The Future is Always "Worse"

In My Humble Opinion
1

Another thread on “Were the any ways in which “the olden days” were better than today?” got me thinking about how in most science fiction, the “future” always seems to be portrayed as a sort of dystopia, regardless of how wonderful or advanced their technology is. Why got me thinking about how we romanticize the past, while the future always seems to look “worse”. Like, short of living in the ruins of a nuclear war, do the people in the story think their world is a “dystopia”?

Would someone from the 1940s look at where I live in modern Hoboken NJ as some kind of weird futuristic nightmare? What with the impossibly tall glass boxes across the river crowding out the Empire State Building and modern luxury condos literally built on top of the still-visible ruins of old piers used to dock ships for sending soldiers over to Europe?

So here are a couple of thoughts on why the future (real or fictional) always seems to look like some sort of techno-dystopian nightmare:

-Technology enables the building of larger and larger structures more efficiently. This has the effect of creating buildings and other constructs that appear out of the scale we are used to and often “cleaner” and more utilitarian. Compare the designs of the Empire State Building, original World Trade Center and the modern Freedom Tower.

-Warfare. Technology enables weaponry to have greater range and accuracy and firepower. While this makes it safer for the soldiers operating them, increasing the “stand off range” of weapons tends to make warfare more impersonal and random while at the same time more destructive. i.e. a World War 2 dogfight with machineguns, compared to a missile duel between MIGs and F-14s, compared to an operator in Nevada piloting a drone in the Middle East.

-Improvements in data collection, monitoring and surveillance tends to become intrusive. Even if it is convenient.

-More people. Populations natural increase. Just having more people packed into a place is off-putting. More people also means more competition and greater environmental impact.

-Less people. If you don’t have more people, then chances are something horrible happened to those people (war, plague, etc).

-Automation makes people soft and stupid. A hundred years ago, a gentleman knew how to hunt, fish, chop wood, build a railroad empire, whatever. These days, half the population can barely carry a conversation if it doesn’t involve two screens.

-More diversity. Not to say that most people are inherently racist. But more intermingling of different cultures can make a lot of people anxious. Particularly if they feels those other cultures don’t share their values.

-Less diversity. Again, if the future looks more homogenous, it’s probably because someone did a lot of bad shit to make it so.

-Freedom. If the future looks more free, then many people will feel it is too decadent and disrespectful of traditional institutions and values. Less free, it will appear totalitarian.

-Wealth. Inflation makes everything appear more expensive, even if the real purchasing power doesn’t change. A wealthier future society tends to appear decadent and frivolous. Similarly, a future society that is more poor likely suffered some horrific economic collapse.
That’s all I have so far. Any others?

2

The future of Star Trek seems pretty good. Sure, the crews of the starships get into a lot of trouble, but that’s because they voluntarily signed up for a job of looking for trouble. The folks who stay home have as good of a life as they want.

3

I would disagree with you somewhat.
A lot of science fiction I’ve read, especially older works don’t paint a particularly dystopian or decadent future.

Cherryh comes to mind, even though I haven’t read any of her stories in quite a few years.

Heck, more current scifi isn’t always especially one way or the other. The Honorverse is a good example I think. Sure, there is a dystopian government in that world, but it’s not the only government.

That being said, sure, there is a subset of scifi that are dystopian in nature. Shoot, I just watched The 5th Wave the other day.

4

Sure, until their home gets assimilated by Borg or ends up as a point of contention between the Federations and the Klingons/Romulans/whoever.

5

Writers like dystopias because they’re interesting and allow them to tell better stories. Drama is conflict, and there’s no conflict in utopia.

6

Even at a young age, ‘The Jetsons’ kinda’ creeped me out: All the slick tech and zippy space “cars” notwithstanding, it seems that not once did anybody ever step on terra firma. That’s sad.

7

Anne McCaffrey’s stories seemed positive about the future.

8

Even the utopian culture series has conflict and drama.

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My point is that even “utopian” societies often seem creepy and dystopian to us.

Except the part where every century or so, flesh eating…whatever…falls out of the sky to terrorize their technologically regressed feudal society.

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The stories focus on conflict even in good societies, so as the hero fights you never see the 99% of the people who have it good.
And they dystopias depend on the style. Today it is runaway climate change, about 1970 it was pollution and overpopulation. In the 1950s it was McCarthyism and corporatism.
I think the term is “if this goes on…” Science fiction is a terrible genre to use for this since a lot of it doesn’t predict the future, it tries to prevent the future.

11

I like your argument, and think it’s pretty solid for why the “average man/woman on the street” could think various futures are dystopic, but fails spectacularly for the folk who actually like the subset of sci-fi that is on the upsides of most of what you bring up. So, sci-fi societies that are more diverse, more wealthy, more free, and where nobody knows how to chop wood. I think some of the best sci-fi lives in this space.

More diversity? That’s a plus in my book, and I assume most sci-fi readers’ books. Hell yes I’d like to live in a world where people interact with wildly divergent lifeforms, change their phenotype or species at will, have colorful heat-dissipating mohawks and cats-eyes, or whatever. The Mos Eisley cantina scene is famous for a reason, and it’s because it’s full of cool-looking diversity.

More freedom, wealthier, and people don’t know how to chop wood? I’m not sure why freedom and wealth appears decadent and frivolous, but I think decadence and frivolity are how you can tell a society is advanced enough to be worth living in. The Romans were as decadent as they come during lots of the Empire, do you think they were just a bunch of inconsequential and effete pantywaists? Or did they literally conquer the world and achieve a peak of civilization with a level of amenities and culture enjoyed by the average person that isn’t seen for another 700 years?

