alt Hacker NewsIt's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures. Ask about sci-fi and what comes to mind first is almost always some kind of dystopia. Terminator, 1984, Deep Space 9, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Dune, Tank Girl, Minority Report, iRobot, Westworld, Altwred Carbon. Those aren't worlds that seem like great places to live if you're not rich! So Star Trek is much a work of fiction as the rest of those, but for all its flaws, at least is paints a mostly nice picture of the future that someone might want to live in, not crushed under the heel of a corporation. It makes sense; a story with no conflict isn't interesting, and dystopia provides for conflict. To philosophize, it's why I think we're so afraid of AI and robots and the future. It's why I wrote my book the way I did.
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I would not call Deep Space 9 a dystopia. Nor Babylon 5, for that matter. They are not happy places to live, for sure, but both settings are abundant in hope and possibility.
Tank Girl makes this list? Why not Judge Dredd, or even Idiocracy?
your growth hacking worked. i didn’t want it to, but it did. i saw your book at the end of your comment and gen looked up the book and read the sample and was expecting to look down my nose at it but… the sample was good so i bought it.
thats the first sample i ever read that got me to read a book. not particularly great writing, but clean and propulsive and i hope the mystery pays off.
> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.
Some say it was the last sci-fi utopia in modern pop culture.
Obligatory reference to the other great utopia in scifi, The Culture series from Iain M. Banks.
As much as I love Star Trek, The Culture feels more mature and nuanced.
speaking on the movie : Tank Girl doesn't portray a world that's great for the rich, either.
it's pretty shitty for anyone outside the singular theocratic military enclave that hordes all the water and decapitates scientists.
>it's why I think we're so afraid of AI
I think you're overestimating the sci-fi cannon indoctrination of the general public, or even tech people, and underestimating their reaction to current events. As things lie at the moment, Big AI is served as a SaaS that can be manipulated at any time by obscenely rich and powerful individuals with questionable decision making skills, some of who reside in the White House and some of who have called empathy a "fundamental weakness". One would be hard pressed to dispute these characters rival the caricatures present in some dystopian sci-fi as it is, they themselves even seem to enjoy the irony. Yes, I also cringe at the alarmist nature of these sentences, but we are at a point where we are most likely to dismiss things right in front of our eyes just by how outlandish it all sounds.
The public's willful transfer of their most intimate personal information to these entities, and once given almost impossible to remove, would make any surveillance state salivate. You have only to look at who holds the keys to this estate.
This insufferable band of Holy Scouts was the reason I never liked TNG. I find DS9 much more believable, up to and including Trump as Gul Dukat. That character was prescient. There is one difference between the two though. While both are malignant pathological narcissists, the fictional Gul Dukat knew how to fake grace once in a while. The real Trump doesn't give a shit.
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> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.
Utopias used to be the most common scifi futures. This is what the so called Cyberpunks (Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, ...) rebelled against.
It used to be all about what wonders technology will bring us. By the time of the 70s it became clear that technology doesn't necessarily make everything better, but can be a burden in itself, or even widen the gap between the haves and haves not. And that is what they wrote about. It turned out to be the most popular scifi with audiences deeming it more believable.