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.
>Wrestling with themes of loneliness, connection, and purpose, this hope-punk sci-fi is for fans of Becky Chambers’s Monk & Robot duology
1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/787289/ode-to-the-h...
Actually it was settled in the present but it was full of good human vibes and human values.
It had an incredible vibe of “humanity is good and humanity will stand against anything bad”. It was really naive in how it described the human nature but I’m sure it was deliberate.
And also it was fun.
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.
I've never really found the Culture to be that optimistic. The people are basically pets, the vast majority of which seem occupy themselves with vapid shit, and the "important" jobs humans have are actually unnecessary (as the "Minds" can do everything better).
I thought the Gzilt from the last book had a better path of development than the Culture. It seems they took every opportunity to keep humans (in some form) in control at every level (e.g. no "Minds" on their ships, just groups of emulated humans running at accelerated speeds to achieve the same effect).
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.
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.
We've been on this pathway since the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.
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. The government owns to 5.5m, the scientists argue up to 8m -they don't own to stats on what is euphemistically called "surplus mortalities" I think.
What an intriguing thing to say :)
What are you referencing?
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.
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.
Also. The part on being good at identifying the right experts is interesting...
Absolutely not.
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.
Allegory is allegory whatever the setting. The genre is just the setting. Some settings are more useful for allegories than others, but that's very specific to the culture and literary tradition that produces the work. Eg. fantasy writers in western countries pretty much never use the setting for allegory, they use scifi more often. Writers from China that I've seen are the opposite, almost every other work in xianxia is deeply political, but the scifi is just scifi.
1. A good story needs a conflict and a struggle. "...and they lived happily ever after" is an ending of a story, you can't go anywhere from it, therefore you cannot start a story with happily-ever-after. I'm not saying that it is impossible to create a conflict in optimistic setting, but it is much harder to do then in a dystopian setting that is rife with conflict.
2. I think that it is harder to make optimistic setting to sound genuine. We've been subconsciously trained by corporate marketing and govt. propaganda to treat anything overly-positive, overly-optimistic, dripping with honey and smelling like roses as "probably bullshit". While dark, gritty, dystopian automatically makes you think that "oh yeah, this guy is telling the uncomfortable truth that they don't want you to hear".
It should be ignored by savvy readers, and abolished from the writer's vocabulary.
I personally find the most uplifting books the ones that are the most "dystopian" such as Anthem by Ayn Rand and 1984 where the underlying message is about hope and our humanity.
Every previous major technological shift had an associated wave of sci-fi and speculative fiction, right? We explored space and got a generation of stories about aliens and moon bases and Mars missions. We discovered radioactivity and got The World Set Free, and then the nuclear bomb proper inspired countless Atomic Age works. We discovered the transistor, and Asimov and Clarke gave us visions of possible computer-powered futures. We discovered DNA and got decades of comics and movies about mutants and superpowers and bioweapons.
(Of course, we only remember the good ones. A lot of the forgotten stories were total shit. But people still wrote them! And at least in retrospect, it sure feels like they had a cultural impact, and made interesting observations about the way the technology of the time might shape the world.)
But now? We're currently a few years into what's probably the biggest technological shift since, what, the start of the millennium? And yet it feels like we're all collectively just sitting here watching it happen. The closest we have to popular speculative fiction is some billionaires and Bay area rationalists writing breathless blog posts about either curing cancer with AI or AI killing everyone, and universally being derided for it either way.
And as much as I myself don't like the work those guys put out, the derision does bug me. Because it feels like the effects of an irony-poisoned culture of cynicism. We can't write or discuss speculative fiction, good or bad, about what a future AI world might be like, because... I dunno. It'd be cringe? It'd be unrealistic? Or maybe we just don't want to think about it?
