# Dark predictions of the future: Sci-fi is depressing **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 19, 2013, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141 "2013-04-19T16:02:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2013, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/21 "2013-04-19T20:57:39Z")
> [@Recusant](#): > > The problem isn’t that Sci-fi is depressing, it’s that, currently, depressing is what people want. Take a look at nearly all the mainstream media being released now- the bright and cheerful have uniformly given way to the dark and gritty; people don’t like it unless it’s bitter and sad. The truly creepy part is how vigorously it’s defended; take a look at some of the posts in this very thread and you’ll see what I mean. > > The good news is, it’s just another fad. It’ll pass. It’s been around for a long, long time however. And it isn’t just the audience; the audience gets fed gloom even if that isn’t what it wants. The creators themselves are often infected with the idea that something isn’t Art unless it is dark and cynical and depressing. This is an especial problem for collaborative works I understand, since it increases the chance there’s going to be one such contributor who drags everything down in gloom. Even if everyone else writes a cheerful, optimistic story, _they’ll_ throw is some horrible disaster or atrocity that yanks the whole storyline down into darkness and leaves the would-be optimists stuck working with the wreckage. I recall one writer who contributed to a shared world anthology as far back as the 80s complain about that, and used that to explain why they all seemed to end up so universally dark. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2013, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/22 "2013-04-19T21:14:00Z")
> [@SleuFeets](#): > > Can anyone name a sci-fi /fiction environment in the last 6 years that wasn’t devastating? > > Seems intentional… 6 years is rather arbitrary, isn’t it, vs 10 or 15 or 20 years? There hasn’t actually been that much, sci-fi wise, produced on television in the last 6 years, but here goes. Doctor Who fits the bill, I guess. Sure, there’s conflict, but it doesn’t present a fundamentally devastating future. Some bad, to be sure, but also some good. Stargate: Atlantis had conflict and Earth in potential danger but no real harm done on Earth. Stargate: Universe wasn’t fundamentally pessimistic, either, about the universe. Sure, there’s war and conflict, but life proceeds and there are wonders and such. Eureka isn’t particularly devastating in its portrayal of the world. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_the\_Immortal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6de8d8/32.png) [@Max\_the\_Immortal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_the_Immortal)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2013, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/23 "2013-04-19T21:46:42Z")
> [@Arrogance\_Ex\_Machina](#): > > I like the way the Culture books deal with this - there is utopia, but the interesting stories happen at its fringe where it meets other civilizations. Only the few chosen ones are involved in conflict with most of the citizens doomed to live a life of mostly carefree fun. Not only that, but the books are often set centuries apart. In the interval, it’s trillions of people living in a utopia where there’s no conflict or suffering that would make a good story. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2013, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/24 "2013-04-19T21:55:07Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > Isaac Asimov famously set out to bury the **Frankenstein** idea, building short stories and novels around the idea that we’d of course program robots to never ever EVER kill anybody, and to obediently follow all instructions until and unless that _“never ever EVER kill anybody”_ thing comes up, and so on, and so on, because we can and would solve that problem in advance. > > And then, as someone – possibly Asimov himself – noted, the guy just couldn’t help but write it so they plausibly rise up against people anyway. Asimov notes in his autobiography that he wrote after two major writers had already published “good robot” stories, Eando Binder’s “I, Robot” and Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy.” The field was already swinging that way under John W. Campbell, and it’s Campbell who suggested the three laws to Asimov. The important takeaway from this is not whether Asimov was original or not - he wasn’t and didn’t claim to be - but that the pulp era of science fiction before the Campbellian Golden Age was doom, gloom, monsters, and dystopia. Campbell himself had written major dystopias under the name of Don A. Stuart for the pulps. Hardly any science fiction in the 1930s was set in what’s been called the “consensus future” that culminated in the Jetsons. Golden Age _Astounding_ had a more optimistic viewpoint but that wasn’t universal by any means and it didn’t last all that long into the 1950s. Look at the some of the most famous titles - _Fahrenheit 451_, _The Man in the High Castle_, _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ - all set in dystopias of varying kinds. Then things got really gloomy in the 60s and 70s. Roddenberry was reacting to his times by making \*Star Trek \*the opposite of what everybody else was doing. In so many words, there was never a time when science fiction was optimistic. The consensus future world was generated by newspapers, magazines, and books in popular science writing. People now associate it wrongly with science fiction because people know less about science fiction history than they do about science history, fiction history, or history history. And that’s an incredibly low bar. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2013, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/25 "2013-04-19T21:55:59Z")
Saying that science fiction today is more depressing than 7 to 10 years ago is looking over a rather short timeline. Science fiction as a genre goes back to the 1920’s, at least, and there are lots of earlier isolated examples. There have been lots of variations in how optimistic or pessimistic science fiction has been over those ninety years or so. Furthermore, if you want to know how depressing or not science fiction is at any time, it would help if you looked at other media, like books. ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2013, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/26 "2013-04-19T23:20:40Z")
I think it can be broken down into setting vs. [the outlook.](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism) The setting can be grimdark as hell but as a whole still be optimistic in showing the power of people to come together and solve problems and all that corny jazz. I find happy endings more satisfying if the protagonists had to go through hell to earn it. People say It’s a Wonderful Life is uplifting, but it’s about a guy who gets shit on his entire life, all his dreams are crushed, and then he tries to kill himself. And wasn’t one of the first utopias Plato’s Republic, where there’s a rigid class system, society is ruled by philosopher-kings, and the state manipulates the states around it to fight each other until they’re all dead? I guess that could’ve been uplifting back then, but sounds like it could easily be 1984 with a twist. > [@Recusant](#): > > The good news is, it’s just another fad. It’ll pass. If people enjoying depressing fiction is a fad it’s an awfully long one, going from the Greek tragedies through Shakespeare, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, to the modern day. I’m not exactly a sci-fi buff but other than Star Trek I can’t even really think of that much squeaky clean sci-fi material from back then. Mostly how aliens are going to kick the crap out of us or how our environmental contamination/radiation will create giant monsters to punish us for our ignorance or general “WHAT HATH SCIENCE WROUGHT!” aesops. ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2013, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/27 "2013-04-19T23:49:50Z")
