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Try getting a publisher to accept a book about a future world that's somewhat cleaner and more convenient than today. I can't wait for the movie version.

NikolaNovak 8y ago
Weeelllll... isn't that what the Culture series by Iain Banks was about - a vision of post-scarcity utopian future? As for movie version, I'd wager Star Trek, at least up to Discovery, was similarly about a vision of a better society (to the point that, as I discussed with few of my friends and colleagues, for a lot of us it has subconsciously shaped our political thinking: "Is this law / action on the path to Star Trek future, or not":)
- alexgmcm 8y ago
  Yeah - but now write a movie about a future that's more or less the same except stuff is slightly better and my phone has a nicer camera. Slow, gradual improvement isn't as exciting as disaster and apocalypse.
- ianai 8y ago
  Love utopian stories. But I think they’re much more difficult to write since they’re fewer, or something. Modern sci-fi is downright jaded. They don’t bother to introduce technology half the time. It’s jusr taken as a given that the guns shoot colored fireballs or death rays. All transportation just floats around, etc. and people mostly scrap by on whatever they can find and die often.
  - krapp 8y ago
    I think they're more difficult to write because they're more difficult to imagine, plausibly. I can imagine a future with energy weapons and flying cars, but one in which corporations and governments don't leverage technology to oppress and enslave the masses, where the rich don't get richer and the poor don't die like dogs, just seems like propaganda.
    - tomatotomato37 8y ago
      The thing is that you can have that without making it such an active point. One of the things I really like about Snow Crash is that while overall it's an anarcho-capitalistic dystopia where criminal organizations are incorporated, no one's actively wingeing about it, its just a setting to the main plot.
    - ianai 8y ago
      Star Trek serialized it (seemingly) easily enough. They essentially got a new universe of problems to explore every episode with the context of the Federations technology and administration.
      - rsynnott 8y ago
        Star Trek's society never made much _sense_, though. If you exclude all the utopian speeches given by Picard, and just look at the interaction of the Federation and Starfleet, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a military dictatorship. (Pet theory; the Federation is a Soviet-ish military command economy. The episodes we see are in-universe propaganda produced by the state. That's why everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes.) I think Banks' Culture is a better example of a utopia played straight, but most of the action in those novels takes place largely outside the Culture.
        krapp 8y ago
        >That's why everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes. That is literally what they are, they're intended to act as mirrors to various aspects of humanity, or embody singular aspects of the plot of the week.
        labster 8y ago
        Shaka, when the walls fell.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Mass media SF has always been like that though, look at Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    I think of it as "cargo cult sci-fi"--adopting the trappings of spaceships and ray guns without understanding or caring about the science. But you're wrong to say that it's a modern issue. That kind of sci-fi has been around since the 1920s at least, pretty much since the moment sci-fi got popular. The facade of grim cynicism may be newer, but it dates to the '80s at least.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      > I think of it as "cargo cult sci-fi"--adopting the trappings of spaceships and ray guns without understanding or caring about the science. Except for the diamond+ hard subgenre, Sci-Fi isn't really about the science anyway. The science serves as a mechanism for introducing premises that allow us to explore aspects of the human condition.
      - ianai 8y ago
        I wish it were more often used to flesh out how things could work differently. Like an introduction to ideas outside the mainstream.
      - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
        Sure, but there's a difference between medium-soft sci-fi and space fantasy. Star Trek is deeply unrealistic, but it at least attempts to, as you say, use its gadgets to explore interesting premises. Star Wars is fantasy with ray guns.
        krapp 8y ago
        A lot of Star Trek comes really close to being "fantasy with ray guns" too, let's be honest. I mean, which is really sillier, subspace or hyperspace?
        vidarh 8y ago
        The difference comes in what they do with it. In Star Wars they "just" pursue the interests of the characters, and the focus is on the excitement, while in most of Star Trek the resolution of conflict is about solving some moral dilemma. They're very similar in that the tech is mostly veneer, but they're very dissimilar in why the details of the tech doesn't matter.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    If anything, I'd have said the opposite. There's a fair bit of hard-ish, no-ftl (and often even no near-light), no magic scifi around right now.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  The Culture series are mostly about the Culture rubbing up against far less utopian societies, though; a pure story about a utopia would be boring.
