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.
...and in warhammer 40k, the warp enables faster-than-light travel; one can only read that as optimistic sci-fi by ignoring the subtext - scratch that - ignoring the text.
Actually it was settled in the present but it was full of good human vibes and human values.
It had an incredible vibe of “humanity is good and humanity will stand against anything bad”. It was really naive in how it described the human nature but I’m sure it was deliberate.
That was 20 years ago (1997–2006) (sorry), Eureka was a little more recent and very optimistic (2006 - 2012), the new star treks are recent but they have lost their optimism, I'm not really sure what they are.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is fun and optimistic and knows what it is, but you're right about Picard and Discovery. Very confused shows with no good self-identity and Picard especially posits a dystopian future and dystopian responses to it which is a huge letdown for a Trek show.
I really liked Paradox (1: On the Brink of Eternity, 2: Beyond Eternity, 3: Eternity). It is foundationally positive and optimistic, yet still "realistic", as far as sci-fi goes. Also not much known on the US-side, as far as I know, which is unusual for good sci-fi.
Came to the comments to see if anyone was talking about Becky Chambers - thank you for not disappointing me! I picked up Monk and Robot with an intention to save it for an upcoming vacation, but started reading the first few pages early and couldn't put it down. I'm really looking forward to her next book in October.
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.
> 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.
I've never really found the Culture to be that optimistic. The people are basically pets, the vast majority of which seem occupy themselves with vapid shit, and the "important" jobs humans have are actually unnecessary (as the "Minds" can do everything better).
I thought the Gzilt from the last book had a better path of development than the Culture. It seems they took every opportunity to keep humans (in some form) in control at every level (e.g. no "Minds" on their ships, just groups of emulated humans running at accelerated speeds to achieve the same effect).
As with all Culture critiques, this one boils down, again, to existentialism. Yes, we live in an meaningless universe and we brush against the absurd every day. That doesn't make The Culture any less of an utopia. And if you think it's not a true utopia, then I suggest reading Camus.
I think it is a credit to the world building in the Culture novels that fans can disagree and debate so much on whether it is utopian or dystopian, and that's a discussion that characters in the books have too!
Personally I love it and I wish we could have a few of the wise Minds among us now.
But that's a choice. Humans in the Culture can change their form and body to basically be whatever they want: with some caution expressed for changes which might not leave meaningful back conversions.
The humans we see are human because they choose to be.
The thing about The Culture is the universe doesn't bend to make being human the default or particularly good: it is an old world where technology surpasses limitations in almost every way imaginable - if you choose. You can also just decide to go lava rafting, where the agreed rules are materials just barely up to task.
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.
Just because techbros keep misreading allegories for societal ills as ads doesn't mean their authors have any influence on the future, beyond the warning or inspiration their works bring.
I think most scifi (that isn't just action adventure) tries to reframe the problems of today in a different context for the purposes of social commentary. Despite the future setting, it is fundamentally a genre about the present.
If the point of your book is to show X is bad, taking X to the extreme is of course going to have to result in a bad outcome. That is the entire point. Not doing that would be like writing a romance without the romantic lead.
That doesn't mean we can't have hope. A warning is one of the most hopeful things: It means we still have time to change our ways.
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.
This paper was extremely influential for me, and it’s worth reading for a perspective shift that’s not often considered in these discussions: what happens when you consider “the apocalypse” as an event in the very distant past? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325453561_Indigenou...
You get a fantasy novel? Living in the ruins of a great civilization that lived in the distant past and faced some sort of calamity (or decline of some sort) is one of the most common setups for a fantasy novel.
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.
It is a bit of a leap, but quite possibly an oblique reference to Voltaire's Candide. He spent some time dismantling the idea that this was the best of all possible worlds (the phrase apparently started with Leibniz) and the Lisbon earthquake featured prominently.
it's the root of "best of all possible worlds" -the secular humanists bootstrapped thinking around doing the best we can here and now, instead of some belief in a future paradise, from the skepticism of gods magninimity which emerged from the Lisbon earthquake: "If god is so good, why did he allow this to happen" blossomed into a range of branching paths amonst the european savants.
The pathways are all there in search. You won't need AI to find them. It's often mentioned in histories of philosophy from Lebnitz onward, he was the last great religious optimist in some ways. Not that there aren't any, but they don't exactly come to mind the way Kant, Voltaire & Rousseau do.
I, too, immediately thought of his <The Ministry for the Future>. However, considering that the future depicted in the book is one where humanity only begins to pay proper attention to the climate crisis following a truly horrific event, it isn't exactly an optimistic future.
I think when you write a story set a planetary scale, it's necessary to translate what to an eponymous hero is a skinned knee falling off a bicycle, in planetary terms is 100m climate refugees dying in the relocation.
