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.
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.