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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it can be broken down into setting vs. the outlook. 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.
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.
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 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, which is not on that list, but he is careful not to make any a classic utopia.
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 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.
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)
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.
