I'm looking for books like the title - a realistic but hopeful depiction of the future. Mostly interested in near future, building after the revolution type stuff, but I'd be open to more outright utopian sci-fi as long as the worldbuilding was interesting.
Not a novel, but the TTRPG Lancer has a very very cool depiction of a socialist future in transition towards FALGSC. Unfortunately the free version of the rulebook doesn't come with all the worldbuilding. Excerpt from the rulebook:
Love Lancer, probably the best designed and optimized TTRPG currently on the market. Also the only one that works best in online play.
It's not the most optimistic. With the full lore you very much get the sense that Union, the Federation essentially, has allowed elements of liberalism and opportunism to creep in on the periphery of its power for expedience. Union makes deals with incredibly corrupt feudal societies and borderline genocidal corpo-states, and may have committed a time-dilation exacerbated preemptive extinction attack against a distant human civilization before the development of FTL tech (the appropriately titled PISTON-1: KINETIC TOTAL BIOME KILL) during its brief fascist takeover. Because of said time dilation and the extreme distances, the attack is still technically in progress and very difficult to stop; when the other civilization detected it, they were rightly very unhappy with Union even if Union's current iteration is trying to stop it. Then there's what happened to the only nonhuman civilization ever discovered, unfortunately it was during the aforementioned fascist phase of Union.
The game has dark elements, and terrible atrocities were perpetrated by Union in the past, the optimistic part is where the players come in. Missions often involve siding with labor revolts, freeing enslaved worlds, et cetera. Union and the galaxy at large are flawed but can be changed for the better. By application of incredible violence and mecha magic.
Yup definitely, but considering Union has a Department of Justice and Human Rights whose mission profile includes freeing slaves I felt that it was a good bit more optimistic that a lot of other sci-fi universes.
Does that department devote any attention to the imprisoned AIs that undergird all of society in Union?
There's 2 entire supplements for that!
(That being said NHPs are still kinda one of the weirder tone deaf blind spots in the setting as presented in the main rulebook)
Lancer is sick. Someone is adapting it to a video game rn too which is cool
Im sorry but the Union of lancer is a stand in for the US. The pillars that you mention are essentially the US constitution.
The Union only exists at the expense of border regions, the populations of which live under constant violence from the Unions mechas. The Union constantly seeks to expand into states like Aunic Ascendancy, an analogy to the Middle East.
It’s state is essentially fascist, with a secret police and mega corporations running the thing. Yes they think they are the good guys, and yes maybe basic needs of their population is met. But who in this fantasy suffers? It’s one of those "shining city on the hill" utopias that reeks of western chauvinism.
I'm going to have to disagree here, to me it reads more like AES with Union as a China analog. In the source material Union is biding it's time and only suffers the corpo-states existence because of the lessons learnt during it's fascist era, so at the moment it has a strict non-interventionist policy. In the meantime it is trying to undermine them with diplomacy and economics (such as support for trade unions in those states), although admittedly in-setting this is having mixed results.
I mean, a core part of this fantasy is that the player characters can move to right past wrongs and end suffering, and a big part of the setting is that Union is a socialist nation in transition so there's a never ending list of wrongs that need to be righted. Are liberatory power fantasies inherently chauvinistic?
Its a fair reading of the worldbuilding, I don't think a world has to be perfect to be optimistic in some way (dispossessed is a good example of a non-perfect optimistic take on anarchism). However, my problem with Lancer is the core (metropole)/periphery framing, in which for the core to have all of these good things, endless war on the (underdeveloped) periphery must be waged. That is what makes it chauvinist to me, and not liberatory.
If a megacorp empire "trying to be better" is optimistic and liberatory, then we just have different definitions of optimistic imagination. To me, Lancer is incredibly pessimistic about human societies and feels inspired by end of history thought (ergo, yes we were bad at some point, but we are good now) where tweaking the US empire is all there is to societal development.
Ok, I see where you're coming from better now. Yeah, I think that's a fair take. But to me Lancer has that "Day after the Revolution" quality where the socialist state has inherited a bunch of messed up problems and has to navigate that, and what I find optimistic about the setting is that it even entertains the notion that navigating all that towards a better future is even possible. Union is trying to end the endless war after all, and another huge part of the tension in the setting is the "when, not if" aspect of Union actually living up to it's ideals. But until then it's Space Dengism.
I always found HORUS or Ungratefuls based campaigns much more compelling than Union for these reasons.