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> Suggestions are appreciated. C Doctorow and U Le Guin comes to mind. Its always weird to me when people use U Le Guin as an example of "optimistic" sci fi. S

> Suggestions are appreciated. C Doctorow and U Le Guin comes to mind. Its always weird to me when people use U Le Guin as an example of "optimistic" sci fi. Some of her writing is extremely bleak. Of course she is pretty prolific and has written a lot of different types of things. Fundamentally i think the issue is that novels usually have to be about conflict. If everything is peachy you dont have a novel. I think it takes much more skill to write an interesting optimistic near future sci fi novel that is actually about the technical change instead of just using it as a setting. Most of the optimistic technology novels i can think of that i liked were far future - Iain banks. Maybe greg egan although optimistic isnt exactly the right word. They show an interesting world, but its clearly not our world. Is it really an optimistic take on the future of technology if the technology in question is hundreds of years in the future? Perhaps you'd like something like "Song for a new day" by Sarah Pinsker. I dont really know if it fits as "optimism", but i'd like to mention "The Fortunate Fall" as a really interesting novel about technology.

worldsayshi 2y ago
Yeah I've only read The Dispossessed and a few short stories so I might have a tilted view of her bibliography. I've tried to get into Ian Banks. One feeling I get is that there's two kinds of optimist sci fi. Technology magically solves our problems - or technology can be both force for good and bad, let's use it for good. I have a feeling that Ian M Banks writes the former but I'm probably wrong here? There can still be interesting conflict even if the bigger problems have been solved. Dispossessed is one good example I think. The conflict is partially about flaws inherent in the "better" society that they created. And in Star Trek and to some degree in "The long way to a small angry planet" the conflict is between the larger society and the hold outs.
- bawolff 2y ago
  I think Iain M Banks tries to answer the question: in a hypothetical future where all our material needs are met, where does that leave society? Do people still do stuff if they don't need money and why? Who runs it? Etc. Its sort of an optimistic exploration of post-scarcity anarchism. It remindsme a bit of how internet communities work. I think it takes its premise much more seriously than star trek does. E.g. Star trek has free replicators for everyone and yet everyone is spending tons of money at Quark's for some reason. Which is fine, star trek has a lot of other good qualities, but i don't think it does a great job of exploring the implication of its technologies.
- TimorousBestie 2y ago
  I can’t think of a plot problem in a Banks novel that is magically solved by technology. They’re mostly about humans/human-equivalent-aliens finding a fringe niches on the boundary of a utopia that they don’t want to live in for one reason or another.
- ergsef 2y ago
  "The Word for World is Forest" and "The Left Hand of Darkness" are probably my two favorites "sci-fi" Le Guin books, highly recommend them.
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
> Its always weird to me when people use U Le Guin as an example of "optimistic" sci fi. Some of her writing is extremely bleak. Of course she is pretty prolific and has written a lot of different types of things. Some of it is, yeah. But I think part of what made her novels interesting was how she was (often) able to resolve conflict without violence. I think that's where the optimism comes from.
- bawolff 2y ago
  I do think its interesting how much more pacifist older scifi seems to be then modern scifi. I was watching the recent tv adaptation of asimov's foundation series, and one of the most striking things was how much characters (including the good guys) resorted to violence. Where in the books the entire theme was that brain beat brawn and the main characters almost never solved their problems with violence.
  - eli_gottlieb 2y ago
    Hell, it was Asimov who coined, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
  - dkarl 2y ago
    > I do think its interesting how much more pacifist older scifi seems to be then modern scifi Optimism is powerful, but it usually comes with impatience. We've shown an ability to decrease the prevalence of war globally, but the fact that improvements have taken longer than a generation and have not been monotonic or absolute makes it very hard to maintain a belief in the possibility of future improvements. The pace of change in the world can't keep up with the emotional rhythm of human optimism, disappointment, and disillusionment. Also, many well-meaning people fight to tear down optimism because they identify it with complacency. Other well-meaning people fight to tear down optimism because they want people to focus on a different problem, so they want them to believe that there can be no progress on X without progress on Y. As a result it is fashionable to deny that anything done in centuries of human struggle has made any positive difference in the world. How that is supposed to motivate anybody to add their own efforts to the struggle is left as an exercise for the reader I guess.
WillAdams 2y ago
As I told my kids, "Tales of the land of the happy nice people" would be boring (or, as Clarke said, "The newspapers in utopia would be dull"). That said, Ursula K. LeGuin did author such a book, _Always Coming Home_, which is far more interesting and engaging than it has any right to be. That said, my go-to reading for when I'm really depressed is her _The Lathe of Heaven_....