And lest anyone think "couldn't happen" a reminder that a significant percentage of the world like 40% or so live within 150km of coastal regions even if not at risk of inundation, for a mix of reasons, that total inundantion risk of most coastal regions less than 5m above mean sea level in the 50-100 year timeframe is high, that at least 150m people live in these regions, and that 'transmigrasi' actually happened: Indonesia decided that for the good of the state, entire cities of people would move. The government owns to 5.5m, the scientists argue up to 8m -they don't own to stats on what is euphemistically called "surplus mortalities" I think.
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/
It's odd to me that Asimov isn't mentioned, because most of his works are centered around human ingeniuity and its applications to reach optimistic outcomes for humanity.
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".
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.
> Does our collective thinking get stuck at the level of an emo high-schooler?
Our society has come to equate contrarian thought with independent thought, but the aren't the same thing. Worse we've simultaneously stopped training young minds to think properly.
Telling someone to think for themselves without first teaching them HOW to do that, doesn't just halt progress it puts it into retreat.
We need to start teaching young people to trust those who know more than they do, and how to tell who those people are. Further, we should teach them how to reason before we admonish them to do it for themselves.
Until we manage those two things we will be a society that distrusts everything we can't understand, and understands very little.
"Optimistic" SciFi seems quite personal to the reader. Where one finds M Banks' Culture series optimistic others find it highly dystopian.
I personally find the most uplifting books the ones that are the most "dystopian" such as Anthem by Ayn Rand and 1984 where the underlying message is about hope and our humanity.
Not sure how to word this, but it's been bugging me for a while: In a public consciousness sense, it feels like there's barely sci-fi at all these days, let alone the optimistic sort. Something is off about it in a way I can't really put my finger on.
Every previous major technological shift had an associated wave of sci-fi and speculative fiction, right? We explored space and got a generation of stories about aliens and moon bases and Mars missions. We discovered radioactivity and got The World Set Free, and then the nuclear bomb proper inspired countless Atomic Age works. We discovered the transistor, and Asimov and Clarke gave us visions of possible computer-powered futures. We discovered DNA and got decades of comics and movies about mutants and superpowers and bioweapons.
(Of course, we only remember the good ones. A lot of the forgotten stories were total shit. But people still wrote them! And at least in retrospect, it sure feels like they had a cultural impact, and made interesting observations about the way the technology of the time might shape the world.)
But now? We're currently a few years into what's probably the biggest technological shift since, what, the start of the millennium? And yet it feels like we're all collectively just sitting here watching it happen. The closest we have to popular speculative fiction is some billionaires and Bay area rationalists writing breathless blog posts about either curing cancer with AI or AI killing everyone, and universally being derided for it either way.
And as much as I myself don't like the work those guys put out, the derision does bug me. Because it feels like the effects of an irony-poisoned culture of cynicism. We can't write or discuss speculative fiction, good or bad, about what a future AI world might be like, because... I dunno. It'd be cringe? It'd be unrealistic? Or maybe we just don't want to think about it?
And so we all sit here, for the first time staring down the possibility, scarce as it still is but growing likelier every day, of a future where computers are better at every intellectual pursuit than us. And doing nothing about it! Nobody writing stories about a Culture where the future AIs benevolently rule over us. Nobody writing about a Butlerian Jihad where we take power back from the machines. (You'll note that those two examples are from the 80s and 60s respectively.) We just sit here going "oh man, huh yeah, it'll sure suck if the robots take all our jobs." And hardly even try to imagine a world where that's happened and how much it sucks, or a world where we successfully revolted against it, or a world where we manage to somehow thrive and find fulfillment despite it.
I'm not sure what I expect, really. I know authors can't just pull a grand vision for a future out of a hat. I'm sure many have, and I just haven't read or watched it. But it just feels like something is different this time, like there's something that's gone missing culturally speaking. Oh well. Maybe this is always how it feels being in the Interesting Times, instead of just reading about them after the fact.
I've been itching to revisit Neal Asher's Polity universe for a hopeful glimpse of the future. Sure, the AI overlords are not without fault, but at least their goals are benevolent
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.
Actually it was settled in the present but it was full of good human vibes and human values.
It had an incredible vibe of “humanity is good and humanity will stand against anything bad”. It was really naive in how it described the human nature but I’m sure it was deliberate.
And also it was fun.
And Lower Decks was absolute blast with so much Star Trek energy in it, and it was pretty optimistic too.
>Wrestling with themes of loneliness, connection, and purpose, this hope-punk sci-fi is for fans of Becky Chambers’s Monk & Robot duology
1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/787289/ode-to-the-h...
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.
I've never really found the Culture to be that optimistic. The people are basically pets, the vast majority of which seem occupy themselves with vapid shit, and the "important" jobs humans have are actually unnecessary (as the "Minds" can do everything better).
I thought the Gzilt from the last book had a better path of development than the Culture. It seems they took every opportunity to keep humans (in some form) in control at every level (e.g. no "Minds" on their ships, just groups of emulated humans running at accelerated speeds to achieve the same effect).
