When exploring sci fi concepts, it is sometimes all too easy to adopt a clichéd perspective, and see the future as either some beneficent place in which enlightened reason will finally triumph over stupidity and self-interest, and technology solve all mankind's ills (Star Trek), or as some terrible post-apocalyptic wasteland where humanity is reduced to barbarism (Mad Max and innumerable copycats), enslaved by AIs (The Matrix), or locked in an oppressive totalitarian regime (1984). In fact all of these options - the naively optimistic and the extreme pessimistic - are more than a little silly.

A more provocative approach might be to look at the future in a way that assumes that it will be at the same time both better and worse than the present. Better in the sense that ignorant, power-hungry, self-centered morons are no longer at the helm of government, and that compassionate sentient rights have been extended to all self-aware (or even simply aware) beings. Worse in the sense that freedom - even the freedom to do wrong and make mistakes - is gone, gone forever. Worse also because not all the god-like archailects that rule the galaxy now are friendly to humans. And even the friendly ones sometimes act in strange ways...

This is the future - a future in which humanity has no more control over eir collective destiny than the domestic plants and animals we keep today have over theirs....

Yet, for all that, the individual human spirit (or the cyborg spirit, or vec spirit, or whatever) remains unbroken. More...there is limitless opportunity for adventure!

And the best part is, you can help in creating this new science fiction universe.

Home | Search | Site Map | Glossary | Encyclopaedia Galactica | Intro | Timeline | Galactography | Sophonts | Topics | Voices from OA | Extras | Community | Top of Page | Parent Node

Unless otherwise specified,
this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.