[The Time Machine (1895)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine#Plot): > [@](#): > > In the new narrative, the Time Traveller tests his device with a journey that takes him to 802,701 A.D., where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings, doing no work and having a frugivorous diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline, and he speculates that they are a peaceful communist society, the result of humanity conquering nature with technology, and subsequently evolving to adapt to an environment in which strength and intellect are no longer advantageous to survival. > > Returning to the site where he arrived, the Time Traveller is shocked to find his time machine missing, and eventually works out that it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure with heavy doors, locked from the inside, which resembles a Sphinx. Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Within their dwellings he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutish light-fearing Morlocks. Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores the Morlock tunnels, learning that they feed on the Eloi. His revised analysis is that their relationship is not one of lords and servants but of livestock and ranchers. The Time Traveller theorizes that intelligence is the result of and response to danger; with no real challenges facing the Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of Man at its peak. And: > [@](#): > > The deleted text recounts an incident immediately after the Traveller’s escape from the Morlocks. He finds himself in the distant future of an unrecognisable Earth, populated with furry, hopping herbivores. He stuns or kills one with a rock, and upon closer examination realises they are probably the descendants of humans/Eloi/Morlocks. A gigantic, centipede-like arthropod approaches and the Traveller flees into the next day, finding that the creature has apparently eaten the tiny humanoid. The Easton Press edition of the novel restores this deleted segment. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/28 "2013-04-20T00:16:15Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Nonsense. It’s just that in fiction utopias are boring, while dystopias can be interesting. I don’t think it’s inevitable, though. Dystopias _can_ be boring; and utopias _can_ be interesting, given enough imagination and insight. And interesting stories, with plenty of conflict, can be played out in all sorts of different settings. ---
**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/29 "2013-04-20T00:27:53Z")
Of course, the _really_ cynical answer? A dystopian setting is cheaper and easier to film. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/30 "2013-04-20T01:40:55Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > I don’t think it’s inevitable, though. Dystopias _can_ be boring; and utopias _can_ be interesting, given enough imagination and insight. And interesting stories, with plenty of conflict, can be played out in all sorts of different settings. If you think that, then name an interesting utopia. I can’t think of one that I personally found interesting. There are, to my sorrow, not many major utopias I haven’t read, mostly because I’ve taken courses on them. I checked Wikipedia and its [list of utopias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopias#List_of_utopian_literature) is just plain weird. _Animal Farm_?!?!?! Maybe one of the lesser known ones has some interest. The closest readable variation is probably Kim Stanley Robinson’s [Three Californias Trilogy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Californias_Trilogy), which is not on that list, but he is careful not to make any a classic utopia. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/31 "2013-04-20T06:29:42Z")
I think it was Harlan Ellison who once said something like “Every work of fiction set in the future, no matter how bleak, is optimistic. The author assumes a future with humans.” ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 7:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/32 "2013-04-20T07:17:57Z")
> [@Odesio](#): > > I think it was Harlan Ellison who once said something like “Every work of fiction set in the future, no matter how bleak, is optimistic. The author assumes a future with humans.” Good point. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 10:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/33 "2013-04-20T10:36:40Z")
Good comments. The fact is, SciFi is a product of the Western mindset, which came about in 1492. Implicit in it is the idea of progress-something that was missing from the medieval mind. So modern science fiction has within it some big assumptions-the idea that human will evolve, that technology will advance, education will improve our lot. All of this would have made no sense to a European in 1300 AD. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/34 "2013-04-20T11:44:32Z")
> [@SleuFeets](#): > > Can anyone name a sci-fi /fiction environment in the last 6 years that wasn’t devastating? > > Seems intentional… Does Iron Sky count, or is pulp done by Finns too out there? It’s just too pulpy to be depressing, grey and black palette or not. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/35 "2013-04-20T18:48:57Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > If you think that, then name an interesting utopia. Why the false dichotomy? Why can’t we just have a future that is as good as now, at the very least? Eureka seems to be the only one still in existence. Even flipping Star Trek is now going “Into Darkness”! As for positive future shows, here’s a list of a few off the top of my head: Star Trek (all series but some DS9) Stargate (both series) Quantum Leap Knight Rider Pretty much any scifi cartoon series Buck Rogers Lost in Space (other than the main crew, being lost and all) I’m sure there are more. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/36 "2013-04-20T19:10:41Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > Why the false dichotomy? Why can’t we just have a future that is as good as now, at the very least? Eureka seems to be the only one still in existence. Even flipping Star Trek is now going “Into Darkness”! If we’re asking why, why can’t we have some reading comprehension and maybe even learn the difference between the word that was actually used - utopias - and a future “as good as now”? Heck, maybe even learn the difference between television shows and books. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/37 "2013-04-20T19:24:40Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > …Buck Rogers… Wasn’t most of the Earth is a barren wasteland inhabited by savages and the Earth Goverment depended on aid from other planets? ---
**Author:** ![The\_Peyote\_Coyote](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/5f8ce5/32.png) [@The\_Peyote\_Coyote](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Peyote_Coyote)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141/38 "2013-04-20T19:39:23Z")
The best utopia I can think of is in Robert Bloch’s short story “The World Timer.” One of Bloch’s best. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dark-predictions-of-the-future-sci-fi-is-depressing/656141.md?page=1)