Optimism in Fantasy/Science Fiction

I agree with you, everyone in Westeros is either doing or suffering murder or rape.

David Eddings' stories can be quite dark, but there are always very decent characters. Brandon Sanderson's characters are also quite nice, and Jim Butcher. They show that you can have an excellent story without making it necessarily grim or gorey.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Comic, yes, but many of the stories deal with tough subjects. For optimism, I'd recommend the Tiffany Aching YA books starting with The Wee Free Men.

I love fantasy or science fiction that have flawed characters, but you are genuinely trying to fight the trend toward darkness. They're basically good people fighting bad circumstances.

I don't see fantasy as any different to any other genre. If it's a dark world, then that's what it is. (Wouldn't appeal to me mind you.)

The bigger issue is limiting what story you tell or who tells it (character wise) because it's a particular genre.

For me GRR Martin didn't give a fiddles fart what genre he was writing in. For him, the genre fit around the story he wanted to tell, and not the other way around.

Some of Martin's characters are genuinely trying to fight. That's the tragedy, though, that many of them that are trying to be good are opposed to each other. And the beauty of it, too.

I would say that the majority of the fantasy that I've read has been optimistic- Martin is so startling because his stories are so very different from most of the other fantasy on the market.

Darkness and optimisism are in the eyes of the beholder...

Me, I loved cursing Martin for his AGOT series. He set me and knocked down all my hero's so far. Rat Bastard, and I love him for it. Now, if he ends the last two books on a bummer note, then I will turn on him. But by then, what will he care, he'll have gotten my money for 7 hardbound books at inflated prices. Bastard...

I thought Dark Fantasy meant it had horror elements in it. What does pessimism or optimism have to do with it?

DJ MacHale's Pendragon series (YA) can get really dark at times, but it's about people trying to save the universe for genuinely good reasons.

And I love GRRM but I hope his books get a little less endlessly depressing before the end. I was blown away by the audacity of what he was doing for the first three books but after that it started to get wearing. A Dance with Dragons wasn't quite as heavy, I think, so here's to hoping.

I think any SF story set in the future is intrinsically optimistic, because it means we're still alive. Technological and sociological advances are a bonus. I don't read fantasy so I'm no good in that department.

I'd say that my favorite science fiction and fantasy was neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It just *was.*

Shadow_Ferret said:

I thought Dark Fantasy meant it had horror elements in it. What does pessimism or optimism have to do with it?

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True. Although the horror tropes people tend to borrow lead towards some more pessimistic stories in that more people die more gruesomely due to more horrendous creatures. XD


Personally, I like optimistic sff as long as it's also realistic. And the same goes for pessimistic stuff. I'd love to see some sff with happier endings. Although, I do like some shades of grey in the middle section.

Sci fi of the 50s and 60s was generally more optimistic because we were slowly becoming aware of what technology could do and beginning to extrapolate to flying cars and housework robots and Orwell's 1984 was still a long way away... sometime in the past few decades it shifted to a more pessimistic view of the future - mainly because we became aware of dwindling resources and environmental issues (note how many sci fi stories mention climate change).

I suppose if you wanted more optimistic sci fi, you could consider a solution to the energy crisis, which is more or less what Star Trek does as there are concepts in there about endless renewable energy and things like replicators for feeding the population. It is generally some means of overcoming current concerns (at one point it was nuclear war, now it is environmental collapse and terrorism) that makes sci fi optimistic.

Nancy Kress's Sleepless stories are interesting in this regard--although there are social effects, the gene-modded humans are neither monsters nor cripples. Also, Robert Reed's Black Milk.

Liosse de Velishaf said:

True. Although the horror tropes people tend to borrow lead towards some more pessimistic stories in that more people die more gruesomely due to more horrendous creatures. XD

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Just because a story is gruesome doesn't make it pessimistic. If in the end the sun rises upon the survivors, that's optimistic.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Just because a story is gruesome doesn't make it pessimistic. If in the end the sun rises upon the survivors, that's optimistic.

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Depends on the context. Survival is a goal, but not necessarily the goal. So maybe they survive but fail to achieve their goals. Could still be pessimistic.

areteus said:

Sci fi of the 50s and 60s was generally more optimistic because we were slowly becoming aware of what technology could do and beginning to extrapolate to flying cars and housework robots and Orwell's 1984 was still a long way away... sometime in the past few decades it shifted to a more pessimistic view of the future - mainly because we became aware of dwindling resources and environmental issues (note how many sci fi stories mention climate change).

