Can I has more utopia, please?

Contemporary Science Fiction suffers from a dearth of imagination. Unless of course you're interested in dystopian story telling. That we got and plenty of it. And that is depressing.

It's often been said that our media is a reflection of our fears. A mirror to our id. And with the state of the world it's understandable that much of what we read in science fiction or fantasy fiction, see in scifi films and television, are expressions of despair. Younger generations polled report feeling hopelessness. And with good cause. A pandemic made into politics. The climate crisis is accelerating with out much on the policy stage to abate it. Housing costs are soaring globally. In the US healthcare is increasingly unaffordable and neo-fascist ideology is mainstream in the republican party. Social media shoveling us siloed bad news at us 24/7.

No wonder zombie and post-apocalyptic and conspiracy stories prevail.

But what if our entertainment media was exacerbating this ouroboros of despair? Perhaps if our stories gave a future with hope we would have better vision to build a better reality upon.

And maybe the times doesn't really define the art. Maybe we do. Maybe it's just a choice. At least I hope it is. Otherwise there really is a conspiracy afoot.

The most popular story franchises currently contain some really dark and dismal vision. I like Marvel as much as the next guy but the entire plot hinged on a conspiracy of super-nazis right before a nightmarish god-being destroys half all life... in the universe. And Star Wars libertarianism casually asserts a universe that has normalized slavery, monarchy, fascism. The bulk of Star Wars civilizations exist in impoverished fringe dwelling. Apparently half of the jobs in the Star Wars universe are some form of bounty hunting. And as a result mass shootings happen every day, every where, on every planet. When they are not sword fighting with plasma lasers, that is. Who would want to live in this universe? But the spaceships are cool.

Even the greatest most utopian franchise of the last fifty years, Star Trek, has succumbed to tedious conspiracy plots, as well as some very dark and cynical story lines.

What happened to the post-scarcity future of Gene Roddenberry? A world without poverty? Or money? What happened to a future to which we could boldly go.

Roddenberry himself was a WWII veteran. One of the generation that witnessed firsthand human suffering and atrocity on an unimaginable scale. If any generation should've been pessimistic, it should have been the Silent Generation. But they largely were not.

Many of the popular Science Fiction stories of Roddenberry's day were optimistic, imaginative and hopeful. And that idealism took hold with Roddenberry's Star Trek (or I should say Lucile Ball's Star Trek) and that is what gave the franchise it's staying power. Its hope. Its vision. Its path to a potential utopia.

Can we get some of that now?

[utopia] is a sanity-keeping measure. Expect the worst and anything even only half-decent seems like something to celebrate. The pessimism comes from a feeling that as a species we seem unable to pass up any opportunity to behave stupidly, self-harmfully (the Copenhagen climate talks being but the latest example). The long-term optimism comes from the the fact that no matter how bad things seem and how idiotically and cruelly we behave. . . well, we've got this far, despite it all, and there are more people on the planet than ever before, and more people living good, productive, relatively happy lives than ever before, and—providing we aren't terminally stupid, or unlucky enough to get clobbered by something we have no control over, like a big meteorite or a gamma ray buster or whatever—we'll solve a lot of problems just by sticking around and doing what we do; developing, progressing, improving, adapting. And possibly by inventing AIs that are smarter and more decent than we are, which will help us get some sort of perspective on ourselves, at the very least. We might just stumble our way blindly, unthinkingly into utopia

— IAIN M. BANKS

The great science fiction novelist Iain Banks has passed on, unfortunately. His Culture Novel series managed to find tension and conflict inside a utopian framework (largely in its dealings with non-Culture societies). His vision was astonishingly original, humorous and exciting. By the way if you are a fan of Banks... you will want this.

These stories are begging to be told. And there is an audience desperate to hear them.