Writing a better reality: The case for optimistic sci-fi (2022)

On the same vein: "The Protopian Fiction Prize invites you to share your vision of people working toward liberatory futures, meeting obstacles, and making real change." https://protopianprize.com/

Even as a writer of optimistic sci-fi myself, it's very difficult for me to come up with more than a handful of examples that are less than ten years old.

Becky Chambers is probably the single best young author working in this genre today. She's got two great series, one that begins with "A Psalm for the Wild-Built", and one which begins with "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet".

I'd argue Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary" is hopeful sci-fi, and the movie adaptation was great. You could perhaps put Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Elder Race" and "Service Model" in there too, since both are pretty hopeful in overall outlook. And if you broaden to include fantasy, Travis Baldree's "Legend and Lattes" series is very much in the same vein as Becky Chambers.

It seems like hopeful sci-fi movies and TV are more common, like the recent "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds".

Perhaps the recent troubles the world is undergoing will lead to more light-hearted fare to distract us? One can only hope.

Always loved Iain M Banks' Culture series and it's very sad that he's not with us any more. If I could pick any fictional civ to live in, it'd be up there.

The current discussion around alignment seems quite relevant. Culture Minds are so intellectually superior to the humanoid population that it's not even a debate, but their goal appears to be a content and healthy civilization with a strong focus on individualism. Somewhere I think Banks implies that Minds see it as a sort of badge of honor that their citizens like them. They certainly have no need for subservience.

A couple of my favorites in this genre:

Ada Palmer's terra ignota. It takes 'the past is another country' and really sends it forward. The world she draws is fundamentally different from our own, as ours is from medieval France. Absolutely fascinating books, with their own set of Utopians trying to make a better world for the future...

And I'm the vibey solar punk direction, Becky Chambers' 'Monk and Robot' is a fascinating pair of novellas about humanity reestablish ing contact with robots after they decided to just leave 250ish years previously. It is very much a book about a Good Future, where people still have people sized problems.

The interesting part about this is that what authors write _actually_ becomes reality to a certain degree. Like authors alongside hollywood and other content creators are _literally_ designing what the future looks like right now whether we realize it or not. So writing optimistically about our future may actually have an enormous impact on what our future will actually look like.

Like, the "modern" electric cars of today are heavily inspired by the common portrayal of "futuristic" tech from the years prior (think the electric "engine" sound used / mandated now). Conversational AIs that basically have recreated Her (2013). Even the personas that chatbots take on I would make the case are drawn from the actual characters in countless stories in its pretraining text.

And so, I would argue, that the more stories we have of optimistic futures where AI integrates into society, the more stories existing AIs trained today have to draw from to actually tune their behavior to. And similarly, the more positive futures there are to be inspired by, the more we may see investments to build products leading us to such a future.

In fact, if LLMs begin automating large sectors of innovation, the actual directions of products and research direction they take may literally be influenced directly by these stories.

To me that's the crazy part.

Kim Stanley Robinson appears to me to be doing this. Even Arthur Clarke was, if the ultimate outcome was sometimes a bit messianic, the pathway to the end was the "best of all possible worlds" -which in some ways is what you are evoking.

We've been on this pathway since the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.

People have been saying this a long time, and I’ve participated in this movement, and I think we need to add something: science fiction can be gritty, realistic, and full of conflict, and also optimistic. I’ve encountered a lot of “climate fiction” that just comes off as schmaltzy, and I don’t think that does the job.

I think that there a two problems, that prevent optimistic sci-fi from being more prominent:

1. A good story needs a conflict and a struggle. "...and they lived happily ever after" is an ending of a story, you can't go anywhere from it, therefore you cannot start a story with happily-ever-after. I'm not saying that it is impossible to create a conflict in optimistic setting, but it is much harder to do then in a dystopian setting that is rife with conflict.

2. I think that it is harder to make optimistic setting to sound genuine. We've been subconsciously trained by corporate marketing and govt. propaganda to treat anything overly-positive, overly-optimistic, dripping with honey and smelling like roses as "probably bullshit". While dark, gritty, dystopian automatically makes you think that "oh yeah, this guy is telling the uncomfortable truth that they don't want you to hear".

Genre is a description of reader/audience behavior, and used primarily by marketers to manipulate the herd.

It should be ignored by savvy readers, and abolished from the writer's vocabulary.

The pervasive culture in the west seems to elevate pessimism as intellectual, while optimism is stupid or naive. This bias is interesting considering how much lives have improved by many important quality of life metrics in the last 150 years, partly due to technological progress, which has enabled social progress as well. Yet most people systematically mis-predict a lot of the quality of life metrics toward whatever side is negative (the book Factfulness makes a good case for multiple results of this kind). In high school, people read Brave New World, and it seems the thinking gets stuck there. It is often a signal of education to reference these books in conversation, and you see it. Does our collective thinking get stuck at the level of an emo high-schooler?

Along the same lines, most current western sci-fi I am aware of (mostly mainstream) is dystopian. Black mirror the show is a good example, also considered intellectual by many. I feel this tendency is even stronger in Europe than in the US, at least when I visit.

In contrast, China is somehow more optimistic. Consider AI right now. Some recent poll shows Chinese people are far more optimistic or positive about AI than western people, an interesting perspective considering their own government has made computer vision surveillance and face recognition far more widespread than it is in the west.

Do these kinds of popular sentiment matter for our collective decision making? are they a needed precaution to ensure things keep getting better? or do they create self-defeating collective behaviors? wdyt.

The optimistic sci-fi usually from other countries besides the US and in other languages besides English.

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