If I want to read about stressful, bad, evil things, I'll pick up a newspaper.
I remember an article, whose title essentially summed up my view on this space - "Star Trek: The Next Generation Was the Last Sci-Fi Show Hopeful About the Future"[0]. I grew up on ST:TNG, and I sorely miss the ideas communicated there. That people can organize for common good. That such organizations, even large and bureaucratic, can be very competent and effective. That individuals can strive to better themselves, both morally and in terms of competence. That the default assumption about your colleagues/teammates is that they're competent in what they do. That we can all cooperate, instead of defect.
Speaking of competence, I wish another cliché would die too. That the world is filled with idiots. It's also very popular, and I also destructive to the fabric of society. But I'll leave elaborating on it to David Brin[1].
--
[0] - https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a31206/star-trek-th...
The golden age of science fiction, the era when science fiction was most popular with the public, occurred when most of that fiction had a positive outlook on the future. I don't think that's coincidence.
To any aspiring authors out there: If you want to stand out and be successful, write stories that show a path to successfully overcoming the obstacles society faces today. If you can successfully do that in a way that doesn't come across as trite and condescending, then you are onto something.
Worse, showing how obstacles are overcome and not seeing it applied in real world is soul crushing.
This is often because politics turned from initially being a way of solving problems to a popularity ascend machismo contest - and it infects everything.
Fiction can only nudge the public opinion.
The difference is applying science and rational thinking vs. soundbites and reasoning from ideology.
That's the problem, the definition of "better" is the whole point.
Say for USA, setting the marginal tax rate of 1M dollars to 100%, including for company revenues, and redistributing that money to the poor greatly increases the Gini coefficient. That's just increasing a number that is widely agreed to be a "sensible definition of better", can't get more "rational" than that. You can write a bulletproof proposal that can't be rationally argued against.
Ideology is not just a series of individual policies, it's a lens through which you can evaluate every possible policy proposal.
"Finding the middle ground" is the Third Way popularized by Blair and Macron now, that has also failed, because it maintains the status quo.
I think that this is an important consideration. If I am not mistaken, this is part of the reason why the super-geniuses in the larger comic universes (e.g. Marvel) do not cure cancer.
Yes, I am getting sick of it all not just for the quantity and repetition, but the fact that it seems people enjoy this shit without the sort of curiosity such stories should invoke. Most of it is gratuitous.
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life. (...)
Have you tried Walkaway?
What's not to like?
(or is a goofy comedy that doesn't take itself seriously at all).
Not everyone is writing about dystopias, but the inflection point isn't quite here yet.