Poison Optimism

If I hear anybody say "bring optimism back into sci fi" again, I'm going to build my doomsday device and hold the world hostage.

In the fifties and sixties, optimism about the future made sense. Yes, we had the Cold War, but all we had to do was not blow ourselves up. Not as simple as it sounded: we almost screwed it up at least three times.

If you read between the lines of all those optimistic stories, in fact, even the dystopias, they had two presumptions for future societies: 1) unlimited energy, and 2) unlimited space.

It just so happens that the two big technological failures of the 20th century were 1) fusion energy, and 2) space travel. The first has yielded nothing despite billions of dollars in research. The second has given us a lot of return, but it hasn't given our excess population anywhere else to go, and meanwhile provides us with no practical way to get more resources.

If space travel isn't a total failure, it's much more daunting than the SF writers of an earlier age ever imagined. I remember a conversation about 2001: A Space Odyssey where I said, "Boy did we blow that deadline." I recall in 1975, SF fans were clamoring to get us a geostationary orbiting artificial space colony by 1995. It was called "L5 by 95." The fact that radiation and living in free-fall would be lethal to human beings has knocked that vision into the realm of Space Opera.

As it turns out, neither nuclear fusion nor space travel show any credible hope of a breakthrough in our lifetime.Those two failures guarantee that the future is going to be tough. I recall in the 70s even Asimov wrote an article saying that our future would be bleak without those two technologies.

When there are breakthroughs in those two things, I'll get optimistic again. In this day and age, it's not called for.

Besides, the SF writers did not set out to create optimistic stories. No, they wrote them that way because they were optimistic people. Optimism should be natural and unprocessed. The artificial version that's being forced on us now by ideological stooges is toxic, concocted with high doses of denial and magical thinking, and an inducement to political conservatism that makes discontent a sin.

One should feel optimism or pessimism when they're appropriate. They're emotions, part of natural signals our unconscious mind give us. Neither one is better than the other, and neither should be considered good or bad.

A writer should be free to write optimism or pessimism as their unconscious prompts them to. That's what separates hackery from art.

(I originally wrote the early draft of this as a comment on cracked.com, 4 Things Science Fiction Needs to Bring Back by Robert Brockway, under the username of leaveittobieber. Yes, I didn't steal it, that's me with yet another handle.)