worldsayshi 2y ago

Yeah I've only read The Dispossessed and a few short stories so I might have a tilted view of her bibliography. I've tried to get into Ian Banks. One feeling I get is that there's two kinds of optimist sci fi. Technology magically solves our problems - or technology can be both force for good and bad, let's use it for good. I have a feeling that Ian M Banks writes the former but I'm probably wrong here? There can still be interesting conflict even if the bigger problems have been solved. Dispossessed is one good example I think. The conflict is partially about flaws inherent in the "better" society that they created. And in Star Trek and to some degree in "The long way to a small angry planet" the conflict is between the larger society and the hold outs.

bawolff 2y ago
I think Iain M Banks tries to answer the question: in a hypothetical future where all our material needs are met, where does that leave society? Do people still do stuff if they don't need money and why? Who runs it? Etc. Its sort of an optimistic exploration of post-scarcity anarchism. It remindsme a bit of how internet communities work. I think it takes its premise much more seriously than star trek does. E.g. Star trek has free replicators for everyone and yet everyone is spending tons of money at Quark's for some reason. Which is fine, star trek has a lot of other good qualities, but i don't think it does a great job of exploring the implication of its technologies.
TimorousBestie 2y ago
I can’t think of a plot problem in a Banks novel that is magically solved by technology. They’re mostly about humans/human-equivalent-aliens finding a fringe niches on the boundary of a utopia that they don’t want to live in for one reason or another.
ergsef 2y ago
"The Word for World is Forest" and "The Left Hand of Darkness" are probably my two favorites "sci-fi" Le Guin books, highly recommend them.

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

> Its always weird to me when people use U Le Guin as an example of "optimistic" sci fi. Some of her writing is extremely bleak. Of course she is pretty prolific and has written a lot of different types of things. Some of it is, yeah. But I think part of what made her novels interesting was how she was (often) able to resolve conflict without violence. I think that's where the optimism comes from.

bawolff 2y ago
I do think its interesting how much more pacifist older scifi seems to be then modern scifi. I was watching the recent tv adaptation of asimov's foundation series, and one of the most striking things was how much characters (including the good guys) resorted to violence. Where in the books the entire theme was that brain beat brawn and the main characters almost never solved their problems with violence.
- eli_gottlieb 2y ago
  Hell, it was Asimov who coined, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
- dkarl 2y ago
  > I do think its interesting how much more pacifist older scifi seems to be then modern scifi Optimism is powerful, but it usually comes with impatience. We've shown an ability to decrease the prevalence of war globally, but the fact that improvements have taken longer than a generation and have not been monotonic or absolute makes it very hard to maintain a belief in the possibility of future improvements. The pace of change in the world can't keep up with the emotional rhythm of human optimism, disappointment, and disillusionment. Also, many well-meaning people fight to tear down optimism because they identify it with complacency. Other well-meaning people fight to tear down optimism because they want people to focus on a different problem, so they want them to believe that there can be no progress on X without progress on Y. As a result it is fashionable to deny that anything done in centuries of human struggle has made any positive difference in the world. How that is supposed to motivate anybody to add their own efforts to the struggle is left as an exercise for the reader I guess.

WillAdams 2y ago

As I told my kids, "Tales of the land of the happy nice people" would be boring (or, as Clarke said, "The newspapers in utopia would be dull"). That said, Ursula K. LeGuin did author such a book, _Always Coming Home_, which is far more interesting and engaging than it has any right to be. That said, my go-to reading for when I'm really depressed is her _The Lathe of Heaven_....