>important jobs
As with all Culture critiques, this one boils down, again, to existentialism. Yes, we live in an meaningless universe and we brush against the absurd every day. That doesn't make The Culture any less of an utopia. And if you think it's not a true utopia, then I suggest reading Camus.
Personally I love it and I wish we could have a few of the wise Minds among us now.
The humans we see are human because they choose to be.
The thing about The Culture is the universe doesn't bend to make being human the default or particularly good: it is an old world where technology surpasses limitations in almost every way imaginable - if you choose. You can also just decide to go lava rafting, where the agreed rules are materials just barely up to task.
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.
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.
If the point of your book is to show X is bad, taking X to the extreme is of course going to have to result in a bad outcome. That is the entire point. Not doing that would be like writing a romance without the romantic lead.
That doesn't mean we can't have hope. A warning is one of the most hopeful things: It means we still have time to change our ways.
We've been on this pathway since the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.
What an intriguing thing to say :)
What are you referencing?
The pathways are all there in search. You won't need AI to find them. It's often mentioned in histories of philosophy from Lebnitz onward, he was the last great religious optimist in some ways. Not that there aren't any, but they don't exactly come to mind the way Kant, Voltaire & Rousseau do.
And lest anyone think "couldn't happen" a reminder that a significant percentage of the world like 40% or so live within 150km of coastal regions even if not at risk of inundation, for a mix of reasons, that total inundantion risk of most coastal regions less than 5m above mean sea level in the 50-100 year timeframe is high, that at least 150m people live in these regions, and that 'transmigrasi' actually happened: Indonesia decided that for the good of the state, entire cities of people would move. The government owns to 5.5m, the scientists argue up to 8m -they don't own to stats on what is euphemistically called "surplus mortalities" I think.
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".
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.
Our society has come to equate contrarian thought with independent thought, but the aren't the same thing. Worse we've simultaneously stopped training young minds to think properly.
Telling someone to think for themselves without first teaching them HOW to do that, doesn't just halt progress it puts it into retreat.
We need to start teaching young people to trust those who know more than they do, and how to tell who those people are. Further, we should teach them how to reason before we admonish them to do it for themselves.
Until we manage those two things we will be a society that distrusts everything we can't understand, and understands very little.
Also. The part on being good at identifying the right experts is interesting...
Absolutely not.
It should be ignored by savvy readers, and abolished from the writer's vocabulary.
I personally find the most uplifting books the ones that are the most "dystopian" such as Anthem by Ayn Rand and 1984 where the underlying message is about hope and our humanity.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe
Every previous major technological shift had an associated wave of sci-fi and speculative fiction, right? We explored space and got a generation of stories about aliens and moon bases and Mars missions. We discovered radioactivity and got The World Set Free, and then the nuclear bomb proper inspired countless Atomic Age works. We discovered the transistor, and Asimov and Clarke gave us visions of possible computer-powered futures. We discovered DNA and got decades of comics and movies about mutants and superpowers and bioweapons.
(Of course, we only remember the good ones. A lot of the forgotten stories were total shit. But people still wrote them! And at least in retrospect, it sure feels like they had a cultural impact, and made interesting observations about the way the technology of the time might shape the world.)
But now? We're currently a few years into what's probably the biggest technological shift since, what, the start of the millennium? And yet it feels like we're all collectively just sitting here watching it happen. The closest we have to popular speculative fiction is some billionaires and Bay area rationalists writing breathless blog posts about either curing cancer with AI or AI killing everyone, and universally being derided for it either way.
And as much as I myself don't like the work those guys put out, the derision does bug me. Because it feels like the effects of an irony-poisoned culture of cynicism. We can't write or discuss speculative fiction, good or bad, about what a future AI world might be like, because... I dunno. It'd be cringe? It'd be unrealistic? Or maybe we just don't want to think about it?
And so we all sit here, for the first time staring down the possibility, scarce as it still is but growing likelier every day, of a future where computers are better at every intellectual pursuit than us. And doing nothing about it! Nobody writing stories about a Culture where the future AIs benevolently rule over us. Nobody writing about a Butlerian Jihad where we take power back from the machines. (You'll note that those two examples are from the 80s and 60s respectively.) We just sit here going "oh man, huh yeah, it'll sure suck if the robots take all our jobs." And hardly even try to imagine a world where that's happened and how much it sucks, or a world where we successfully revolted against it, or a world where we manage to somehow thrive and find fulfillment despite it.
I'm not sure what I expect, really. I know authors can't just pull a grand vision for a future out of a hat. I'm sure many have, and I just haven't read or watched it. But it just feels like something is different this time, like there's something that's gone missing culturally speaking. Oh well. Maybe this is always how it feels being in the Interesting Times, instead of just reading about them after the fact.