Like you, I find that sci-fi and its derivatives is where many readers often miss the point. It's not a overly "happy ending" genre, which I think is important

Like you, I find that sci-fi and its derivatives is where many readers often miss the point. It's not a overly "happy ending" genre, which I think is important to provide balance to all the literary genres as a whole, since many of them aren't exactly trying to make the reader depressed. That's not so much the goal of sci-fi authors either, but instead to make the readers think, which, yes can and often does drive is into the darker parts of what society, humanity and existence has to offer. It's important to have a functional place to approach these things, in my opinion, which is why I shy away from the utopia/optimistic stuff in the genre that rarely seems to gain the popularity the more darkly speculative and dystopian stuff does. It's not for everyone, I guess. But it should be. Your 1984 example is fantastic since we are seeing this exact thing play out in US politics today, with a tyrannical group trying to usher in a police state and the sycophants that walk lock-step right along with it, enamored by the delusion that they are the good guys because their demagogues don't explicitly say the quiet part out loud.