Soft Star Recommended Reading
Two pieces from the Web on optimism and its role in science fiction
Today I wanted to share a couple of nonfiction pieces published elsewhere online that resonated with me in the past week or so. Both pieces are not only excellent reads, but they also serve as great examples of the message I hope to send with Soft Star: that, in spite of the pessimism we may feel about the state of the world, there is value to imagining futures with a sense of hope, optimism, and
Have a suggestion for a future piece of recommended reading? Comment on this post or email me at softstarmag@gmail.com.
Happy reading,
Miranda
“Breaking Out of Capitalist Realism”
By Juliet Kemp, Uncanny Magazine Issue 48
“Reading recent SF/F, it has seemed to me that while there are plenty of extrapolations from our present into future dystopias… there’s less in the way of true alternatives, compared to the writings of people like Le Guin or Delany in the ’70s and ’80s. If SF/F is a reflection of the now, how do we imagine a different future?”
In this essay, Kemp makes an observation similar to the one I made in this post: that dystopian futures are disproportionately represented in recent science fiction. Even stories about small mutual-aid communes in some distant future tend to have an oppressive, capitalistic status-quo looming in the background. Of course, as writers we tend to base our work on our observations of the world. But Kemp argues that imagining alternatives to a bleak post-capitalist dystopia not only provides us with more-creative stories, but also encourages us to consider ways that those alternative futures could eventually come to fruition in real life.
“Optimism”
By Paul Crenshaw, Hippocampus Magazine 2019
“Last night at the symphony I listened to a hundred and sixty people singing Handel’s Messiah, the Hallelujah chorus banging off the curved walls and coming back down to us. In the words there reigns a hope for the future, which made me wonder when I became so pessimistic.”
This flash CNF piece (which Soft Star contributor Bethany Jarmul cites as the inspiration for “One Day Is As A Thousand Years”) explores the familiar transition from childhood awe to adult cynicism. While reading, I related to the wonder Crenshaw described when, as a child, he first learned about the brain-bending concepts of technology, outer space, and even our own planet. That feeling of wonder is what I hope to evoke with the pieces published here in Soft Star Magazine, and Crenshaw ends his piece with a call to the audience to hold onto the belief that “surely something of that once-envisioned future is still possible.”