Science Fiction

13580 readers

1 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Tenthrow@lemmy.world

Is Science Fiction Inherently Hopeful? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 4 months ago by automaticdoor75@sopuli.xyz to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I read a lot of Harlan Ellison (worked on The Outer Limits, 80's Twilight Zone, Babylon 5), and I was wondering what people thought of this quote from him:

[S]cience fiction is the only 100% hopeful fiction. That is to say, inherent in the form is, "There will be a tomorrow". If you read a science fiction story, it says, "This will happen tomorrow". Now that’s very positive, that’s very pragmatic, "We’ll be here tomorrow. We may be unhappy, we may be all living like maggots, but we’ll be here." So that means it’s 100% positive.

Ellison has even said that his short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is optimistic, because in the climax, there is still room for self-sacrifice and defiance to authority.

I guess it comes down to whether you think a bleak future is better than no future at all.

Shameless plug for my work if you like Ellison or want to learn more: https://ndhfilms.com/ellison

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don’t know if I’d say “inherently hopeful.” Sturgeon’s approach to science fiction was “ask the next question” which is sometimes not so hopeful. I do think a lot of golden age and even new wave (which Ellison defined) is very hopeful. I think genres like cyberpunk and more modern interpretations of dystopian science fiction explore less hopeful situations. You also have stuff like “The Heat Death of the Universe” by Pamela Zoline which could be evaluated from many perspectives on hope.

[–] felbane@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Okay, that Zoline story kinda broke me for about half an hour.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 2 points 4 months ago

It’s a really powerful story and shows up a lot in SF academia. I was introduced to through Dr James Gunn’s histories.