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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> We've been on this pathway since the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.
What an intriguing thing to say :)
What are you referencing?
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.
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.
> 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.
> Black mirror the show is a good example, also considered intellectual by many
Absolutely not.
The optimistic sci-fi usually from other countries besides the US and in other languages besides English.
interesting, can you point me to some examples?