I’ve been thinking about how a lot of science fiction portrays futures that feel far more optimistic than the world we actually seem to be heading toward.
In real life we’re dealing with many simultaneous, compounding crises: AI being deployed in ways that cannibalize society under capitalism, an ever increasing cost of living with fixed wages, declining birth rates (people replacing children with pets/mascots), pollution, mass extinction of biodiversity, climate change, etc. It feels less like “one big problem” and more like death by a thousand cuts.
By contrast, in most SF stories there are usually one or two central issues to grapple with—an evil AI, an empire, climate collapse—but rarely the overwhelming stack of interlocking failures we see in reality. Even dystopias often feel strangely cleaner and more legible than real life.
Is there a known psychological explanation for this? Something like optimism bias, positivity bias, planning fallacy, or cognitive overconfidence, where we systematically underestimate complexity and overestimate humanity’s ability to coordinate and improve? Or is it more about narrative constraints and what the human mind can comfortably model?
Curious if there’s research, theory, or even just good takes on why imagined futures so often look “better” than the present.
I suggest Peter Watts.
Writers try to build tight narratives. Portraying a polycrisis is hard. It’s even harder if you want to focus on one or two factors. Decent editors try to cut extraneous stuff out of stories, so they’ll try to trim out factors that aren’t necessary to the main story arc.
And then you need to consider the audience. Can a writer portray a polycrisis in a way that viewers or readers will stick with? Or will the audience get tired of a laundry list of problems?
I suggest Peter Watts because he writes (wrote?) good genre fiction that’s depressing and includes multiple reasons to be depressed.