[cstross]

SF author here: I was invited to participate in Project Hieroglyph and declined to do so, because the explicit remit was essentially to write panglossian techno-optimism rather than downbeat realist-mode depictions of our more likely futures.

Attacking a propaganda exercise for being propaganda seems, well, a trifle spurious ...!

(Also: essay falls into the classic pitfall of assuming that a genre of fiction has to be didactic and educational. Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell might have declared that to be their intentions, but both of them were propagandists for their own peculiar ideological shibboleths, and they don't speak for the field as a whole. Oh, and Campbell died 50 years ago.)

[toolcombinator]

If you look back at sci-fi from the 60ies, despite it appearing utopian today, it often dealt with the anxieties and issues of the day.

Trek is a good example. It’s often hailed as “utopian” and “visionary” today, totally ignoring the Cold War themes, fear of technology (Just look at how many times Kirk faced an intelligent computer antagonist!), overpopulation and of course the counter culture.

In the space hippie episode (Which Way to Eden?) Spock even talks about the discomfort many people feel with technology and the universal longing for a pre-technological eden.

[cstross]

There's also survivorship bias at work here -- the SF we remember from the 1960s tends to be stuff that was initially popular and has stood the test of time. (There was a lot of terrible SF in the 1960s, and it was still cluttering up the second hand bookshops when I was strip-mining them in the 1970s.)