Post #114001
2026-01-05 21:49 UTC
Replies (8)
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@Melobol@lemmy.ml 2026-01-05 22:05
Not All SF is optimistic. I could start bringing up huge names - but it doesn't matter. That wasn't really your question. Fiction - be SF or Fantasy - is mostly* about escapism at the end. People who read them don't want reality. They want to forget stuff that bothers them, that they can't do anything about. *Mostly, because some books are using fantasy/sf to introduce higher concepts, but usually that goes over most reader's head.
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@sbv@sh.itjust.works 2026-01-05 22:06
I suggest Peter Watts. > most SF stories there are usually one or two central issues to grapple with—an evil AI, an empire, climate collapse—but rarely the overwhelming stack of interlocking failures we see in reality. Even dystopias often feel strangely cleaner and more legible than real life. Writers try to build tight narratives. Portraying a polycrisis is hard. It's even harder if you want to focus on one or two factors. Decent editors try to cut extraneous stuff out of stories, so they'll try to trim out factors that aren't necessary to the main story arc. And then you need to consider the audience. Can a writer portray a polycrisis in a way that viewers or readers will stick with? Or will the audience get tired of a laundry list of problems? I suggest Peter Watts because he writes (wrote?) good genre fiction that's depressing *and* includes multiple reasons to be depressed.
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@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 2026-01-05 21:57
Probably easier to show how bad *thing* is if everything else is still kind of ok.
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@wizrad@lemmy.ca 2026-01-05 22:10
Maybe its just my reading preferences, but I don't know that I agree that they are optimistic generally speaking. A lot of what I have read tends to be either picking up the pieces from the fall of humanity or a warning on human arrogance and hubris. Usually you have some kind of humanity ending issue that gets resolved but usually has an element of sacrifice or loss in getting to that resolution. Ive always found sci fi to be a "this is how terrible it could be if we dont hande X issue correctly, but at least there will be people like the protagonist who will try and do the right thing". I think if you took away that optimistic resolution to some of these plots, they wouldn't be very compelling as a read. I think to more directly answer your question, these stories are often trying to make a point. Some of the ones I've enjoyed most tend to do a better job of incorporating the death by a thousand cuts you describe but are ultimately trying to say something about a specific issue. I think its also hard to argue that our modern time isn't better than the past. That's not to say its perfect or that there isn't suffering, but if we were to describe our lives to someone from a thousand years ago, they might feel that our current world is fairly 'optimistic' as well. This could definitely be some bias on my choices though so grain of salt lol.
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@notsosure@sh.itjust.works 2026-01-05 21:54
Aren’t people in general optimistic?
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@Nemo@slrpnk.net 2026-01-06 01:51
Because a book that's as depressing as the real world isn't fun to read.
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@HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2026-01-06 22:14
> It feels less like “one big problem” and more like death by a thousand cuts. A lot of sci-fi was generally written to play with a few ideas. I think it would be difficult to create a narrative around several problems with different causes and solutions.
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@Eternalposer@lemmy.zip 2026-01-06 22:49
I was talking about this recently, how there are so few optimistic sci-fi that I think it's speaks poorly to where we're heading. If we can't visualize a better world how are we going to work towards it? Other than Star Trek what scifi has an optimistic view of the future?