Optimistic Dystopian Literature

I’ve tried to break up with the Financial Times (trying not to be unconsciously trained to think like a hedge fund manager anymore) and largely failed. They continued my subscription until September, the problem with annual subscriptions. The upshot is that I still get to read Janan Ganesh (though no longer on the phone app, they don’t make you keep that until the end of the subscription) and every once in a while there are nuggets that I find that are pretty fun. One such nugget: in an interview with the president of Arizona State University, Michael Crow said that if not for running an educational institution, he would rather be making movies that are the opposite of dystopian, portraying a better future using imaginative thinking and cinematic narrative. I think this is what I’m generally after when I write fiction, though sometimes it’s to get people (and myself) to see the errors in thought patterns that tend to create dystopian futures. Maybe that’s the same thing (one has to have a plot, even in an optimistic futures movie). Though maybe that’s the problem. The need for a plot. The necessity of conflict. What would stories that had no conflict, no inciting incident be like? Probably exceedingly boring and perhaps not worth paying attention to. Is that would a non-dystopian future look like? Or is that presupposition evidence of how hard it is to imagine a future that is better than the present? Maybe removing valuations would make it easier to see everything in both the light and the dark. Maybe accepting both (or at least seeing both as real, necessary if you will). But here still lies the problem with English: to imagine a world of joy or a life of joy seems to strip it of its value, its square area. Pure joy is connected with naivete. With ignorance. With childhood. Infantilized joy. Because adults have hard lives, doing hard things, being hard enough to get by in a hard world. Perhaps this is how life is. Or perhaps it’s something different, something where the question of hardness is so irrelevant as to create confusion from the asking.