Writing optimistic fiction at the end of the world
Finding reasons to be cheerful
I remember the 90s being a safe decade full of growth, entertainment and exciting prospects. I was a teenager in the UK, and everything seemed to be getting better. Tech was still cool and the internet was just emerging as something genuinely brilliant. It felt like the world was heading in the right direction in terms of equality, albeit still very slowly. Societies were becoming more secular, with conflict over religion of all things seeming like a relic of the past. I thought we were on track for our Star Trek utopian future.
This was partly because I was young, naïve, politically ill-informed and privileged. Retrospectively I’ve become aware that the 90s were full of all sorts of deep problems - of course they were. No decade is without its disasters and controversies and prejudices.
At the time, though, the only real fear was that planes might fall out of the sky due to the Millennium Bug. Remember that?
The pivot point in my understanding of the world is 9/11. I realise that global human society is a total mess. I had been too young to really appreciate the tail end of the Cold War, but in the early 2000s my dreams are plagued with nuclear apocalypse. My home town engulfed by flame as a mushroom cloud towered into the sky. I still remember that dream, vividly, as if it were something that had happened.
Two decades of endless wars. Financial crashes. Terrorism.
In the 2010s social media evolves from a remarkable new way to communicate into a psychoactive toxic influencer that warps public perceptions and behaviours. Or was it always like that?
2016 is a big one. America votes to begin dismantling its own democracy. The country I practically worshipped as a child, voluntarily destroying itself. The United Kingdom’s own government implements a referendum so ham-fisted and damaging that we’re still reeling from it. Violent acts of self-harm on nation state scale.
Let’s not forget the planet itself, falling apart around us due to our own actions and inaction. Climate change has been a part of my life from the beginning, but always felt like something the grown-ups would fix. Now I’m a grown-up, and it’s apparent that we’re not up to the task.
A pandemic shuts down the world and kills millions. They’ve happened before, but we all forgot. We are not prepared. We’re already forgetting again.
2022 delivers AI emergence, a good decade-or-two ahead of time. Skynet and Terminator comparisons are inevitable and over-used, but that’s only because those films feel prescient and unnervingly truthful, in and around Arnie and all the explosions. To complete Judgement Day’s vision, Russia brings back the threat of nuclear apocalypse.
I’m 42. The first half of my life was blissful ignorance. The second half has been a raging inferno.
Deep breath.
Let’s have a bit of Aragorn.
I aim to write optimistic speculative fiction. Increasingly, it feels like the fantastical aspect of what I write is not spaceships, dragons, robots or magic, but the presence of hope.
That was 500 words of grim, so let’s see about flipping it around.
While promoting his 2020 book The Ministry of the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson talked repeatedly about the importance of hope in fiction, and science fiction specifically.
“We could deal with it better or worse. And so I wanted to describe how we could deal with it better.” Kim Stanley Robinson in Nautilus magazine
His books have always been about climate, one way or another, and he’s never been afraid of committing to a particular future. His Mars books, written in the 90s, were an entirely convincing exploration of how colonisation could realistically happen. The Ministry of the Future begins only a few years ahead of where we are now. Most of his work will be quickly overtaken by reality.
I used to think that putting hard dates on near-future science fiction was a mistake. Blade Runner and Back to the Future felt diminished to Teenage Me because they got their futures ‘wrong’. We didn’t have flying cars, or androids, or automatically lacing shoes. Better to keep it vague, so that a story didn’t age itself out of relevance.
That wasn’t quite right, though. Novels are points in time. A science fiction novel from the 50s is an amalgam of out-of-date visions and uncanny predictions. Read Asimov today and he has all sorts of interesting things to say about AI and the fall of empires, even though he failed to predict the mobile phone or the microcomputer. Watch Babylon 5 and its vision of the future still seems very possible, despite the 90s show being largely unaware of the impending impact of the internet.
That juxtaposition of retrospective knowledge with the best thinking of the time creates context, which shines a new light on the themes being explored. That’s what science fiction can do so well. Kim Stanley Robinson’s books provide templates and suggestions for the future: if we live up to those expectations, then great - and if not, they change into reminders of what could have been.
Science fiction is inherently hopeful because it tends to depict a future. It might be dystopian, but the continued existence of humanity is itself a message of hope. Even a dystopia has potential for revolution and change. It’s not the end; not yet.
The books I write are purposefully optimistic. Bad things happen to good people, they’re certainly not all happiness and smiles, but the themes and messaging are hopeful, progressive, forward-thinking. That’s what I’m interested in exploring. It definitely feels harder to do now than when I started writing seriously in 2015 - each year the world gets more complex and intimidating. That makes it even more important to explore how it could be better, though, I think.
In 2020 I wrote a book called No Adults Allowed, in which a well-meaning AI wipes out almost all of humanity. It’s still an optimistic book about what might happen next (you can grab it on Amazon). Tales from the Triverse, which I’m serialising on Substack, is a frequently grim scifi detective story in which everything is falling apart: but ultimately it’s going to be about finding a way through that collapse, and figuring out how to carry on.
I think I wrote this article today mainly as a reminder to myself. A prompt to keep going, and that I’m on the right track, and that it’s worth looking to the future with some hope, even as the present remains scary. The trick is then finding the path from here to there.
What’s your favourite optimistic novel?
Thanks for reading. To wrap up, here are some ebook giveaways and promos that might be of interest if you’re looking to add to your ridiculous reading pile:
I find a lot of this optimism in horror as well, IT being my favorite example. Sure, there will be child eating demons from the ancient abyss, but love, loyalty and friendship will defeat it. Similar to the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. The small people win.
I went to the WWII Memorial in Washington DC a couple of years ago. On stone, they had quotes from soldiers and world leaders and thinkers. And what struck me was that it was the ordinary people, farmers and blue collar workers who fought and defeated Hitler. A reminder that ordinary people uphold the world. And it’s in those people, my own friends, family, neighbors and children, that I put my hope.
This is by no means an optimistic novel, but if there's a novel that captures the absolute depth of despair and nihilism it is Neville Shute's "On the Beach". This book rocked my world. Don't read it if you're looking for a good time. I'm mentioning it because it was the book that most accurately captured that sense of terminal despair.
For happy, cheerful books--well, I can't say exactly. There's only two kinds of books--books that I can read to escape, or books that I can read to learn. When I'm not feeling great I spend more time reading books for learning. An escape can be effective as an escape even without being happy. Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers was philosophically interesting and had an expansive world. If the world feels bigger than the story I will typically enjoy it for that reason.