And so we all sit here, for the first time staring down the possibility, scarce as it still is but growing likelier every day, of a future where computers are better at every intellectual pursuit than us. And doing nothing about it! Nobody writing stories about a Culture where the future AIs benevolently rule over us. Nobody writing about a Butlerian Jihad where we take power back from the machines. (You'll note that those two examples are from the 80s and 60s respectively.) We just sit here going "oh man, huh yeah, it'll sure suck if the robots take all our jobs." And hardly even try to imagine a world where that's happened and how much it sucks, or a world where we successfully revolted against it, or a world where we manage to somehow thrive and find fulfillment despite it.
I'm not sure what I expect, really. I know authors can't just pull a grand vision for a future out of a hat. I'm sure many have, and I just haven't read or watched it. But it just feels like something is different this time, like there's something that's gone missing culturally speaking. Oh well. Maybe this is always how it feels being in the Interesting Times, instead of just reading about them after the fact.
The humans we see are human because they choose to be.
The thing about The Culture is the universe doesn't bend to make being human the default or particularly good: it is an old world where technology surpasses limitations in almost every way imaginable - if you choose. You can also just decide to go lava rafting, where the agreed rules are materials just barely up to task.
>important jobs
As with all Culture critiques, this one boils down, again, to existentialism. Yes, we live in an meaningless universe and we brush against the absurd every day. That doesn't make The Culture any less of an utopia. And if you think it's not a true utopia, then I suggest reading Camus.
Personally I love it and I wish we could have a few of the wise Minds among us now.
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.
In the US the lack of funding for the arts and impossibility of making a living as an artist has caused arts and culture to die off and become extremely stagnant, endlessly recycled with no risk taking.
And Lower Decks was absolute blast with so much Star Trek energy in it, and it was pretty optimistic too.
When they visit 1970s Earth in State of the Art, they have to be very selective about who they send because many of them would stick out like a sore thumb even after cosmetic surgery.
"Noon 22nd Century" was very optimistic and inspiring, I really liked it as a kid and dreamt of becoming like the scientists in these stories. Even something like "Far Rainbow" had a grim plot but an uplifting sentiment regarding the nature of human spirit so to say? The tragedy happened but people faced it with strength and honor, so to speak.
Because, IMHO, having some sort of meaningful occupation is good. The bad thing is actually the loss of power and control over your own life and your society that comes with it in our world.
In the Culture, I get the impression that most of the people are essentially dumb little lap dogs, who have little idea of how anything works, occupying themselves with social-media-tier stuff. There are still "people" who have to get the work done, but they're non-human which means the society is really a non-human one.
Is that really any different from our modern society other than the robots freeing the more capable or more dutiful humans from the chores? The central critique of most human systems of governance is that they place power in the hands of the idle/corrupt rather than the productive (left and right, they just disagree on which parts of society are productive). Putting all the power in the hands of the people doing all the work is the ideal solution for most people, we just don't have self-sacrificing civic-minded slaves to force the drudgery on.
Yes it is, because our modern society is still a human society. Humans in culture society are more the like dogs in ours, perhaps loved and cared for, but it's not their story.
> Putting all the power in the hands of the people doing all the work is the ideal solution for most people, we just don't have self-sacrificing civic-minded slaves to force the drudgery on.
The problem in the Culture is that they effectively put all the power in the hands of the "Minds." I have no problem with a Roomba or toilet-cleaning robot handling true drudgery. But the interesting or important shit should be for people.
In the Culture novels, there was some pretty radical genetic engineering going on (to the point of enabling alien reproductive compatibility). You'd think they could have done some of that to make "self-sacrificing civic-mindedness" very fun and satisfying, instead of going all-in on vapid hedonism stuff (which what you see whenever you catch glimpses of the bulk of culture citizens).
They were willing to sacrifice nearly a trillion lives in the Idiran war, which was voted on by the entire population. Even after that vote, it was very easy to opt-out and I get the sense that most of those who did were motivated by genuine pacifism rather than personal fear.
The most dangerous and uncomfortable jobs like Special Circumstances and Contact seem to have an enormous surplus of volunteers and it's even hinted that there might not be any need for humans to do most of those jobs; they exist just because humans want to do them.