"This kind of thought experiment — that Einstein called gedankenexperiment — is the fruit of our prefrontal lobes, humanity's most unique and recent organ, the font of our greatest gifts: curiosity, empathy, anticipation and resilience. Indeed, forward-peering storytelling is one of the major ways that we turn fear into something profoundly practical. Avoidance of failure. The early detection and revelation of Big Mistakes, before we even get a chance to make them. (...) an endeavor best performed by science fiction."
This. I read a fair amount of books and there is this one distinct feature I found in science fiction - they are humanity's concept simulator. It's all about setting up series of gedankenexperiments, and then simulating their outcomes and interactions between the outcomes. Whether an author is writing about effects of a new technology on society or testing new ways to structure civilisation or elaborating on how physical limits are affecting day-to-day life of a space-faring race, the art becomes a way to explore new ideas free of constraints like political correctness, corporate interest, or social taboos[0].
I wish people stop treating sci-fi genre as "stupid fiction tales that are obviously inferior to thinks like Pride and Prejudice, etc." These people are often the same that walk around saying "go read books, you'll be smarter", and yet they dismiss the primary field of non-fiction that is pretty much designed to make you smarter.
Or maybe I'm unaware of romance novels dealing with game theory and metaethics.
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It has been said that [1] Star Trek: The Next Generation was the last sci-fi hopeful about the future. I tend to agree with that, and I'd like to expand that statement into: somewhere in the early 2000s we have collectively lost faith in humanity.
I just finished re-watching Early Edition (a lightweight story about a guy who gets tomorrow's newspaper today, complete with a cat) and I must say I'm angry. People in the 80-s/90-s used to have faith in the better future and in other people. That you don't have to shoot people to solve problems, but you can ask them instead. People used to help others. How strange does that sound today? This total reliance on individual performance, violence as a means to achieve everything and assumption that everyone else is either stupid or malicious (or both) is fucking annoying. We're raising a new generation of people on such message, and I'm afraid this literally screws up our (and their) future.
I so do want some positive, hopeful message in TV shows back.
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And since the author mentioned how Star Trek world is different from your garden variety space opera - one thing I absolutely loved about Star Trek series is that the crew of Enterprise/DS9/Voyager were not the heroes. They were the protagonists, but you could see that they all acted on behalf of the United Federation of Planets - a huge, competent, powerful sociopolitical structure that they were proud to be part of and that would always have their backs. It's the Federation that was the hero in Star Trek. The whole show made you believe that good people could come together and create something more powerful than the sum of its parts, and that it would work out ok.
I think that as a culture we've given up that belief. We're society of no hope, no trust and no shared vision. And I'm afraid this is going to hurt us massively in the next decades.
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Oh, and since I'm venting, I need to share my pet peeve of 2000+ film making - the Batshit Insane Hollywood Morality. That it is a right thing to do for hero to kill a couple thousand strangers to save one person, just because this person is family. That it is ok for a hero to go and murder a few dozen poor schmucks just to get revenge on a guy that hurt you.
Or - and I'm not making this up, it's an actual plot of a known 2009 movie - we're supposed to applaud the protagonist who shut down the global economy, likely killing a few billion people withing minutes of movie credits rolling down, just because he wanted to have sex with his wife.
I mean, Hollywood, what the fuck?
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Footnotes:
[0] - It even makes for a nice trick - you take a current taboo, frame it as "aliens in space" and suddenly no one complains the way they would if you try to endorse the same ideas in an essay. Early Star Trek is famous for running that trick to criticize racial and gender prejudices which were more common in the US back then.
[1] - http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-trek-the-next-gene... + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797363