i was thinking maybe we’re more optimistic about how fast society can advance than in the past and thats being reflected in our media. like Asimov stuff vs star trek vs cyberpunk, bladerunner, type stuff being set like 50-100 years from now instead of like, the year 3000+. maybe im wrong
People predicted that we’d have moon colonies by now and even be mostly on the way to making Mars ones. Instead, we basically gave up and now pay billionaires to go to space while making fun of and snubbing our favorite icons like William Shatner.
The idea that we even want to go to space is dead, at least in political terms. Irl, we get to be slaves until the earth ends within our lifetimes, making us dream of like socialism or at least less cost gouging in our near future. No wonder we turn to fantasy settings like LOTR and Harry Potter rather than sci-fi - the former is fun but the latter becomes increasingly depressing when you try to mesh futuristic technology with what we know of human morality today.
Tbf, the dream is not dead, it’s just… postponed for awhile while we sort things out on earth.
I know there are some scifi stories that have addressed this exact moral conundrum, like the Elysium movie (supposedly a spriritual successor to Disrict 9). I didn’t watch it from beginning to end, but I recall it bringing up the idea of poor people dealing with what’s left of Earth and the wealthy living in colonies beyond Earth. Something like that.
If you enjoy that, I highly recommend the series Altered Carbon, as it takes those concepts and pumps them up on steroids.
The Rich live literally forever - technically that’s like illegal or whatever but meh they exist above the law, and I mean as in literally above the law, where they exist in sky castles floating above the Earth, those who haven’t migrated to the stars that is.
And occasionally they get bored and do things like hire prostitutes - not for sex, mind you, but to murder them. What thrill could be more enjoyable than something nonconsensual, to someone who has the power to extract consent from more or less anyone at any time?
And if their bodies ever die, they just 3D print a new one and keep going, using the latest backup of their mind drive.
The Poors ofc can afford none of this, so it’s like the Elves in Lord Of The Rings who are immortal, immune to poisons, and have magic, compared to the short lives of humans that bloom for a handful of decades and then are gone. In LOTR btw, I don’t know if you know the secret backstory of that, but elves are “attuned” to the Earth - and so like when they die their souls travel across the sea to the West, spend iirc one century without a body for purification, then are allotted a new body and keep right on going, on the same Earth just on the Western rather than Eastern continent.
Whereas humans were meant to flower and then die, and then go somewhere else that was such a closely guarded secret that even the essentially angel generals were not told, just “the next world”. I feel like that’s an essential tidbit bc otherwise the elves are flat better than humans in every way - and it’s bc they are, at least in terms of being highly optimized for this current world. Humans are so pathetic in comparison only bc they are optimized more for the next one, although nobody (even Gandalf, or even Sauron) knows quite what that means.
Though Sauron was aware of at least this much, hence when he told the humans that the Creator, Eru Ilúvatar, had made them with the express point that they would die quickly, he was lying - not as in positively stating falsehoods but rather in selectively choosing the truths that he wanted them to be aware of. And then by getting them angry, he got them to do as he pleased.
Doesn’t this sound familiar? “BuT bOtH siDeS sAmE tHo”?!
Sci Fi and fantasy has so much to teach us. Like not to be gullible assholes.
And maybe we will go to space? But when that happens it won’t be anything at all like Star Trek, and rather until we get some shit sorted out, it will be more like Spaceship Troopers or Altered Carbon. Or unfortunately quite likely, Star Wars.
I’m not very well-read so my opinion comes from a select well-known big hit novels/series, but mostly film/tv and also a vague, surface-level knowledge and understanding of themes, settings, etc of some of the important works I haven’t read
IMO a lot of earlier scifi was conceiving of possibilities or coming up with weird ideas and building a world and narrative around them, and sometimes you can’t make a reasonable way for this to occur from where we are in our reality. So you do “a galaxy far far away” or 10,191 or something so far out that earth is a long-forgotten planet, and now you are doing something more similar to high fantasy world building, and can do whatever you want.
Versus a later generation of sci-fi stories that are cautionary tales about things that could become invented, and how they would integrate and affect our current societies over a (relatively) small number of years.
I’m on my phone so I don’t want to completely rewrite what I just wrote, but I do want to clarify/correct that this is not actually “earlier” vs “later” - there are examples of both all throughout scifi history - but perhaps what has entered the mainstream via adaptations, smash hits, cult classic, etc. pathways. Basically it depends if the author is writing a cautionary tale or metaphor, developing a conceptual & epic universe, telling an allegorical story, or whatever else - and then oftentimes popculture dictates which ones people become familiar with.
Anyway it’s super early and as I said I’m on my phone, so I hope these thoughts are coherent and at least vaguely interesting to you. I found your question thought provoking and wanted to respond. Cheers
Sorry. I don’t mean to respond to everyone’s engaging comments, but just wanted to tell you that this is a very interesting point I hadn’t even thought of. The difference between grand, epic high fantasy sci-fi versus more grounded, urban storytelling. And even then, some of the more notorious franchises take both approaches.
Eh, anyway, I don’t want to regurgitate the thoughtful points you already made, so I won’t. Thanks for sharing. Best!
I don’t know, 40K is pretty far in the future.
The good stuff happens pretty quick though, as seen in the documentary Event Horizon.
hits blunt
No, I don’t think you’re wrong at all. Another semi-recent game that took a perhaps too optimistic view of how quickly our tech would advance was Detroit: Become Human. It came out back in 2018. I recall how the fandom (myself included) was kinda weirded out about the setting of that game, which was only 2038. So within a roughly 20 year time gap, the game presumes that our current tech in then 2018 would advance so far and fast by just 2038.
It’d only be realistic if the y2038 bug temporarily took out all the androids because they’re running Debian 10 or something.
LMAO 😂 okay, but does it count if they’re running a distro that’s more bleeding edge?
I think it depends on the content you expose yourself to, we did get Dune, Foundation, and a bunch of disappointing Star Wars, but yeah, otherwise it does feel like some sci fi lately has had settings or plots that didn’t feel foreign in terms of era
In Hindu mythology I guess the current age ends in 428,899 CE so that’s another data point for a longer speculative future from the distant past
