Neal Stephenson, science fiction writer and author of the totally awesome Cryptonomicon, has been making the rounds asking scifi writers to stop being so pessimistic. Stephenson laments the demise of the innovative, hopeful vision sort of scifi that imagines big things and inspires scientists to figure out how to really create them.
In an essay in The World Policy Journal, he talks about a speech he gave at the 2011 Future Tense conference. He believes that scifi is still relevant for two reasons:
1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious.
2. The Hieroglyph Theory. Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs—simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.
So as not to be all talk, Stephenson has launched the Hieroglyph Project to encourage scifi writers to think big and think optimistic. The project will be publishing a scifi anthology in 2014 with new stories about scientists working on big projects.
Scifi has always had a dystopian pocket in it, but I think Stephenson is right that is has grown very large and overshadows other possibilities. While I have enjoyed my share of dystopian scifi, I do really enjoy the stories that have big ideas in them. So much of what older scifi writers have dreamed up has become reality. Granted, I still don’t have my flying car and we have yet to colonize Mars, but that’s ok. I am an optimistic person and so I like Stephenson’s optimism. And in scifi the possibilities of science are only limited by the writer’s imagination. I am looking forward to that anthology but I hope Stephenson’s Hieroglyph Project does something in the mean time. 2014 is a long time to wait.
I’m a huge science fiction fan, and while I had not thought in these terms previously, I realize that I do prefer novels with a more optimistic view. I love the innovation, the imagination, the hopefulness in spite of the odds quality to these novels. I’m going to check out the Hieroglyph project– thanks, Stefanie!
I’m with you Jenclair! I don’t want all sunshine and roses and for the books to be unrealistically optimistic, but if all we can imagine for our future is doom and gloom then that’s all we are going to get.
Very cool. I was recently reading Asimov, and the optimism jumped out at me. I hadn’t even realized what I’d been missing from my sci-fi all these years.
Yes! Not that Asimov’s worlds are perfect but there is the belief that problems can be solved even when things are dire.
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From childhood I was fascinated with two things — the distant past and the distant future. I loved reading about Egypt and the Bible times, and also about dinosaurs. Then I would leave this for a bit and get entranced by sci-fi and outer space sort of themes in my reading. But not until reading this insightful blog posting here have I realized how much of it [sci-fi] IS dystopian. You, and Neal Stephenson are exactly right. Where are the optimistic sci-fi books? They are definitely in the minority, I guess. I’d LOVE to read a great sci-fi novel where the world significantly improves even if that means the need to inhabit another planet or something. Along these lines, I think of a really fascinating sci-fi book by C.S, Lewis. I’ve read it several times — it’s called Out of the Silent Planet. It’s fabulous. This guy travels to a planet called Malacandra where everything is beautiful and peaceful — BUT — the human visitor seeks to exploit the resources found there — in other words, introduces evil into this paradise.
This Hieroglyph Project sounds wonderful — I will watch for it.
I keep meaning to read Lewis’s scifi but haven’t managed it yet. As for optimistic scifi, I don’t want everything to be perfectly happy with all the loose ends tied up, heck, even the Star Trek TV show and movies have villains while remaining optimistic. But the world doesn’t always have to end up like The Road. Now and then it would be nice to have a story in which we save ourselves with science and technology instead of destroy the planet. maybe we should get writing, eh Cip?
I’m with you. I love a good dystopia, not so much because they suggest scary future possibilities but because they’re often a way of commenting on the present, but nevertheless I don’t want that to be the ONLY thing scifi does. All the stories, please
Exactly Nymeth, all the stories please. And while the (present) future might look bleak there is no chance for it to be otherwise unless we imagine that it can be better.
Wrestling with this issue now, in the first few days of pulling together a sci fi novel.
It may be difficult to write an optimistic science fiction story because the conflict risks a reader’s boredom. I don’t know personally how to keep an optimistic story interesting. Darker stories are inherently interesting. End of the world? Save us! We failed? Our future is bleak. So many things can go wrong … surely only a few can go right.
I’ve kind of settled on bringing the dark and offering a ray of light at the end. We’ll see how it goes.
An interesting view point you have John, that optimistic scifi risks boring the reader. I don’t think optimisim means there is no conflict. Octavia Butler has a number of what I would call optimistic books and none of them come close to boring. Ursula Le Guin as well. Robert Heinlein can sometimes be gloomy, but for the most part his books are optimistic. I wonder, is it harder to have a positive outlook these days than it used to be? Good luck with your own book!
I hear you, Stefanie. Perhaps it’s actually harder to come up with an entertaining and optimistic plot … at least, it is for me. Thanks for the good words.
Hopefully sci fi–I like the idea. I don’t read much science fiction, and I do like dystopian stories, but I like what Stephenson says. I have his books on my reading pile as a matter of fact. As yet unread. I wonder how optimistic they are?
I have a good many of Stephenson’s book too. They are so big and fat that they aren’t my first choice to pick up when I am casting around for something new. I have read Cryptonomicon though and liked it very much and think it falls on the optimistic side since it is about codes and codebreaking for the “good guys.” I think his other books tend to be upbeat too. Bookman keeps telling me I have to read Snowcrash which has a Samurai pizza delivery guy in it or something
Overall I prefer optimistic science fiction and you would certainly think from most of the books you see on the shelves that this is not the direction many writers feel like taking. Which makes sense. We’ve been in a long run of very bad times and I expect to see writing reflect that, but now it has been long enough that I too would like to see a stronger turn towards forward thinking optimistic visions in fiction, particularly science fiction. I can enjoy a good dystopic novel or film. Stylistically and story-wise they can be very engaging. But the majority of novels I consider favorites have more of an optimistic spin, even if there is some big bad “empire” looming in the background.