  - andygates 8y ago
    It would probably be a long party and psychodrama. Intensely interesting to the participants, but we're not them.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      Sounds like most episodes of Black Mirror. And they certainly offer cleaner and more convenient futures, just the opposite of utopian in concept and in tone.
    - vidarh 8y ago
      One of the Culture novels do include a lengthy descriptions of a party that had lasted a ridiculously long time. Hydrogen Sonata possibly... There are quite a few descriptions of utopian societies partying in sci fi, but usually as an excuse to make one group or another stand out as gloriously debauched to set up the inevitable downturn when someone crashes the party or some character or other at the party is forced to face real life. But they can be interesting stories in their own right - just probably not easy to expand to novel length.
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        "The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation, and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago, and there has been no follow-up. The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and look, because you won't enjoy it. There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds, and there is one theory that this is a battle being fought between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who are hovering over the thing like vultures, but you shouldn't believe anything you hear at parties, and particularly not anything you hear at this one. One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all the business about selective breeding and regressive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering idiots, or, more and more frequently, both."
- brlewis 8y ago
  I haven't kept up with sci fi for a long time so I had to google Culture Series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_(series)#Books_in_the_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_(series)#Books_in_... Sounds like the utopian culture of the protagonists is surrounded by plenty of non-utopian drama. Star Trek - a future where I might die because I chose to put on a red shirt in the morning. ;-)
  - scotty79 8y ago
    Read Iain M. Banks. It might be the best SF I've ever read. And I read a lot of SF.
    - chimprich 8y ago
      I agree, but the downside is that you'll be spoilt for most of the rest of the genre, because little else measures up. Perhaps read everything else first. Amazon Prime currently has an adaptation of Consider Phlebas in the pipeline, something I have very mixed feelings about.
      - rsynnott 8y ago
        Not sure why they went for that one, really; even as a novel it's kind of messy and confusing, and I struggle to imagine how an adaptation will work. Player of Games would have been a much more obvious choice.
        NikolaNovak 8y ago
        I'm torn; it's my least favourite of Culture novels, and I almost consider it an early trial, very different in spirit and nature than the rest; but I can see how it'd be an obvious choice for a movie/series: it has the most action/adventure feel and a simple linear storyline (even if you account for the "twist" of who the good guys / bad guys are). There's a single protagonist, we focus largely on him, and he goes out and has adventures in space. Whereas something like Excession - that can never ever be a movie, really...:-/
- User23 8y ago
  There's another view which is that the Culture Minds keep humans around as pets. For those who hold that view, the Culture is actually a dystopia.
ianai 8y ago
Sure, but I’ve still seen enough dystopian films/shows. Bird box and skyline are basically the same film, at the start/premise. Don’t look or you’ll die.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mrec 8y ago
Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge (the last in his Orange County trilogy) springs to mind.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
Optimism may be passe in TV and film right now, but there's plenty of those in written sci-fi. Off the top of my head, I recently read John Scalzi's Interdependency series (the two books of it that are out, anyway).
- rsynnott 8y ago
  Those are about the collapse of civilisation, and it's a pretty nasty civilisation; I'm not sure how optimistic they are.
burkaman 8y ago
Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke takes place in a generally better future where the solar system has been colonized. I found it incredibly boring, which is maybe your point. Also, Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells is about an essentially perfect utopia.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  Another example would be Alastair Reynolds' Poseidon's Children series; unlike the rest of his novels, which are generally extremely grim, it takes place in a sort of flawed utopia. A lot of people dislike it for this reason.
larkeith 8y ago
Several books and quite a few short stories by Arthur C Clarke are more or less optimistic about the future - definitely not utopian, but better than today.

