Sci-fi is an amazing genre.
It helps us explore our feelings about the unknown, the future, and the possible. It lets us imagine “what if” scenarios, and then build out rich worlds that our minds can occupy. It depicts dystopias we should fend off and utopias we should seek – and it teases us with the scintillating possibility that humans may actually be able to build the world we want.
But over the last few generations, it’s been harder for us to imagine this better world – and our sci-fi reflects that.
News stories constantly remind us that we’re headed for trouble. Children are being murdered, authoritarianism is on the rise, and Earth is inevitably going to warm so much that it will likely kill millions of people. Given this, how could we possibly imagine a less bleak future?
But maybe that’s what sci-fi can explore.
Author Neal Stephenson wrote in 2011: “Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place.” Journalist Noah Smith argues that optimistic sci-fi needs to have “several concrete features corresponding to the type of future people want to imagine actually living in.”
So, what if we figure it out?
Right now, it’s hard to see that future. We see terrible things all around us – hunger, disease, mass murder, greed, an increasingly uninhabitable planet.
But unlike the world of Mad Max, our world has not yet been killed. There are still monumental efforts to stop hunger, to limit disease, to build more resilient governments, to wake us from the hypnosis of war, to sail deeper into the galaxy and to see closer into the atom. We can still create a world where the patches of paradise blossom into the wastelands.