On disrespecting current values and traditions, I think most people on this board, and most readers of sci-fi, think pretty little of our current values and traditions, and don’t mind seeing better thought out, more freedom-fostering alternatives portrayed.

Likewise not knowing how to chop wood or build a railroad empire - much like we can program in higher-level languages now without worrying about assembly language or what the bare metal is doing, cultures evolve beyond basic physical things as complexity and innovation abstracts more and more of it away from more and more people.

Maybe 1% of people here could go into the woods and kill and dress enough animals to eat reliably. Maybe 1% of that group could do it without bringing any modern technology to the table, and could make their own bows and enough of a technological pyramid from materials in nature they wouldn’t starve or freeze to death. Does that mean 99.99% of people today are useless? No, it means they live in a society that’s abstracted those things to a level that nobody needs to know them any more, so they can focus on things that are actually valued by society like building predictive models and flying airplanes and thinking up better ways to blow people up and such.

Sure, we’re not wrestling bears with our bare hands and living red in tooth and claw supported by our wits alone, and so in that sense are nothing but effete layabouts who could never “really” survive, but neither were the Romans, and that’s actually a good thing. And the societies in most sci-fi should be sufficiently abstracted that this is a good thing, too. Like a society where building a railroad empire would be as primitive and silly an endeavor as going into the woods to manually hunt 0.5% of your annual food intake.

I actually think a lot of authors don’t take this societal abstraction far enough, and leave things at an unrealistic level of near-human and near-twentieth-century level of abstraction, when in reality daily life in the far future will be far more abstracted and esoteric than typically portrayed.

But when I think of that more-free, more-diverse, more-wealthy subset of sci-fi, I don’t think it’s dystopic at all, and think that’s where your arguments fall down. The downsides you posit aren’t really downsides for most sci-fi readers, and there’s good chunks of sci-fi in this space. Wesley Clark mentioned the Culture series by Banks, I’d submit Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth books, hell even Neal Asher’s Polity books are all on this side of things, and are popular enough the authors are wealthy and well regarded, so they’re doing something people like.

12

The way the OP’s worded it seems that no F/SF Future is free from being “worse” – just for example…

That just tells me what I already know, that there will always be someone unsatisfied who will project onto the work as if it were about *them *and complain. That if you portray the world moving in the direction of improvement and benefit for all, there will be someone who disagrees with what is “improvement” and “benefit” and will say so.

13

Hoboken? Ooo, I’m dyyyyyin’ again!

14

A utopia would be boring due to lack of conflict. Star Trek: The Next Generation managed to make this work, mainly because there were other cultures (or subcultures) hostile to the utopia. In general I think it’s easier to write about a dystopia. It’s easier to imagine how things could go wrong than how they could go right.

I suspect their vision would be mostly positive. I don’t know Hoboken and could not comment on things like poverty and crime, which may have worsened since the 1940s, but I suspect most things have improved.

Warfare has become “cleaner” since the invention of the nuclear bomb. (Guess why?) When I read about modern conflicts, which are generally civil wars or terrorist insurgencies, I read about “dozens of terrorists killed” instead of “thousands of soldiers killed”. Many of those died at the “hands” of drones, or sometimes rockets, missiles, or other weapons that ensure the operators didn’t have to see the victims up close.

15

One problem with a “utopia” future is if this is the future, what are the stakes?

A proper utopia would have a medical treatment for aging. It would have a genuine meritocracy. It would have free and universal medical care and advanced education. There would be countless AI systems doing all the mediocre labor. We wouldn’t fear murder or even nuclear weapons because our consciousness would be backed up in underground vaults and we could be restored after death with only some recent memory losses (and maybe therapy for the identity issues of no longer having our original bodies). Women wouldn’t fear rape because they would have implanted/wearable communication/recording implants or even personal defense weapons, making any muscle advantage meaningless. Nobody would ever abuse a child because every kid would be watched, from multiple camera angles, with the video streams sent to human activity classifiers using AI. A kid couldn’t go missing for more than a few seconds before a drone would be deployed to find them, and nobody would dare lay a hand on one - if they did a drone would be there to tase them in under a minute.

We wouldn’t have funerals because nobody would ever die permanently. We wouldn’t have prisons, those who offend would still be part of society, just an armed security drone would follow them around and prevent them from being able to commit any further crimes. If we still used democracy, it would be a form where corrupt and crooked politicians can be recalled, where all votes are made to count, where there are unbiased sources of truth and when a politician lies openly it can be proven they are lying. And lying is itself a violation of the public trust and politicians can be removed from office by unbiased, nonpartisan policing bodies for doing it.

16

The Future is always worse.

Every day you wake up, its the future. You are on day closer to death. One more gray hair. One more ache and pain. One more friend or loved one dead.

Wish I died yesterday.

Well, maybe tomorrow. I got shit to do today.

17

I was thinking of her sci-fi short stories (before she bloated them into full novels) rather than the Pern fantasies.

18

The original Star Trek series presented a future where humanity had made vast improvements since the 20th century not just technologically but socially as well. The governments of Earth had united, racism was a thing of the past, and advanced technology led to the elimination of diseases which had plagued mankind for millennia. To describe the future of Star Trek as worse off than 1960s American society is perplexing. While Star Trek wasn’t set it a utopian future, it did present a future where humanity was better off than they were in modern times.

19

Not sure about diversity. Notice how all the women in Star Trek are skinny and hot. There are no fat people, old people, or tourists from Kansas in Star Trek.

20

Hey, Kirk’s from Iowa (and later Riker’s from Alaska), that oughta count for something :smiley: