A future half-empty?

The 2013 film World War Z (starring Brad Pitt) depicts a future unraveled by a zombie plague. file photo

Our future, according to Hollywood, is not pretty. Take two movies that are currently showing for example: In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, humans battle with super-intelligent apes for world domination. In Divergent, survivors in a post-apocalyptic world are pigeonholed into five factions. Those who don’t fit in are hunted down and persecuted.

Both movies belong to the dystopian sci-fi genre. Dystopia is the antonym of utopia, which was coined by the English writer Thomas More. In his 1516 book Utopia, More described a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean. A utopia is an ideal society with peace, equality, justice and prosperity.

But in dystopian fiction, the world is usually a bleak place ruled by a totalitarian government. Mistrust and fear permeates the whole of society. High-tech machines and tools are used to wage wars or suppress discontent citizens.

Just as bad news grabs more attention, many dystopian works are immensely successful. Movies such as The Hunger Games trilogy, Total Recall and World War Z are all box office successes worldwide.

But now a group of scholars and science fiction writers are saying: enough of the depressing stuff. They say negative visions of the future depicted in pop culture are limiting people’s abilities to dream of a better world.

US writer Neal Stephenson is one of the dissenters. A sci-fi writer himself, he sees the cynicism of the current dystopian sci-fi rut and calls for a more optimistic approach–fewer zombies and catastrophes, more creative inventions and solutions.

Bright, not bleak

In an interview with the BBC, Stephenson said he got this idea from president of Arizona State University (ASU) Michael Crow, who said at a conference on futurology that science fiction needed to supply ideas that scientists and engineers could actually implement.

Stephenson wasted no time to take action. In 2011, he partnered with ASU and started Project Hieroglyph to rally writers to inject new optimism into science fiction so as to inspire the next generation to build a better future.

The project brings writers and scientists together to learn from and influence each other. Renowned writers have been working with scientists to imagine technically-grounded science fiction stories depicting futures achievable within the next 50 years, the BBC reported. These stories, collected in a book entitled Hieroglyph, were just released last week.

Ed Finn, director of Project Hieroglyph, wrote in the Slate online magazine: “We are in desperate need of this sort of long view in contemporary culture, where we can barely see beyond the next Apple press conference.”

“What’s really exciting about Hieroglyph is the idea of bringing some constructive criticism to our notions of the future: not just pointing out problems but ponying up some possible solutions,” Finn said.

Hieroglyph writers’ visions of tomorrow

 Environmentalists fight to stop entrepreneurs from building the first extreme tourism hotel in Antarctica;

 People vie for citizenship on a near-zero-gravity moon of Mars, which has become a hub for innovation;

 Animal activists use drones to track elephant poachers;

 A crew crowdfunds a mission to the Moon to set up an autonomous 3-D printing robot to create new building materials;

 A 20-kilometer-tall tower spurs the US steel industry, sparks new methods of generating renewable energy.