Science fiction as hope

Matt Gemmel, a Scottish writer and novelist, wrote a blog post about what science fiction is. It’s inherently hopeful, he said. Despite all of the dystopian and end-of-the-world themes that come up in science fiction, it’s really an optimistic genre.

That’s what science fiction is about, of course: hope. It’s inherently optimistic, even if some of its specific flavours are dystopian. Science fiction says we’ll still be here. We may still be fucking things up completely, but at least we’ll still be around.

—Matt Gemmel