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There are a myriad of reasons we are on the shitty timeline, but a non-insignificant one to me is how terrible classic sci-fi writers were at writing humans rather than planks with faces drawn on them that periodically state the author’s views on something. The focus of sci-fi on massive space operations and colonization of other planets from the beginning was warped by a dis-interest from sci-fi writers in the positive potentialities within the human psyche that are outside the grasp of cynical structures of power and control, the part of ourselves that just wants to tend a garden in their backyard and nothing more.
I think this has lead to very hollow visions of the future that were well suited to becoming the basis for people like Elon Musk’s world view. Sci-fi looked to the stars and tried to see into the future while ignoring the one thing we can count on about the future, humans will still be humans.
(I know this is a generalization and isn’t true as a rule)
That and also Modern Western Sci-Fi tends to wave away all the hard parts of engineering, politics, and economics when it comes to actually doing the thing.
How did Heinlein assume we'd colonize the Moon in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"? Oh, don't worry. We just bootstrapped ourselves up there Ayn Rand style.
How did Kirk and Picard and Janeway find themselves on Galaxy Class Starships traversing the deep corners of distant space? Well, first we did a quick global super-holocaust because of genetically engineered racism (don't ask the finer details of that) and then we just... got better and turned Earth into a Utopia.
Maybe you buy into the more Posadist vision of First Contact, where a few starving refugees accidentally broke the luminal barrier with a rocket they assembled from spare parts. But the truly hard parts - the laboriously assembly and re-learning of scientific knowledge by each new generation, the failed bluesky research projects and dead-end engineering projects, the accumulation of trust between individuals within a state and states within the world necessary to mobilize materials and labor for these grand mega-projects - largely get breezed over.
An epic spaceship battle with the Trisolarians is, after all, far sexier to put on screen than a bunch of scientists grappling with the mathematics behind three spheres floating through space. So the old Asimov-style of SciFi as a series of entertaining word problems falls away, to be replaced by the Science Fantasy of Space Wizards and Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.
How did Kirk and Picard and Janeway find themselves on Galaxy Class Starships traversing the deep corners of distant space? Well, first we did a quick global super-holocaust because of genetically engineered racism (don’t ask the finer details of that) and then we just… got better and turned Earth into a Utopia.
Nah actually a crazy guy named Zefram Cochrane creates the first warp drive on earth using an old ICBM as a platform to build his spaceship, he is basically just doing it as a crazy entrepreneur trying to make money. When he launches it to test it for the first time, the use of the warp drive alerts the Vulcans, who come and investigate. Generally, Vulcans did not have a policy of interfering with other planets that had not yet become spacefaring, but since Earth now had developed the warp drive the Vulcans established first contact and then helped usher Earth into a new space age. If it wasn't for the Vulcans, it is likely that Zefram Cochrane would have still been moderately successful but it is unlikely that the Federation would have arose complete with massive starships.
In the silly mirror universe where everyone is evil what happens is that instead of Zefram shaking hands with the Vulcans when they land and make first contact he and the other people in the camp shoot the Vulcans and steal their technology, eventually building an authoritarian galactic empire called the Terran Empire.
An epic spaceship battle with the Trisolarians is, after all, far sexier to put on screen than a bunch of scientists grappling with the mathematics behind three spheres floating through space. So the old Asimov-style of SciFi as a series of entertaining word problems falls away, to be replaced by the Science Fantasy of Space Wizards and Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.
I don't want scifi to only be about the mathematics of spheres though.
I also don't want my scifi to be just about Space Wizards (ughh Jedi and Sith are the most boring part of Star Wars by far), Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.... I want my scifi to be about people and the positive capacity of humanity. When we look to imagined futures they should remind us that we have the agency of choice to pick what the future is, and that is totally possible for us to pick kindness and empathy. That is why Star Trek is so much more interesting and compelling than 99% of scifi, because while sometimes it is grim it is always concerned with the choices we make and imagining a future where we make better choices. Outside of Star Trek, the feeling of scifi has overwhelming been dystopian futures and though there is good reason to imagine dystopian futures as cautionary tales, I think they are also a drug that when overdosed on makes us believe dystopian futures are inveitable.
For example I wanted to love the scifi show Tales From The Loop, the appeal of Simon Stålenhag's visions of alternate realities is undeniably captivating. However, all the characters seemed to act like complete sociopaths, the episode that did me in was where the two kids have their bodies swapped and kid who is switched into the body of the kid who has a much nicer life refuses to switch back. He goes on to just live that kids life presumably as an impostor... and I just... like I don't even remotely believe 99.99% of humanity would make that choice (especially as a child who hasn't even become comfortable in their own body yet). Some humans might, but that has far more to do with how abnormal those people are than it does to do with how technology might corrupt us with its power. Same thing with a lot of black mirror, it is this repeating vision of dystopian futures that just assumes that everybody will behave like sociopaths and it gets really tiring to me not the least because it fundamentally undermines the plausibility of the imagined future at a basic level. It subconsciously teaches us to deny the possibility of more positive futures since our imagination is a bayesian space defined and bounded by visions of the future provided to us by culture.
I don’t want scifi to only be about the mathematics of spheres though
Neither do I. But there's a lot of Sci Fi to explore that doesn't require you to invent to teleporter or the laser sword.