Any good sci-fi out there that isn't apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, or some form of capitalism in the future? You know, some kind of portrayal of a better world is possible? Star Trek is an obvious one but I'm scratching my head trying to think of other examples.
I like to imagine The Culture series as part of The Culture on boarding program and Banks had to return to his home planet.
banks was stoked to get those drug glands implanted! i forget which book but i know there is reference to Earth getting a first contact package of some kind long after the designation of Earth as a sort of hands off control group in the 1970s. maybe 2030s or even later? earth gets the "prime directive" treatment until then so we better bring about global communism because i want my genderfluid FALSAC
The Disposessed by Le Guin is short and life-alteringly good, even if it kinda cops-out by acknowledging an anarchist society could only happen if thousands of ideologically-consistent anarchists move to the moon, and somehow don't get nuked by their capitalist homeworld...
Yeah, this is a drum I've been beating in for quite some time. I love Culture, but it's not particularly radical and Banks seems to have been a lib. Culture is basically what libs want to see "the West" as. Progressive, prosperous, untouchable in its hegemony. Graciously interfering with more backwards weaker civilizations for their own damn good.
Look to Windward is a particularly revealing example.
spoiler
Culture secretly meddles in affairs of cat people's backwards cast civilization, trying to get democratic forces to power through bribes and what not. This backfires spectacularly and leads to a cat civil war killing a good fraction of population in process. The cats are pissed at the Culture. They sent a civil war veteran who lost family in the war to go 9/11 on the Culture's massive space station. The attempt is easily thwarted and it's cat architects are brutally tortured and murdered by Culture's super special forces robot agent.
Published in year 2000. You can't make this shit up.
If anyone is curious I also read an academic article with the same sentiment.
Wait, it's not an academic article, it's an essay. Still, it makes a lot of good points.
Part of me thinks the reason there are so few is that it's difficult to create a meaningful conflict/story hook in a setting where the primary motivator(s) that create conflict are removed via post-scarcity. Star Trek has to basically inject old-world style conflict in a society that has transcended scarcity and racial/reactionary tensions, and these issues are caused by other alien races or by societies living on the fringes of civilization.
Warhammer 40k because it goes past into something worse than capitalist realism.
:kitty-cri-screm:
kim stanley robinson's mars trilogy or his newer 2312.
plot spoilers below to explain:
spoiler
mars trilogy ends with capitalism collapsing in on itself and a global conflict of various democratic socialist and marxist nations fighting a world war against massive transnational corporations and kicking the shit out of them and democratizing the remaining ones. mars stays kind of anarcho-martian. there are tons of socialist characters.
2312 has capitalism is a peripheral entity that runs only luxury goods and basically serves the same role as sports gambling. it basically exists on the frontiers only. most of the solar system has a AI driven planned economy and a system modeled on the spanish mondragon co-op
I've seen good things about Ministry of The Future. Ecoterrorists using drones to down all non-ecofriendly air traffic comes to mind, but I don't know if it fits within OPs parameters.
i really need to read that. i haven't read any of KSR's recent stuff. i was going to buy a copy but it had "FAVORITE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA" or something splashed on the cover and i kind of wreched. hard to believe he would read something so based.
Same. I'm sure his social media manager or something have given him a cliffnotes version.
The Culture series by Iain M Banks.
Skip the first one until later, they aren't chronologically linked for the most part.
It's about a full communist society in space, it's technically not fully automated because all the unenjoyable labor is done by fully sentient AIs, but they're so hyper intelligent that it takes like a trillionth of their attention.
A lot of the stories do include basically capitalist (or feudal) societies, but they're generally antagonists who can't possibly resist the inevitable influence of the Culture which seeks to both technologically uplift less developed societies and manipulate them into abandoning money, class structures, bigotry, etc.
EDIT: I guess I'm far from the only person here that likes Iain M Banks.
Why is aliens gifting people in less technologically advanced societies with like immortality drugs and replicators a bad thing? Is it that they worked to influence other societies? Because they're literal communists and in the books I've read they're generally just pushing societies toward socialism and away from the worst excesses of capitalism.
Its still a bit apocalyptic but one of the central plot devices is basically dialectical and historical materialism in the form of psychohistory so it's definitely commie
It’s skill kind of an apocalypse, and it has some of the worst physics I’ve ever seen, but it’s space communism kinda, “Wandering earth”
Another growing plague on sci-fi is the resurgence of feudalism.
That's more science fantasy than science fiction. The Star Wars-ification of sci-fi ends up becoming little more than King Arthur In Space.
Even mediocre sci-fi tends to be forward looking. The Bob-verse series is a great example of this pasty-ass-white-boy futurism. Yeah, its a liberal chauvanistic white nationalist power fantasy. But it does at least pretend to grapple with the societal impacts of technological advance, interstellar expansion, and transhumanism, rather than just becoming a series about space wizards.
Compare that to the space colonialism of Starcraft or Warhammer and the D&D-space spin-offs Starfinder and Spelljammer settings. Probably the hallmark difference is that nothing really changes in these settings. Yes, somebody invented Super Teleportation at some undefined point in prior history, but now civilizations are just kinda trapped in amber for a thousand years.
There's a CBC Radio play if you'd rather listen to the abridged version
Arguably the grandaddy of them all, the Foundation series. Which is fantastic, btw.
