Where Have All the Hopeful Futures Gone? The Case for Optimistic Sci-Fi
Writing a better reality: The case for optimistic sci-fi
Sci-fi often defaults to dystopia, yet optimistic visions like Star Trek and WALL-E show futures worth living in. The author argues that optimism isn't utopian—it's about problem-solving and progress. By imagining better worlds, we can confront today's challenges with hope, not resignation. Ursula LeGuin's call for 'realists of a larger reality' reminds us that to build a better future, we must first envision its shape.
Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can… imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom — realists of a larger reality.
- wwalker3
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.
- throwaway219450
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.
- bawolff
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.
- sdenton4
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.
- _matthew_
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.