The hope of the USSR and the soviet revolution allowed Americans and the West to believe in a utopian future too, what was essentially FALGSC but without any of the progressive imagery. They glommed onto their aesthetic. The Western sci-fi tradition basically stole the imagination of the USSR for their own worldbuilding and ideas, but stripped it of any revolutionary content and made it just about technology and “ethics” in some vague sense. These books and movies, produced in 1920-1960, portrayed a united humanity exploring space and robotics in humanitarian quests.
They deluded themselves that they could do the same thing as the USSR, progress and unite humanity, just without the icky communism part.
Then the grimy dystopian futures started taking over our collective imaginations during the Cold War, as we started distancing ourselves mentally from the world the USSR wanted and imagining a world where capital won completely instead. It’s no coincidence that as the USSR weakened and withdrew and turned revisionist and eventually collapsed, the bright collective future the world imagined collapsed with it.
Well put, pretty much any sci-fi that’s not dystopian in nature is essentially a vision of a communist future.
I prefer flawed but optimistic sci-fi than outright utopian, personally.
I’m currently writing two separate sci-fi settings; one set in a socialist state and the other in a communist society. I’m taking great pains to represent them positively without making them seem perfect so as to be more believable.
We need more hopeful, optimistic, and left-wing sci-fi future settings that are still engaging & grounded in reality.
I wonder what would happen to a space-faring communist society if it came into contact with a capitalist-like alien society. Would it regress back to socialism upon the reignition of class conflict and national borders ?
The capitalists would invade it and probably destroy it if it wasn’t able to build a state in time to protect itself.
the Culture series is the only one i’ve ever read (some of) that explored around the edges of an advanced, actually fully developed communist society. and it’s not even the future, nor Earth (it mostly takes place in the past) (obviously less grounded it’s just Star Trek with coherant physics and at a higher power level). definately utopian, or more a guy who watched star trek as a young adult and said “what if i wrote my own Star Trek but the Federation is actually full communist at every level”.
for hardish sci/fi:
the Mars Trilogy by demsoc Kim Stanley Robinson ends with a global and then interplanetary socialist revolution but has some weird tropes and relies on too much hand waving. not utopian at least, there is a violent revolution and multiple competing ideologies/tendencies that cobbles together green socialism, market socialism, anarchism, and vanguardism. but unfortunately the revolution on Earth is skipped over.
it sucks because the story beat of global megacorps with domains the size of nations fighting a conventional/cyber war with an alliance of newly formed socialist republics and mega-cooperatives sounds fucking awesome
there’s optimism but you have to grind through some forgettable characters.
the spiritual successor he wrote, 2312, took place in a socialist Sol system, but also more early stage market socialist with libertarian socialist elements. dunno i didn’t like it only got a chapter in.
The Mars Trilogy sounds interesting. I’ll have to give it a try, thanks.
your welcome. i hope to read your stuff one day!!
The Mars trilogy is amazing and beautiful. There’s a real love for people, and also for the land running through it.
It’s the year 2025 and I’m watching a video that may or may not be AI created for monetary gain on an app and a device that track my every single move and conversation, again for monetary gain. If I’m lucky I’m able to explore the corners of my run down house for which I just paid 100k above the asking price in order to have a chance.
