This week on The Sunny Way, we’ve been discussing how science fiction creates the future. By planting seeds of what we and our world and our lifestyles might look like someday soon, sci-fi draws the reader into the future, as surely as the possibility of being an oak tree draws an acorn into its own potential.

While rifling through my newsreader today, I came across a link (via Worldchanging) to a blog post on Futurismic, a site focused on near-future science fiction. Writer James Boone Dryden writes that current sci-fi focuses too much on technological breakthrough:

What do science fiction writers think of global conflict? What happens when the world falls into chaos after environmental collapse? Where will the world be if we eradicate ourselves with biological warfare? There’s no grand technological breakthrough that lies at the heart of these types of stories. No, there stories that have been told many times, but they’re present, and they’re modern, and they’re pertinent: they are human, and that is what makes them so profound. Socially conscious writing is important, in my opinion, because it begins to bring back to science fiction what it began as: a way of questioning that which is potentially dangerous.

I agree with him that science fiction packs the greatest punch when it focuses on humanity more than technology. (This is perhaps why, even though I love so much sci-fi, I remain a low-level geek—long descriptions of gadgets and processes and feats of engineering make me tired.)

But what I don’t understand is this—why does Dryden equate socially conscious, human-oriented science fiction with dystopian visions? Why is it more important to explore potential dangers than possibilities?

I understand that, in order to be interesting, stories must contain conflict. But I think it’s vastly more interesting to explore future problems, the ones that will arise once we’ve solved the current crop.

Like Uli, I watched Star Trek as a child with my eyes wide, contemplating the possibilities—just imagine living in space, making food on a replicator, working as part of a collaborative team with a worthy leader! The idea of living in that way ignited my little neurons like nothing else ever had. The post-apocalyptic novels my dad left on the back of the toilet certainly never had that effect—they just made me a pint-sized insomniac.

Look at the headlines of any paper, magazine, or website that covers “the news.” We are marinating in dystopian stories all the time. But when I read the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson or Island by Aldous Huxley—stories that trust human beings to figure it out, stories that describe in tangible details what life can be like once our current problems are solved—I can feel what it would be like to live in those realities. And wanting to live in them inspires me to want to create them.

Enough with dystopia. We’ve had enough bad news to last till the Vulcans get here. Let’s start creating a new story, where we figure out how to live and interact in new and better ways. And let the science fiction writers, the great techno-optimists of our culture, lead the way.

(image by hwguth via flickr.)