So, I made a statement on Facebook that there are very few --indeed, almost no-- science fiction movies (or just movies about a possible future) that have come out in the past 12 years (EG, starting in 2000) that was not back-dropped by either a distopian or downright apocalyptic world.

Star Trek is the one major exception I thought of at the time.
Later, I remembered "I, Robot".
So far, every other film I can think of has been pre-2000.

Can y'all think of any? I've become curious if my speculation holds up to scrutiny.
Thanks.

I agree that there are very few movies as optimistic as Star Trek, but I would hardly say that there are none at all. However, let me just say that this is a very interesting question indeed

My partial list of "optimistic" sci-fi movies:
Minority Report (based on novel by Ph. Dick // humanity is prospering, some social problems solved at the end)
Paycheck (based on novel by Ph. Dick // humanity is prospering)
Prometheus (coming out this summer // based on the Alien universe // humanity is exploring the cosmos)
The Chronicles of Riddick (set in the 28th century // not so optimistic after taking the Necromongers into account, but humanity has spread through out the galaxy)
Impostor (based on novel by Ph. Dick // this could be called dystopian as well but... we survived 1st contact with evil aliens and are ready to strike back )
Starship Troopers 2+3 (we are exploring the cosmos, however the regime on Earth seems a bit totalitarian)
Red Planet (we go to Mars!!!!!)
Doom (we are at Mars!!!!!)
District 9 (1st contact isn't so bad in the end)
Iron Man (who wouldn't like to be Mr. Stark?)

I will also include some TV Series just for completeness:
Outcasts (BBC)
Stargate Universe

I wrote the ones above, mostly out of the top of my head. For a list of sci-fi movies you can have a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sc ... _the_2000s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sc ... _the_2010s

As I said, earlier this question is rather subjective, ie the answer depends on what exactly you consider optimistic etc.

Tried to get you 5 more...

- In Time (not so optimistic) {Oct 2011}
- Real Steel (takes place 2020) {2011, originally a book from 1956}
- Priest (iffy if you want to consider this) {2011}
- Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Sort of Eludes to future events) {2011}
- Source Code (Doesn't really have a time line, but its at least current) {April 2011}

Grrr outcasts got canceled and I started watching it because my local station picked it up recently and I didn't realize it was going to be unfinished. I hate watching unfinished work, I should have checked first. It is too bad because it was decent.

Yeah, it really sucked when I learned that Outcasts got canceled... The same was true about Stargate Universe

I don't necessarily mean a utopian or even optimistic future. I just mean one where it's at least as "good" as it is now: we have problems, yes, big problems; but, in general things are good and have the prospect (but not the certainty) of getting better. We've not destroyed the environment; the

In a distopian world there's the powerful and the powerless; laws are made to keep the powerful in power and the laws are enforced with deadly force. This includes movies like "Blade Runner" and "Red Mars". I include Red Mars because the beginning premise is that Earth was dying.

Most of the movies in the list above, I've not seen. However, of those I have seen (not many) I only one I disagree with is Red Mars. So I can now include Iron Man, District 9 and Minority Report. You've just more than doubled my list. And I'll look up the others on your list as well as those on the wikipedia list.

However, I would be surprised if one in ten or even one in twenty is other than pessimistic about the future. And this is scary because an opinion about the future, what ever it is, will be manifested *if* enough people believe in it. And right now our society believes our future is bleak. Very bleak. And it scares and angers me. Very much.

I think that there is some bias in your selection because people really like watching catastrophes, problems and problem solving, doomsday scenarios, post-apocalyptic events (just consider how successful The Walking Dead is) etc. If everything was perfect or "at least as "good" as it is now" as you say, then people would be bored quite quickly! Therefore, more movies/series with things going wrong are made. Also, you only consider Hollywood movies and that's actually only a small fraction of the world's movie production. So, this adds another bias in your result

Furthermore, your basis for comparison is a bit biased as well. You said that the movie should depict a reality "at least as "good" as it is now". But this only applies to some people. Imagine all the people living in totalitarian regimes where "laws are made to keep the powerful in power and the laws are enforced with deadly force." One such example is North Korea or Iran. Imagine all the poor people in Africa and so on. In other words, I think you set the bar a bit too high my friend. I agree that the bar should be set quite high, that we should try for the best, but reality is always different from our expectations.

