I’ve been loving my hard scifi recently. But I feel like it’s begun to demonstrate how much easier it is to imagine all the ways things could go wrong. If fiction is how we lay an outline for the future, I wonder if anyone can recommend some more uplifting stories to me? Rather than a cautionary tale I would appreciate a story with a setting where the author dares to risk being wrong about what’s right for us. Naturally this may simply be the setting for a somewhat unrelated story, but I’m curious what sorts of literature comes to mind that falls into this category.
The Culture series by Iain Banks. It’s level of post scarcity makes Star Trek look destitute.
The Culture series by Iain M Banks has an interesting spin on a utopian society.
None of these are Utopian but a trend towards being better.
One of Ted Chiang’s short stories The Story of your Life (the basis for the movie Arrival) perhaps?
Project Hail Mary
Contact
Though I wouldnt count the barely-avoiding-imminent-human-Apocalypse from Project Hail Mary a trend to the better for humanity 😆
Yeah. Each of these have some conflict or struggle but the ending is more hopeful.
Might I suggest Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, my favorite book. The structure is like a Kim Stanley Robinson novel where there’s a group of characters but the real character is the birth of a post scarcity society, namely the one in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
I loved it because it answered the problem I had with anarchism: what happens when a psychopath decides to take your shit? The answer is–in a post scarcity society–you walk away. You can always make new shit, better shit, grander shit.
I don’t want to get into spoilers, but there was one thing that always was bugging me about this premise. Like, what if X situation happens? Wouldn’t you know it, X situation happens. He interrogates the premise to its logical conclusion.
I would kill to see this novel made into a decent TV series.
The solarpunk genre in general might have some good stuff for you - my favorite so far is Murder in the Tool Library, but the Terraformers might be closer to what you’re looking for.
I found Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey to be a little too optimistic to be realistic in the end. I don’t mean that in a bad way, as I thoroughly enjoyed the story, including the ending. I’m just too much of a pessimist. :-)
