I’ve been loving my hard scifi recently. But I feel like it’s begun to demonstrate how much easier it is to imagine all the ways things could go wrong. If fiction is how we lay an outline for the future, I wonder if anyone can recommend some more uplifting stories to me? Rather than a cautionary tale I would appreciate a story with a setting where the author dares to risk being wrong about what’s right for us. Naturally this may simply be the setting for a somewhat unrelated story, but I’m curious what sorts of literature comes to mind that falls into this category.
Might I suggest Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, my favorite book. The structure is like a Kim Stanley Robinson novel where there’s a group of characters but the real character is the birth of a post scarcity society, namely the one in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
I loved it because it answered the problem I had with anarchism: what happens when a psychopath decides to take your shit? The answer is–in a post scarcity society–you walk away. You can always make new shit, better shit, grander shit.
I don’t want to get into spoilers, but there was one thing that always was bugging me about this premise. Like, what if X situation happens? Wouldn’t you know it, X situation happens. He interrogates the premise to its logical conclusion.
I would kill to see this novel made into a decent TV series.