The latest update in Jetse De Vries’ SHINE Anthology blog seems to show that he’s getting quite a good amount of decent optimistic scifi stories despite the (rather surprising) reaction I’ve seen from many that optimistic SciFi is hard to do or not interesting or not popular.
My fiction is often described as quite dystopic and I suppose that it is in places but for me most of my stories are quite optimistic. I certainly am an optimistic person.
The story that I wrote for the antho and which is with Jetse now in amongst that huge pile of great stories (dammit…) hopefully manages to encapsulate some of the optimism that I truly feel. I see a lot of the problems that we have, and have faced, are rooted in a lack of knowledge or understanding and the more of both of these that we get the better off that we will ALL be. So many of our fears and hatreds can only exist when there is a lack of knowledge or understanding whether it be of other people, of events, or whatever. To grab a current example, what about the astroturf groups currently protesting attempts in the US to create a national healthcare system? How many of them could truly be standing there saying that it would be a terrible thing to have everybody covered for half the cost of the current system if they really understood the issues at play?
It’s not about being ignorant, that’s nobody’s fault. If you aren’t told something then it’s hard to blame you for not knowing it (unless it’s something obvious you could figure out for yourself) or if you are told something that isn’t true and aren’t aware that it’s not true then who can blame you for acting as if it were? If you truly believed that the new healthcare system would kill off old people who were sick and force people to have abortions it would be entirely logical to oppose it. But all it would take to make this switch is some tiny pieces of knowledge – the wordings of the bill, for example, rather than somebody else’s interpretation of the wording of the bill. Or the knowledge that those promoting this “grassroots” movement are the corporate bodies which would be negatively affected should this new healthcare system come into being.
I feel positive for the future because the number of channels through which information we can reach us is expanding all the time and yes this means more garbage but it also means just more. You can distort and try to hide knowledge but really, once we know something, once it’s out there, it can’t be easily put away again. Information, knowledge, is the single most important thing to our future and it’s not just that I think it will probably cease to be controlled by corporations or powerful individuals in the future, it’s that I think it cannot be controlled by them. You can threaten people not to give out information, you can create whistleblower laws, you can do whatever you want but once that information is out there, that’s it. It’s out there.
Damn right I feel positive.
