Dystopian Sci-Fi is a Creative Cop-Out. We Need “Rigorous Hope.”
We are drowning in dystopian sci-fi because despair is the easiest way to sound profound. But the “optimistic sci-fi” label is a trap that codes hope as naive. We don’t need sanitized utopias; we need imaginatively rigorous stories that treat a survivable future as a hard-won achievement, not a premise.