Why I Write Optimistic Science Fiction
I put in my Instagram bio “I write hopeful sci-fi about kickass people working together IN SPACE.” That hopeful is very important to me.
I grew up watching Star Trek the Next Generation. It was on in syndication weeknights at 9pm, and then new episodes for the later seasons would come out on the weekends. My whole family watched it together every night, and we recorded the episodes on VHS, so me and my sisters could watch them later. (It was a very big deal who was the best at pausing and restarting the recording around the ads.)
Gene Roddenberry’s speculative vision of a future with no money, of warp drives and tricorders, of exploration and science being the primary reason to go out into space, of helping people and providing humanitarian aid on alien planets. This kind of uplifting science fiction is one that values humanity’s differences and finds strength in them. You have Captain Picard with a passion for archeology, who is not a heroic underdog captain, and is in fact valued by his society for being calm, compassionate, and curious. You have Uhura and Chekov on the bridge in the Original Series, which gave audiences a vision for what was possible once you got past current (still current just in different forms) prejudices. All these things in their many and varied ways have inspired generations of hope and progress in the real world.
That’s what good science fiction does. Martin Luther King Jr. told Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, to stay on the show when she was thinking of quitting, because she was the first Black woman on tv who wasn’t a slave or a maid, and she represented the vision that Black people made it to the 23rd century as equals at the table. Kids who got into science because of Star Trek and science fiction are now trying to create warp drives and tricorders — journeys that are leading to new developments in physics and tech. And those are just a couple examples. That’s the power of optimistic science fiction.
If we’re going to “science our way out of this,” whether it’s climate change, or health applications that come from space technology, or what have you, I firmly believe we need inspiration like I found in Star Trek that we CAN do it. That we can work across differences and make things better for everyone. That ideas we dream up in stories are worth trying to build in real life.
That’s why I write hope into my space operas. That’s why I include optimism in my storytelling. That’s why I include characters from many backgrounds, who together can save the day. Some call it cozy, which I don’t mind because I also want to write stories where the darkness gets beaten back. But for me, prone to seeing the worst outcomes in real life, it’s also a choice to see the best in humanity. It’s a choice not to give up on what I value in the world.
P.S. I really want the Holodeck (with its safety features intact.)
