Comment by d--b

The fact that sci fi has gotten more pessimistic is debatable. But if we had to pinpoint a reason, I’d say that Silicon Valley selling the world technological utopia and delivering attention farming algorithms is a good culprit.

Now every time there is some kind of tech progress, we can’t avoid imagining how its monetization is going to affect people in a bad way.

The second obvious reason is that we’re fucking the planet up and this has been enabled by technological advances.

And well authoritarian regimes. Ahem.

That said, to me there’s plenty of recent sci fi that isn’t too pessimistic. The Martian, Interstellar, Arrival, Her, to name a few.