It’s unfortunate that we’re the ones that get all that dystopian stuff in the Star Trek timeline; with the Bell Riots, Eugenics Wars, 2nd US Civil War, and WWIII all due any time now.
Bell riots coming this year in September
Loved that Doctor Who (NewWhoS01E02) quote:
You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you’re going to get killed by eggs or beef or global warming or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible, that maybe you survive.
Easy for a time travelling 900 year old person to say.
I go to star trek for hope, and 40k for a very fucked up form of “hope” that involves a lot of masochism.
Utopian sci fi is popular in literature, but rarely in movies or shows. We’ll get a series about the Culture one of these days though. Special Circumstances can get up to things that puts turning into a lizard and raising babies with your captain to shame.
Edit: I also think some more of Kim Stanley Robinson’s books will get turned into series someday. They’re generally about the progress to a Utopia. Years of Rice and Salt is particularly interesting because it tracks that progress all the way from the dark ages to a Utopia while the characters keep reincarnating and making the same exact mistakes over and over.
I was so sad when the rumoured series didn’t go ahead.
It would have been horrible anyway.
I just noticed he said I robot was dystopian. Asimov was absolutely Utopian and so were the stories in that book. I wouldn’t call the movie a faithful adaptation.
Thank you! I cane to say the same thing. Really undercuts his entire point about “other authors” when he apparently doesn’t know the work. Or at least, only knows the movie.
ESPECIALLY since Asimov and Roddenberry were friends!
Babylon 5 was pretty utopian from what I remember
You remember poorly. I shall list “ways in which human society sucked in Babylon 5” until I am bored:
- There’s plenty of poor, desperate people just…everywhere. There are entire sections of the station that are designated as gutters for poor people to lie in.
- There are businessmen whose interests hold sway over as many lives as governments do, like the guy Geribaldi goes to work for.
- More than once Dr. Franklin involves himself in some underground operation to help the poor or targeted because they have nowhere to go, I can think of a free clinic he ran and an underground railroad for telepaths on separate occasions.
- The duly elected president of Earth is assassinated and his running mate installs himself as a fascist dictator, remaining in power for over three years.
- The Psi Corps exists, which is simultaneously plotting against humanity at large while victimizing telepaths.
- There’s that whole episode about a dockworker’s strike over pay and safety conditions, and a major plot point is there’s a law that allows the labor negotiator guy to order the military to violently break strikes “by any means necessary.”
- There are apparently several groups of racist terrorists just…wandering around.
- There are wars just…all the time. Lots of the cast are members of the military and all but the very youngest are veterans of at least one shooting war. There’s that whole episode about all those marines that stay on the station for awhile, and they pretty much ALL die. What was that battle even about?
- They still use CRTs for everything.
- One of the biggest attractions on the station is a large casino.
And that’s just focusing on the humans, let alone the episode where an entire alien species is wiped out by a plague their conservative faction associates with “decadence” and insists on praying away, or the Centauri going all Israel on the Narn.
Babylon 5’s setting was nowhere near as utopic as Star Trek’s “We’ve cured all diseases, solved poverty, eradicated greed, created clean energy and discovered the female orgasm” setting, it’s only a little grimmer than this week’s actual headlines given the fact that in-universe ancient eldrich beings were having their regularly scheduled apocalypse.
That said, compared to anything made after 2002 Babylon 5’s tone is much more upbeat and hopeful. The characters rise to the challenge, they grow and get better, they do the right thing whenever they can. Ultimately it’s a show about trying to be a good person. That doesn’t seem to get made anymore; Battlestar Galactica ushered in the hearburn drama era that ultimately led to me cancelling my cable subscription.
