This will end well

[james_davis_nicoll]

The White House Wants To Use Science Fiction To Settle The Solar System

I expect this will be even more transformative than SIGMA.

This fits with a growing trend within the science fiction community itself - recently released books such as The Martian by Andy Weir, Seveneves by Neil Stephenson and Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson are each deeply focused on optimistic futures, rather than dystopian ones.

Huh. Not how I would describe the last two books.

Comments

[oh6]

I foresee a veritable Manhattan project of imagineering.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Perhaps simply optimistic in the sense that several centuries in the future the world remains high tech and not reduced to either Mad Max or brutal oppression - Aurora fits that definition pretty well. Of course, the only way to describe Seveneves as optimistic is to explain that not everyone dies when the moon shatters.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

To a certain set of SF geeks, "humans in space doing spacey things" is inherently optimistic, no matter what's happening on Earth.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Apparently there is more substance to Washington's Museum of Science Fiction than I had previously surmised-- if involvement with an OSTP conference is any indication.

[michaelgr.livejournal.com]

Why not just get the white house staff to skim-read the pop-science articles the authors are basing their ideas on? I mean, that's what the authors do anyway - just cut the middleman.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Pass the helium 3.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

We need something in space we can't get anywhere else. A big phosphate deposit easily extracted from an asteriod would do it.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Guano asteroid!

This is your chance to write the 21st-century version of "The Martian Way," perhaps taking as inspiration the events of the Lobos Islands crisis of 1852, in which Peru and the United States came near to armed conflict over guano.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, Star Trek is usually described as taking place in an optimistic future, even though in most versions of the timeline there's at least one and possibly several apocalyptic hellscapes sometime between the author's time and the depicted future.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Remember also that a lot of people would give their right arm (which would help them blend right in) to live in the Star Wars universe, even though it's pretty much an endless tableau of planet-smashing war, cruelty, slavery and despotism, with no real sense of social, cultural or even technological progress.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Really?

I know that a lot of people would like to live in Star Trek universe, which is fairly understandable -- I would not mind that either. But I never met anyone who wanted to live in Star Wars universe, any more than wanted to live in Game of Thrones. And for much the same reasons.