NikolaNovak 8y ago

Weeelllll... isn't that what the Culture series by Iain Banks was about - a vision of post-scarcity utopian future? As for movie version, I'd wager Star Trek, at least up to Discovery, was similarly about a vision of a better society (to the point that, as I discussed with few of my friends and colleagues, for a lot of us it has subconsciously shaped our political thinking: "Is this law / action on the path to Star Trek future, or not":)

alexgmcm 8y ago
Yeah - but now write a movie about a future that's more or less the same except stuff is slightly better and my phone has a nicer camera. Slow, gradual improvement isn't as exciting as disaster and apocalypse.
ianai 8y ago
Love utopian stories. But I think they’re much more difficult to write since they’re fewer, or something. Modern sci-fi is downright jaded. They don’t bother to introduce technology half the time. It’s jusr taken as a given that the guns shoot colored fireballs or death rays. All transportation just floats around, etc. and people mostly scrap by on whatever they can find and die often.
- krapp 8y ago
  I think they're more difficult to write because they're more difficult to imagine, plausibly. I can imagine a future with energy weapons and flying cars, but one in which corporations and governments don't leverage technology to oppress and enslave the masses, where the rich don't get richer and the poor don't die like dogs, just seems like propaganda.
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    The thing is that you can have that without making it such an active point. One of the things I really like about Snow Crash is that while overall it's an anarcho-capitalistic dystopia where criminal organizations are incorporated, no one's actively wingeing about it, its just a setting to the main plot.
  - ianai 8y ago
    Star Trek serialized it (seemingly) easily enough. They essentially got a new universe of problems to explore every episode with the context of the Federations technology and administration.
    - rsynnott 8y ago
      Star Trek's society never made much _sense_, though. If you exclude all the utopian speeches given by Picard, and just look at the interaction of the Federation and Starfleet, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a military dictatorship. (Pet theory; the Federation is a Soviet-ish military command economy. The episodes we see are in-universe propaganda produced by the state. That's why everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes.) I think Banks' Culture is a better example of a utopia played straight, but most of the action in those novels takes place largely outside the Culture.
      - krapp 8y ago
        >That's why everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes. That is literally what they are, they're intended to act as mirrors to various aspects of humanity, or embody singular aspects of the plot of the week.
        labster 8y ago
        Shaka, when the walls fell.
- simonh 8y ago
  Mass media SF has always been like that though, look at Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  I think of it as "cargo cult sci-fi"--adopting the trappings of spaceships and ray guns without understanding or caring about the science. But you're wrong to say that it's a modern issue. That kind of sci-fi has been around since the 1920s at least, pretty much since the moment sci-fi got popular. The facade of grim cynicism may be newer, but it dates to the '80s at least.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    > I think of it as "cargo cult sci-fi"--adopting the trappings of spaceships and ray guns without understanding or caring about the science. Except for the diamond+ hard subgenre, Sci-Fi isn't really about the science anyway. The science serves as a mechanism for introducing premises that allow us to explore aspects of the human condition.
    - ianai 8y ago
      I wish it were more often used to flesh out how things could work differently. Like an introduction to ideas outside the mainstream.
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      Sure, but there's a difference between medium-soft sci-fi and space fantasy. Star Trek is deeply unrealistic, but it at least attempts to, as you say, use its gadgets to explore interesting premises. Star Wars is fantasy with ray guns.
      - krapp 8y ago
        A lot of Star Trek comes really close to being "fantasy with ray guns" too, let's be honest. I mean, which is really sillier, subspace or hyperspace?
        vidarh 8y ago
        The difference comes in what they do with it. In Star Wars they "just" pursue the interests of the characters, and the focus is on the excitement, while in most of Star Trek the resolution of conflict is about solving some moral dilemma. They're very similar in that the tech is mostly veneer, but they're very dissimilar in why the details of the tech doesn't matter.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  If anything, I'd have said the opposite. There's a fair bit of hard-ish, no-ftl (and often even no near-light), no magic scifi around right now.
rsynnott 8y ago
