“focus your energy on what you want to see more of” has some distressing implications for the whole genre of dystopian fiction. it suggests that dystopian fiction doesn’t successfully act as a warning, and if anything makes dystopias look cooler, more familiar, more thinkable
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e.g. squid game is ostensibly supposed to be some kind of warning about the dangers of capitalism or inequality or w/e, and also, the basic premise was so cool youtubers immediately began running their own squid games - minus the death obviously
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i wonder if it’s just impossible to keep writing about a distant abstract threat over the course of decades before it stops viscerally registering as a threat at all. warnings should perhaps be saved for imminent threats, that’s how we’re used to threats being
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there might be an interesting market for genuine attempts at utopian fiction; it’s been awhile since i’ve seen SF depict a future that i’d be happy to live in and maybe we could really use some of that these days
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i'm sayin
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Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
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The Ones Who Misread Omelas
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this is why I enjoyed The Expanse
yeah it’s *absolutely fucking not* utopian but it depicts a world that is approximately as fucked as our current one, and I am happy to live in our current world for all its faults
compared to a Lot of modern SF, that’s pretty optimistic
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I think Ian Banks' Culture is the best post scarcity utopia I've encountered in fiction. I'm not a serious scholar of the subgenre though.
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Not sure if I want a utopia, but I would take something near-future that wasn’t dystopian!
twitter.com/james_barton/s
After I posted that, someone mentioned the Nexus trilogy by , which I enjoyed a lot.
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Replying to @james_barton @made_in_cosmos and @sagar__dubey
And I wonder if sci-fi is missing a possibility here. There are still utopian and dystopian visions, but many of the dystopias are near future, and the utopias are far future.
I don’t think there are many stories set in a good plausible future, 20-50 years out.
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I would also live in this future in a heartbeat.
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Our Dystopian stories are a consequence of there being no market for stories that don't draw from Liberal mythology. Interesting to think about the design of a market that is mythologically innovative.