Tales To Astound

Imagine all the good that the tech industry and venture capital could do if they just had different shared visions of what the future looked like. What if, instead of space travel and virtual worlds, our tech billionaires had been raised on exciting stories of a future with fast, efficient mass transit or a living wage for all workers?
David Karpf "Virtual Reality Is the Rich White Kid of Technology"

Okay... I'll bite. Who, exactly, was writing these supposedly exciting stories of the perfect lefty future back in the 1950s through 90s, when many of "our tech billionaires" were young and supposedly reading futuristic stories? I did a good amount of science-fiction and fantasy reading back in the day, and I don't recall a single tale where excellent bus service or corporate bosses sharing the wealth were the keys to the princess being saved and the space villains being defeated. Even utopian space opera like Star Trek simply presumed a post-scarcity society, rather than hinge stories on finding pat solutions to pedestrian, if pressing, problems.

Making life better for poor and working-class people through the simple expedient of everyone else giving up some of their own standard of living simply doesn't strike me as an interesting plotline to repeat over and over. The one story of the sort that I recall reading, in a science-fiction anthology magazine, seemed like little more than a take of class warfare where the correct class won, due to some actions that people had taken in the past that the story didn't even bother to describe. In effect, control of the robots that factories used to produce goods have been given over to Unionized workers and had become proxies for them. It was apparently illegal for companies to own their own robots, but what had brought this about wasn't part of the story. Rather than change society in any interesting way, the author had simply moved the labor versus management battlefield to a slightly different venue. The story was not exciting, or worth keeping for that matter; I wound up dropping the anthology into a "take a book, give a book" type of box at work.

I'm not going to say that such stories can't be exciting. In the case of the unionized robots story, someone had found the concept worth writing about and someone else found it to be worth including in an anthology for publication. So the fact that I found the story boring and heavy-handed is clearly more of a problem with me than the writing itself. Not everyone is going to like everything that's published. And so I suppose what I'm noting here is a lack of breadth in the sub-genre. If we're going to postulate a genre of science-fiction where the shared vision of the future consists of poverty reduction, municipal transport and exciting plotlines that rely on those things, there are going to have to be enough of those stories, and for them to varied enough, for the technology thinkers of tomorrow to have a good chance of reading them today.

And this is what I find to be missing often in lamenting what people weren't reading in the past. That sense that if the 1950s through the 1990s was the best time for people's imaginations to be captured by stories that are exciting due to a focus on social, rather than technological, progress, the second best time is right now. "Virtual Reality Is the Rich White Kid of Technology" complains about what technology entrepreneurs weren't ready when they were young, but it doesn't name any titles for people to be reading in the here and now. And so it comes across as another in a long series of laments of the omissions of the past that doesn't concern itself with remedies in the present.