The Culture series are mostly about the Culture rubbing up against far less utopian societies, though; a pure story about a utopia would be boring.
- andygates 8y ago
  It would probably be a long party and psychodrama. Intensely interesting to the participants, but we're not them.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Sounds like most episodes of Black Mirror. And they certainly offer cleaner and more convenient futures, just the opposite of utopian in concept and in tone.
  - vidarh 8y ago
    One of the Culture novels do include a lengthy descriptions of a party that had lasted a ridiculously long time. Hydrogen Sonata possibly... There are quite a few descriptions of utopian societies partying in sci fi, but usually as an excuse to make one group or another stand out as gloriously debauched to set up the inevitable downturn when someone crashes the party or some character or other at the party is forced to face real life. But they can be interesting stories in their own right - just probably not easy to expand to novel length.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      "The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation, and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago, and there has been no follow-up. The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and look, because you won't enjoy it. There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds, and there is one theory that this is a battle being fought between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who are hovering over the thing like vultures, but you shouldn't believe anything you hear at parties, and particularly not anything you hear at this one. One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all the business about selective breeding and regressive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering idiots, or, more and more frequently, both."
brlewis 8y ago
I haven't kept up with sci fi for a long time so I had to google Culture Series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_(series)#Books_in_the_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_(series)#Books_in_... Sounds like the utopian culture of the protagonists is surrounded by plenty of non-utopian drama. Star Trek - a future where I might die because I chose to put on a red shirt in the morning. ;-)
- scotty79 8y ago
  Read Iain M. Banks. It might be the best SF I've ever read. And I read a lot of SF.
  - chimprich 8y ago
    I agree, but the downside is that you'll be spoilt for most of the rest of the genre, because little else measures up. Perhaps read everything else first. Amazon Prime currently has an adaptation of Consider Phlebas in the pipeline, something I have very mixed feelings about.
    - rsynnott 8y ago
      Not sure why they went for that one, really; even as a novel it's kind of messy and confusing, and I struggle to imagine how an adaptation will work. Player of Games would have been a much more obvious choice.
      - NikolaNovak 8y ago
        I'm torn; it's my least favourite of Culture novels, and I almost consider it an early trial, very different in spirit and nature than the rest; but I can see how it'd be an obvious choice for a movie/series: it has the most action/adventure feel and a simple linear storyline (even if you account for the "twist" of who the good guys / bad guys are). There's a single protagonist, we focus largely on him, and he goes out and has adventures in space. Whereas something like Excession - that can never ever be a movie, really...:-/
User23 8y ago
There's another view which is that the Culture Minds keep humans around as pets. For those who hold that view, the Culture is actually a dystopia.

ianai 8y ago

Sure, but I’ve still seen enough dystopian films/shows. Bird box and skyline are basically the same film, at the start/premise. Don’t look or you’ll die.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mrec 8y ago

Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge (the last in his Orange County trilogy) springs to mind.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

Optimism may be passe in TV and film right now, but there's plenty of those in written sci-fi. Off the top of my head, I recently read John Scalzi's Interdependency series (the two books of it that are out, anyway).

rsynnott 8y ago
Those are about the collapse of civilisation, and it's a pretty nasty civilisation; I'm not sure how optimistic they are.

burkaman 8y ago

Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke takes place in a generally better future where the solar system has been colonized. I found it incredibly boring, which is maybe your point. Also, Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells is about an essentially perfect utopia.

rsynnott 8y ago
Another example would be Alastair Reynolds' Poseidon's Children series; unlike the rest of his novels, which are generally extremely grim, it takes place in a sort of flawed utopia. A lot of people dislike it for this reason.

larkeith 8y ago

Several books and quite a few short stories by Arthur C Clarke are more or less optimistic about the future - definitely not utopian, but better than today.