We Need Hope

I’ve been feeling super frustrated with recent SFF that I’ve been picking up lately. I have been searching for hope and not finding it. I want fiction that will make me feel the future is worth fighting for, but instead I keep finding unrelenting disaster and bleakness. I want to believe that humans can be good and kind and learn and grow but I kept finding stories that highlight the worst of human nature.

In the wake of Ursula K Le Guin’s death I’ve seen a lot of excellent quotes from her around the internet. One of them struck me particularly hard:

"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality."

Le Guin said that in 2014 as part of her National Book Award Speech but I don’t think the SFF world has taken her words to heart.

I need to image a better future. A future where climate change can be managed, not one where it will kill everything I love. A future where marginalized people are more accepted than today, not less so. A future where we learn to distribute resources more fairly, not less so. I don’t want to close out the possibilities of the future. One of the things I love about SFF is it lets me imagine other ways society could be even if there is no clear path between us and them. Fantasy and far future settings can be hopeful in the societies they depict. I want to see fictional societies where caring for others is valued. I feel uplifted by reading about societies that value and care for diverse people.

The unhappiness of this lack of hope is overshadowing all my reading recently. I’m finding it hard to love stories I think I might otherwise enjoy. Mildly grim stories that I would otherwise shrug off are getting me down. I’m putting off reading books I was once eager to start because I fear they will take too much of a toll on my spirits. I’m having a hard time getting into a reading groove. And since reading is one of the things I use to fend off depression this whole thing is getting me down.

I’m also feeling grumpy because people keep telling me that stories I don’t find hopeful are hopeful. I ask for hopeful recommendations and people give me the names of stories I found bleak. This makes me feel like I’m out of touch with reality. Like this reality has gotten so dark that the bar for hope has gotten incredibly low. It's baffling and distressing.

I recently read a story that felt was really manipulative in the way it framed the world and it reminded me of this essay by Cory Doctorow about moral hazard in science fiction. The essay talks about “The Cold Equations” a “classic” story where the narrator is forced to throw a young woman (referred to as a “girl” because sexism) out of an airlock. He is compelled to do so by the cold logic of physics or so it seems. Doctorow writes:

"The parameters of ‘‘The Cold Equations’’ are not the inescapable laws of physics. Zoom out beyond the page’s edges and you’ll find the author’s hands carefully arranging the scenery so that the plague, the world, the fuel, the girl and the pilot are all poised to inevitably lead to her execution."

I'm feeling this way about the grim hopelessness of so much SFF, that it doesn't have to be this way. That we could shift the frame, change the logic of the stories, and find hope. Unrelenting grimness and hopelessness is seen as more realistic and therefore in someway better for you than optimism and hope. But hope is necessary and good and we need it. Without hope how can we strive for a better future?

I hope SFF writers will take Le Guin more seriously in the the years to come. That whether writing fantasy, space opera, near future SF, or any other sub-genre of SFF that writers will try to be “realists of a larger reality” and to frame their stories so as to leave room for hope. I want this for me personally so that I can find the kind of stories I like best but also for society at large so we can image and create a better future.