We need new fiction now

Covid just made us all realise we know a lot more people than we thought we did who would hide a zombie bite.

I still can believe the world to rally together when it means to kill something.

The enemy must be simple though. Too complicated or invisible or something and the conspiracy nuts will take over.

I recently watched Utopia, British show about a super secret group putting naughty stuff in a vaccine.

Their plan hinged on every person being so afraid of a pandemic that everybody takes the vaccine. This was made pre COVID of course, because we now know that would never work.

Covid proved to me any libertarian hope/dream I had wouldn't actually work because people would never get together to do the right thing as a group.

COVID, when the world partly united to make a cure and a vaccine in quite a record time?

I happen to really like District 9 for this reason

There's no malicious plot of aliens blowing up shit or invading to colonize: nope, aliens literally just crash-landed on accident and humanity was like "stay the fuck right there, we'll take all your shit until we figure out how to deal with exploit you"

Humanity is always its own worst-enemy

Forgot the name, but that movie about tentacled aliens invading earth with like 12 monoliths and a linguist tries to understand them

The way world cooperation is portrayed is kinda reflecting. Not perfect, but somehow realistic

For me it is that book Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs. My kids favorite. The ending is natural disasters make the town unlivable so the population flees to a new home and are welcomed with open arms.

Yeah that is so fucking bullshit. You telling me that a nice wealthy population would allow foreigners facing death into their land? They would keep them at sea until they all starved and churches would call them rapefugges.

In the real word: Aliens don't exist.

On Lemmygrad: The Sun deserves it for defecting to the west!

Not everyone would unite, but the big governments of the world would at least sit together to form a plan towards a common enemy.

Like how we formed the Allies during WW1.

Your local redneck probably won't, but that doesn't matter.

More like the world unites and then the United States turns it into some pointless political issue.

Change "the world united to.." to "The US decided the world would..."

…has ruined sci-fi…

No, just ruined the generic good vs evil trope.

There’s a lot of good sci-fi (books/movies/series) out there that has a more nuanced take on humans and society.

I would have turned the movie off if the narrator said, "The people were terrified, remaining six feet apart. And everyone was hoarding toilet paper."

This is more believable, I think.

Humans require an external threat to unify against. An alien invasion could provide that. Without some great enemy to oppose, I do not think we would come together willingly.

Fun fact, the sun is already blowing up. Checkmate Aliens!

I hate that COVID makes the Star Trek utopia so much less likely. We're living in the mirror universe.

American perspective.

Alien invasion is probably the only thing that would make (most) humans band together.

When you have giant spiders trying to eat everyone, people will stop caring that their neighbors leaves blew into their yard, or your skin tone is a few shades darker than someone else's.

I don't know... My take is that the stupidity of extremely polarised politics that exists in the US will reach a point where it self destructs within the next 50 years.

In a lot of countries, people listened to the experts. They accepted the lock down. They wore the masks. Almost everyone that didn't have a medical reason not to, got vaccinated.

Its good for Science Fiction can be aspirational sometimes though.

Classic Star Trek has humans living in an idealistic society meeting some weirdo aliens doing some weirdo alien shit that causes a lot of problems. Then you realize we're more like the aliens than the we are like the idealistic future human society. Our society is alien to to an ideal society.

Then the Enterprise warps off to some other place to do some cool shit somewhere else and the aliens are stuck on their shitty planet because they're a bunch of losers what can't get past their weirdo shit.

The implication is that we could be the cool dudes in a starship constantly doing awesome shit. But instead we're the losers stuck on a planet that the people in the starships laugh at.

So the reason why an ideal future isn't possible is because we can't get past our weirdo loser ideas.

I can now picture Kirk, Spock and Bones having a chuckle about some weirdo aliens that can't advance because they're stuck in the rut of doomerism.

"It's quite illogical that they can't understand they can never achieve anything if they presume failure before they even try."

"Humanity once thought that way a long time ago but we eventually got past it. Anyway, off we go somewhere else to see some other loser aliens doing stupid shit we used to do!"

I heard there is a Chinese flood narrative where when the people heard that the local god was pissed and going to make a flood they united and started building infrastructure. The result was the god failed to wipe them out.

Gantz last arc did this so well, people just don't give a crap about the truth, misinformation is widespread, and people will listen to whatever propaganda they want.

You would really like the Three Body Problem.

One of the iffey feelings I have reading three-body series, even though it's a pretty dark series that also highlight the dark side of humanity, is that the world superpowers were somewhat effecticely cooperative. May be if Liu Cixin wrote the book around Covid, it might be quite different.

Expeditionary forces is a comedy science fiction in which the nations of the world reluctantly worked together, but only some of the nations, and they're far from friends.

There is nearly a century of Nebula Award winning science fiction that is in the public domain. Hollywood can't say, "they're out of ideas" All they need are screenwriters who aren't idiots.

Image Transcription: Twitter Post

Kyle Butcavage Jr, @KyleButcavage

COVID has ruined sci-fi movies shit'll be like, "the year was 3004 and aliens were gonna blow up the sun" and I'm like, "makes sense" but then it goes to "so the world United to..." and I'm like "No the fuck they did not."

You are looking for c/HFY and r/HFY.

But I agree, except for the West pretty much every banana republic tries to isolate itself so their dictators can easier rob their subjects riches.

I summed it up in the Short Story Hard WEST