Interesting.
Do we need more optimistic and fun takes on humanity's future?
- Thread starter CmdrShep2183
- Start date
One could argue this is when you need optimism the most. Anyone can be happy in good times. Try find happiness when things stink. Much harder. Plus I think we forget that people's need for optimism is very much tied to what is going on in their own lives and not so much society at large. I mean we could be living in almost near Utopia right now but if I get cancer or I can't find friends or someone to fall in love with this great world doesn't mean shit really to someone's who is living a unhappy life. And since I am someone who feels most people are always unhappy because we all have our own trauma's then it means the world is never going to be a happy place because the people in it will never be happy because it goes against human nature to not always be going through some sort of suffering.
Jason
I agree that you do have to appeal to people so people will watch it. Also bring in modern elements as well. I do wonder though if you tinker with something so much at some point if it stops being what it really is then maybe it's not worth doing anymore. If Trek can't be Trek I don't know if means much that the brand name stays alive but everything that use to make it great is no longer part of the shows and movies.
Jason
You had seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation...three seasons of the original Lost in Space...
Optimistic and fun are two different things imho.
I would say yes and yes, though.
Anson Mount's Pike made DSC more fun than when it was the concerned-Burnham-unintelligible-Klingons show. Not sure the theme was more optimistic. Maybe it was (spoiler: how she treated Q'onos).
I don't see superhero movies, but I hear Marvel movies are fun. As opposed to Man of Steel or Superman/Batman.
I would say yes and yes, though.
Anson Mount's Pike made DSC more fun than when it was the concerned-Burnham-unintelligible-Klingons show. Not sure the theme was more optimistic. Maybe it was (spoiler: how she treated Q'onos).
I don't see superhero movies, but I hear Marvel movies are fun. As opposed to Man of Steel or Superman/Batman.
I think it'd be great to have an optimistic view of the future, so long as the show prevents a credible path to how we got here. Without that credible path it feels like willful ignorance and self indulgence.
I agree you with, I was just thinking how The Mandalorian is a lot of fun but it doesn't really present an optimistic setting.
This is a case of the lifestyle of the character, though. Mando's a bounty hunter. They work in the seedy underbelly. If they aren't outright criminals, they definitely aren't shy of performing criminal acts in pursuit of the target or asset. The character doesn't lend itself to a bright fun setting.
Happy explorers boldly going where no one has gone before? Definitely able to be fun and optimistic.
War stories are typically not going to be optimistic. But, then again, isn't it optimistic to tell Noor Inayat Khan that the Fascists always lose? Even in the depths of grit, grime and despair optimism pushes those fighting evil to keep going and working for a brighter future. So, I dunno. Maybe a dirty underbelly story can be both fun and optimistic.
I guess I was just trying to suggest a show need not have an optimistic setting to be fun (or for that matter optimistic). I think maybe it's too limiting to suggest that casual viewers need happy characters not being serious in a happy future.
Good point. SHAUN OF THE DEAD is fun, even though it's set in azombie apocalypse. XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS was fun, even though it was set in "a land in turmoil," beset by gods and monsters. See also FLASH GORDON, BARBARELLA, etc.
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I'm not sure about that because in reality their most likely isn't a credible path to a better future. Human nature will always keep the world in turmoil. I think the best part of not knowing how humans got better is that it is something that inspires hope by saying their is a way. It's up to you find it. Plus Trek is a tv show and not something really equipped to try and solve the problems in society. It's value like most art is in how it makes us feel or to maybe think about something from a angle we never have before. Never really going to be something that has any true answers I suspect.
Jason
We'll never have a perfect utopia like in Star Trek. But I disagree there's no credible path to a better future. We can have a future where the majority of people are much better off than we are today, and we don't have the same kinds of conflicts, but still have all the problems that come from just normal human conflict. We can't all be equal, but we can make it so the people on the bottom have a decent life. We can't end international conflict, but we can keep it from leading to huge body counts. Etc, etc.
I think Star Trek has one of the more credible paths. How did we get better? We nearly drove ourselves to extinction and realized "Huh, guess this isn't working for us."
If they did make the argument I am guessing the answer would have to be replicators and holodecks. Give everyone anything they want without having to break your back or soul to obtain it and also not having to worry about resources and also having a places to deal with sexual frustration via holo-sex.
