Damien Walter has a new blog post up at The Guardian, and it is all about how science fiction is all gloomy and dystopian and we wants our flying cars, now please. As Will Plant notes, many of the comments are singing the praises of an imagined future in which most humans are blissfully happy. That. of course, is because they are being kept as pets by a group of super-intelligent AIs.
3 thoughts on “On Future Happiness”
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Back in the golden age of science fiction, the future was a much brighter place.
Hmm, yeah… War of the Worlds, John Wyndham, etc. Happy days. What happened to conflict being the essence of drama?
Oh, don’t be too hard on Damien. His job is to generate eyeballs on web sites, and if he can do that by saying something daft but infinitely debatable I can’t fault him for doing so. If is, after all, much better than saying something deeply offensive, which is the other method newspapers use to attract attention. And it gets people talking about SF on the web site of a national newspaper.
I have written a response which will be published sometime soon on Tor.com.