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Maybe that timeline should be shifted a little. Science fiction of the '30s and '40s was more optimistic; the 1950s brought us the threat of nuclear annihilation and novels like On the Beach; thanks to Communism and the Cold War, it also reflected "fear of the other" and the dangers of conformity in novels like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The 1960s saw dystopian novels that warned of the dangers of overpopulation and ecological catastrophe, like Stand on Zanzibar and Make Room, Make Room. It also brought us New Wave authors who experimented with literary styles and questions of reality, but were not particularly optimistic - like Delany. When I think of the '70s, I think of authors like Niven and Zelazny...more optimistic, I think.

My two cents.

ETA: There were some important dystopian novels at the start of the '70s, like The Sheep Look Up; and Make Room, Make Room was adapted into the movie Soylent Green in 1975. But if we're counting movies, Star Wars was 1976, so...

Star Wars was released in 77, and Clarke was published prolifically through the 50s, 60s and 70s, so I guess that counts as a vein of optimism throughout that period.

The tone of optimism in a story is often set by its protagonists. The world could be a dark and horrific place, but if the lead characters have noble ideals and are fighting tooth and nail to achieve them, there's an element of hope that breathes positive life into a book. (This doesn't make it better or worse than "gritty" books of doomed societies--it's just a matter of taste.)

I think Dean Koontz books (writing aside) have plenty of good examples of horror stories with an optimistic slant. Odd Thomas, for instance, is an idealist and an optimist, so even as awful crimes are going down in his books, the reader has a sense of hope that the clouds will part and things might turn out all right. Koontz's horror story, The Taking, is another example. He often writes optimistic Christian "good guy" characters who fight on in the face of tragedy and horror, and ultimately triumph or at least manage to protect their friends and neighbors.

A cynic might call such idealist POV characters "unrealistic", but that's completely ignoring the reality of individual temperament. Some people are more cynical and others are idealists, even when viewing the same society and circumstance. A mix of both types of characters make for a realistic world, IMO.

I thought John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation was an excellent example of an "optimistic" futuristic sci-fi. In the future, humans are still selfish, greedy, and corporate-minded, but there are some characters who will put the dignity of the individual ahead of financial gain. There are laws in place in the future that are designed to protect the people that we don't have in modern-day. It was plausible, futuristic, true to human nature. Recommended if you're looking for SF that's less depressing and fatalistic.

I definitely agree with Ardent Kat -- for me, the key issue is how the characters act and feel. If they are "stupid-happy" in the face of real, dangerous, heavy problems, it doesn't work. But more importantly for me, if the characters are always super-serious, dark, urgent, and lacking humour, it doesn't work at all. There's always something funny in life, even if it's just horribly black humor in the middle of awful situations. That's just human nature. I find it easy enough to believe that a person could maintain a bit of hope, or at least want to keep people's spirits up, in the midst of the worst crises. You don't have to work too hard to sell me on optimistic characters, provided they aren't ignorant of real problems.

seeker_nomad said:

I would say that the majority of the fantasy that I've read has been optimistic-

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Yeah, I'm having trouble thinking of a fantasy book/series other than Martin's work which isn't at least somewhat optimistic. That's one of the main things I love about the genre. Fantasy has real heroes who are genuinely good people and actually succeed in stopping evil and changing the world for the better. It's wish-fulfillment. But there is definitely an art to making a story optimistic without having it seem fluffy or unrealistic. As others have already said, most of that lies in creating believable and realistic characters.

Chasing the Horizon said:

Yeah, I'm having trouble thinking of a fantasy book/series other than Martin's work which isn't at least somewhat optimistic. That's one of the main things I love about the genre. Fantasy has real heroes who are genuinely good people and actually succeed in stopping evil and changing the world for the better. It's wish-fulfillment. But there is definitely an art to making a story optimistic without having it seem fluffy or unrealistic. As others have already said, most of that lies in creating believable and realistic characters.

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I must be the odd sheep here, writing about evil heroes who bring evil to the world (and succeed).

But I agree, most fantasy has some sort of optimism. Either at a character level or at an overarching plot level.

Chasing the Horizon said:

Yeah, I'm having trouble thinking of a fantasy book/series other than Martin's work which isn't at least somewhat optimistic. That's one of the main things I love about the genre. Fantasy has real heroes who are genuinely good people and actually succeed in stopping evil and changing the world for the better. It's wish-fulfillment.

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You're missing out.
Try Jack Vance's "The Dying Earth" or "Eyes of the Overworld," or Roger Zelazny's "Jack of Shadows."