Jason
Jason
Exactly. Progress is one thing; perfection is another thing. But one never wants to stop progressing just because perfection is unobtainable (and possibly undesirable).
And even in a society that's doing a much better job of providing for folks' basic needs, people are still going to be people. They're going to lose the big game, get their hearts broken, suffer loss and disappointment, professional failures, and so on. (Hi, Doctor Daystom!) They're going to have personality conflicts and arguments and misunderstandings and grudges. (Hi, Ben Finney, Miranda Jones!). And, yes, some people are going to behave badly or selfishly and have character flaws. (Hi, Harry Mudd, Cyrano Jones!) Heck, if Star Trek proves anything, it's that people are still going have family squabbles and unhappy love affairs even in "utopia." (Hi, every estranged relative of pretty much every crew member!)
It's just that, in the more civilized corners of the galaxy, people don't have to worry too much much about starving, going broke, social unrest, or being invaded by their neighbors (hopefully). Meanwhile, life out on the Final Frontier is going to be a lot rougher and more precarious.
Given the rampant climate change denialism still seen in the West, we arguably need even fewer "optimistic and fun" takes on our future. Or, at the very least, we probably need a lot more stories to acknowledge the ramifications of the rising oceans, deforestation, and pollution. Even most sci-fi dystopias seem overly optimistic in the technological sense, as future societies are routinely depicted as technical wonderlands, just with the wrong sort of people and ideologies in charge.
As a recent Slate article observed:
In other words, perhaps we need more stories like the Robert Charles Wilson novel Julian Comstock, in which human survivors of a massive collapse of modernity revert to 1850s-style feudalism, agrarian economies, and science-denying state Christianity. (To serve as a warning, not a prophecy.)
As a recent Slate article observed:
We don’t want to see climate horrors clearly, for the obvious reasons, and so the list of TV shows and movies that approach it in an off-kilter way is almost too easy to compile. Game of Thrones opens with an unmistakable climate prophecy but warns “winter is coming”; the premise of Interstellar is an environmental scourge, but the scourge is a crop blight. Children of Men depicts civilization in semi-collapse, but collapsed by a fertility menace. Mad Max: Fury Road unfurls like a global-warming panorama, a scrolling saga of a world made desert, but its political crisis comes, in fact, from an oil shortage. The protagonist of The Last Man on Earth is made that way by a sweeping virus, the family of A Quiet Place is hushed by giant insect predators lurking in the wilderness, and the central cataclysm of the “Apocalypse” season of American Horror Story is a throwback—a nuclear winter. In the many zombie apocalypses of this era of ecological anxiety, the zombies are invariably rendered as an alien force, not an endemic one. That is, not as us.
In other words, perhaps we need more stories like the Robert Charles Wilson novel Julian Comstock, in which human survivors of a massive collapse of modernity revert to 1850s-style feudalism, agrarian economies, and science-denying state Christianity. (To serve as a warning, not a prophecy.)
In other words, perhaps we need more stories like the Robert Charles Wilson novel Julian Comstock, in which human survivors of a massive collapse of modernity revert to 1850s-style feudalism, agrarian economies, and science-denying state Christianity. (To serve as a warning, not a prophecy.)
See also DROWNING TOWERS by George Turner, which warned of rising oceans as far back as 1987. Won the Arthur C. Clarke Award at the time. Hard to believe that was more than thirty years ago, but here we are.
There's also MINDSTAR RISING by Peter Hamilton, which was a hard-boiled noir set in a tropical England transformed by global warming. (Full disclosure: I was the American editor on that one, although I mostly just repackaged the original UK text and didn't make any significant editorial changes.)
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I remember reading the Justice League America comic back in 1990. Back then, the book was known for its sense of humor and a number of quirky team members. You could almost call it an action-comedy series back then. But when a particularly vicious and murderous villain showed up--Despero--it was a slap in the face. Suddenlygot real, characters died, and there was no time for jokes. The sudden tonal shift during that story was a clever wake-up call by the writers that despite the book's frequently funny nature, there was still darkness out there and it could strike at any time.
The Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Kevin McGuire, Adam Hughes era was incredibly entertaining. The JL/JLI/JLA #1-60 is probably my favorite comic book run ever. The Despero storyline was film worthy.
