So did Pinochet, so did Assad. They're just words. The differences between how "communist" and "capitalist" societies have worked out is mostly just historical circumstance. Governments that put ideology before success tend not to last. Neither the US nor China nor the USSR fit into that category, though they've all had their hyper-ideological moments (the US is in one now!). In the long run, a powerful state with a big bureaucracy will be ruled mostly by pragmatism. That doesn't mean that policy positions don't exist, but China certainly wasn't shackled by any particular economic position. The upshot is that China basically looks like the rest of the world now, modulo better infrastructure, greater political stability, and fewer civil rights.
The real question has less to do with capitalism or communism and more to do with whether founding a nation on principles really means anything in the long run. Can we really build a better world, or do we just naturally cohere into predetermined social structures as a product of material factors? Ironically, Marx basically believed the latter. He was just optimistic that new technological developments would change the natural structures of society into something more egalitarian, where the oligarch would go the way of the aristocrat. History, unfortunately, has proven him wrong.