The Rise of Dystopian Fiction
This is very true in SF. It&#x27;s hard to think of a recent optimistic SF book. If you exclude all the paranormal stuff (werewolves&#x2F;vampires&#x2F;zombies&#x2F;etc), it&#x27;s even harder.<p>One of the biggest problems we have today is that there&#x27;s no shared vision of an achievable better world. As a society, we don&#x27;t know where to go.<p>Most of the promising ideas from the 1940-1960s have been tried, and most achieved in the US. See the original General Motors Futurama from 1940, which was supposed to be a vision of 1960.[1] This optimism was during the depths of the Great Depression, the next 20 years contained a big war, and yet it all happened. Freeways - did that. Spreading out cities - did that.  Tall buildings spaced far apart in open space - tried that, didn&#x27;t work out well.  Most of those goals were achieved at scale.<p>The 1964 GM Futurama [2] tries to be optimistic, but it totally missed as prediction. Moon bases. Arctic bases. Undersea bases. Roads through jungles built by giant mobile machines. Desalinization plants irrigating the desert. Extreme urban sprawl. &quot;Neither terrain nor distance a deterrent to where men of the city build their homes.&quot; None of that got beyond the prototype stage.  Nobody quite knew where to go from there.<p>In the 1970s, SF had an enthusiasm for big space habitats.  That went nowhere; lift cost to orbit is just too high.<p>Today, nobody is even trying very hard to define a better future.  (Well, Musk talks about colonizing Mars, but, face it, as real estate, Mars sucks. If you could get to Mars for free right now, it wouldn&#x27;t be worth developing.  Few deserts are, even ones with air.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;tAz4R6F0aaY?t=462" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;tAz4R6F0aaY?t=462</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk</a>