Why can modern SF authors not provide us with the happy shiny futures we saw in such Disco-era books as Malevil, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, The Exile Waiting, The Iron Dream, The Pugilist, Jem, Dying of the Light, The Genocides, The Last Caesar, and Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
I miss the bright shining future of Philip K. Dick.
Cyberpunk was famously very optimistic about the future.
Oddly, in a sense it was (the basis for comparison at that point was novels about mutual nuclear annihilation, so a very low bar)
Would a hundred million year setback for the Earth's ecosystems be an unreasonable price for never hearing Trump's name again?
That at least there is peace and quiet at last would be a potential silver lining!
You know who really had faith we'd pull it together? John Sladek!
Let me go retreat into the cozy optimistic worlds of Jack Dann! sciencefictionruminations.com/2025/08/24/b...
The 1970s gave us that Spider Robinson about how oligarch ladies can find true love despite health challenges... now that there are no more African Americans, who totally forced white people to wipe them out. See also The Year of the Quiet Sun, Lucifer's Hammer, and A Secret History of Time to Come.
Can't forget the endless triumph of man against the world in Malzberg's novels!
I am not even going to bother to pitch "classic mainstream SF race war novels" to ReacTor. At least in Space War Blues, N'Haiti had the upper hand on the space crackers, what with being technologically advanced and also not idiots.
Surprised no one has reissued The Iron Dream…
They did, but it was retitled to Project 2025.
Ah, Malevil. I am currently reading a series set in the late medieval era by the same author, and I snickered when there was a throwaway reference to Château Malevil in the first book.
Did his other books also have a running them of Very Serious Men deciding how to manage the woman problem, which the women then completely ignore?
I mean, we just got to the Main Character’s birth, the entire first half of the first book was about his father and his father’s war buddy. And his 35 year old father marrying a 14 year old girl, but you know, Medieval Times(tm). (It’s probably been 40 years since I read Malevil, I don’t remember
much about it.)(Robert Merle also wrote Day of the Dolphin, which I have not read, though I vaguely remember seeing the movie)