Hacker News Reader

Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

Sophie’s choice between scrolly crap and a video. No surprise I suppose, given the article focuses on films and ignores the much larger body of sci-fi novels which had no shortage of pessimism in the past and have no shortage of optimism today.

View on HN

Can you name a couple of your favourite recent sci-fi books that have this optimism? Would love to read something not dystopian once in a while.

Andy Weir's stuff isn't utopian but is obviously very science-positive. I have slightly mixed feelings about Alastair Reynolds' work (I thought Revelation Space petered out a bit, but that Zima Blue is profoundly beautiful etc) but his Blue Remembered Earth trilogy is a very deliberate (dare I say heavy handed) attempt at a more optimistic universe. Going back a little, obviously there's the Culture series which definitely does examine some of the complexity behind a powerful, galaxy-spanning utopian civilisation and its AI attendants, and some of the books are tragic, but I'd definitely live there. More generally, just google solarpunk and you'll find lots of recommendations. I don't know which authors specifically identify with that genre going forward, I've heard good things about Becky Chambers but haven't read any of her books yet.

Huh, I hadn't even considered Andy Weir to be science fiction. Good stuff, but not thought-provoking in the way "real" scifi should be... in my mind, at least.

I hear you about the Revelation Space series. The first (titular) book is one of the best I've ever read.. but it is painfully obvious there was no plan.

Thanks for sharing!

This isn't a book, but the new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds show is pretty optimistic. It shows Earth going through some "Eugenics Wars" very soon, which then escalate into WWIII which kills off 40% of the world's population in nuclear attacks, but after that things look pretty good with humans inventing warp drive and exploring the stars and creating a federation of planets.

Oh yea Star Trek always has been a great example of optimistic scifi.

But I feel it’s a bit dated and rooted in “US American culture” - not a bad thing per se but it feels to me like it’s not real realistic to expect that kind of culture to survive the strive that is coming.

That's the standard Star Trek backstory that was even there in the original 1960s series (the Eugenic Wars, and the character of Khan Noonien Singh, the genetically engineered tyrant, were introduced in the 1967 episode "Space Seed").

No, they modified it somewhat in SNW: they pushed back the start of the Eugenics Wars (there's a time-travel episode explaining it, originally it starts in the 1990s), and then they threw in a bit about a "second civil war" and WWIII killing 40% of the population in the pilot episode.

That doesn't strike me as actually being very optimistic considering that we will be living in the Eugenics Wars and WWIII part of the timeline not the exploring the stars part of the timeline.

whoosh...

There is a cool new subgenre in recent years called Solarpunk, which focuses on optimistic world-building. Some of it can come across as rather preachy regarding climate change, but there is some decent reading in there. My favourite so far is Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri.

Iain M. Banks "Culture" novels. Oh, there is certainly room for many depressing insights in human nature, but the overall picture is dominated by the AIs, having created an utopia.

The Culture is arguably our best possible future, and yet it’s still a world in which the underlying structure of meaning is almost gone. Winning the game is as bad as losing it.

That's what SC is for..

True. Some of us were made to exist in the gaps between ‘normal’ and solve problems the majority aren’t even aware of.

The Murderbot Diaries are kind of neutral, but very funny in my opinion.

Try the Clockwork Rocket trilogy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com