You know honestly there seem to be a lot more dystopian science fiction works out there, like Cyberpunk is actually very dystopian since the entire world is violent, dangerous, people basically eat bland kibbles for food, and real food is actually expensive and only rich corpos eat that every so often.
I liked Star Trek a lot because it’s so uplifting. Humanity went through a period of dystopian times but then when the Vulcans arrived they were uplifted and formed the United Federation of Planets where poverty is eliminated, and everyone is free to do what they need to do to better humanity. But knowing human nature, regardless of how cheaply we can produce stuff, there will always be poverty because human greed knows no bounds. So post scarcity society will never happen. Scarcity will always be enforced or created somehow.
So I can see why there are so many more dystopian sci fi stories out there. Star Wars is actually a dystopian sci fi work because they are always at war, and there is general misery all over the galaxy.
I guess people loved Star Trek because it shows what we could do if we just got rid of our animal brains… But in Star Trek you won’t have cybernetic augmentations… because it is illegal in Star Trek. Before you said Borg, they are not UFP.
Most sci-fi is utter trash. It’s hard to find the little gems buried in the mountain of shite. IMO those tend to be neither utopian nor dystopian; they’re just stories, set in some alternate reality. I really like Ursula K LeGuin’s work.
I despise the science fiction genre. The only film I like is the original Blade Runner. Could never make my way through more than 10 pages of an Earthsea or Dune book.
I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings, but can’t say I’ve read any other fantasy. I bought the complete Game of Thrones series, and chucked it in the bin after a few pages. Total fucking pulp. Even Steven King is better than that tripe, and that’s saying a lot.
The Culture series, by Iain M Banks is mostly utopian, though he’s got to work at the fringes to get stories.
Accurately described as “space hippies with nukes.”
Problem with Utopias, as Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed or Always Coming Home, is it’s hard to make Utopia interesting.
Most sci-fi isn’t sci-fi, in that the “science” bit is laughable. I appreciate Asimov and Clarke mostly because they gets the science right, although their stories can be hit-and-miss.
Iain M Banks does OK in that regard too, although I’ve only read one of his books and it was a bit too woke for my taste. A big turnoff for me is when authors write their stories around “what would happen if my political/sociological views were actually correct?” instead of putting together a somewhat-different world and letting the story evolve in a believable direction given the constraints and assumptions that have been set up. LeGuin manages to explore the fringes of sociology (and technology) without going all preachy.
