Writing a better reality: The case for optimistic sci-fi

Even as a writer of optimistic sci-fi myself, it's very difficult for me to come up with more than a handful of examples that are less than ten years old.

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.

A couple of my favorites in this genre:

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.

People have been saying this a long time, and I’ve participated in this movement, and I think we need to add something: science fiction can be gritty, realistic, and full of conflict, and also optimistic. I’ve encountered a lot of “climate fiction” that just comes off as schmaltzy, and I don’t think that does the job.

Genre is a description of reader/audience behavior, and used primarily by marketers to manipulate the herd.

It should be ignored by savvy readers, and abolished from the writer's vocabulary.

Kim Stanley Robinson appears to me to be doing this. Even Arthur Clarke was, if the ultimate outcome was sometimes a bit messianic, the pathway to the end was the "best of all possible worlds" -which in some ways is what you are evoking.

We've been on this pathway since the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.

The optimistic sci-fi usually from other countries besides the US and in other languages besides English.