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.
Replies
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.
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?
> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.
Some say it was the last sci-fi utopia in modern pop culture.
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.
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.
> 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.