I agree; with movies you need a 'problem to overcome' scenario, otherwise it would be a documentary on the future, something a lot less people would go see. There needs to be a story, progression from bad to better or at least less bad.

As for the 2nd part I think ZDarby is talking about a future where the entire planet isn't almost extinct, destroyed, etc. Perspective for sure is a factor but I think he is talking generics and global planetary condition, not the politics, economics or living conditions.

I was listening to some interviews recently about the condition of the space programs around the world and the lack of interest we now have for them. It was proposed that when the world focuses on space, that there is a correlation to improved optimism, economic growth, employment, scientific discoveries, human development, general well being, and etc. That’s just something to think about.

Your observations are absolutely accurate, Captain_Picard. Any such selection, almost by default, will be loaded with bias. And the ones you mention are definitely there.

But, as Kaladin (I think) is saying, I'm trying to gage the optimism of the times; and I think they're quite pessimistic.

I only want to play the devil's advocate by saying that again there is bias in your argument since you only consider the movies and not other forms of expression like poetry, novels, art etc. But I understand what you mean... we live in troubled times

The following are essays by the writers of the "Invasion!" series of books, which can be found at the end of the last book, Voy 09: Final Fury.
(The series is pretty good, IMHO, and I recommend it.)
These short essays better express the thought I was trying to convey, that Star Trek centered around the optimism of being human despite our flaws, not the pessimism of it because of them.
I believe there are very few other such franchises.
However, I notice these essays imply there really never were.
All three essays are worth the long read.

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When my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, and I met, I was twenty-five and he was thirty-five. We lived in separate parts of the country, and we both wrote science fiction. I was an admitted STAR TREK fan who had never been to any of the conventions because I was too broke to attend. Dean, who never speaks of the things he likes, was a closet Trekker whose love for the series turned out to be a big surprise to his friends. The night Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered, I watched in my apartment, and he watched it in his, and it wasn't until the next day that I discovered he loved STAR TREK as much as I did.

At that point, we had been seeing each other for nearly a year.

So, when John Ordover, our editor at Pocket Books, asked us to write an essay about how STAR TREK had influenced us for the last book of the INVASION! series, we knew we immediately had a problem. Because when STAR TREK premiered, I was six. Dean was sixteen. I was in grade school. He was in high school. I saw two episodes during the show's entire first run (I couldn't stay up that late). He saw them all when they aired. And so on.

Dean and I run into these generational things all the time, especially concerning the sixties. While I was learning to walk, Dean was learning to duck and cover in preparation for a nuclear attack. While I was riding my bicycle after school, he was worried about being sent to Vietnam. When I experienced my first kiss, he had broken off his second engagement.

Even though we have a lot in common now, our ages prevented us from having a lot in common then.

So ... how did STAR TREK influence us? Well, it influenced us differently.

Dean grew up in Boise, Idaho, then a fairly small city on the scale of things. It had an air force base and it was near several nuclear bases. It was, in nuclear parlance, a first-strike area.

During his years in grade school, Dean learned how to protect himself in a nuclear attack. Instead of fire drills, his school held duck-and-cover drills. The children hid under their desks, covered their heads, and waited for a teacher to whistle an all-clear. This, somehow, would save them from a nuclear explosion. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. And most public places had a visibly displayed yellow-and-black sign that showed where to hide if the sirens went off, warning of an attack.

By the time he was ten, it seemed clear that the world wouldn't last the decade. By the time he got into high school, that prediction came true on a personal level. Many boys his age went to Vietnam, and most never came back. High-school graduation meant, for many, the draft, and years of service in a war few believed in. Dean spent the first twenty-four years of his life thinking that (1) the world would end and/or (2) he would die in a police action so controversial Congress never voted it into war.

But this was just a backdrop. On the surface, Dean was a regular guy. I went to his high-school reunion. The folks who didn't know him well thought he was handsome (and he was; I saw pictures), smart, and shy (and he wasn't; I heard stories). He made the newspaper fairly regularly as part of the golf team, and he spent most days after school in the winter skiing at nearby Bogus Basin.

Except on Fridays. On Fridays, Dean W. Smith, handsome high-school student, stayed home.

To watch STAR TREK.

He watched it because it was science fiction and, unbeknownst to all but his closest friends, he was an avid science-fiction fan. But if STAR TREK had been bad science fiction, he might have dated on some of those Friday nights. Some of the episodes were bad, but more were good. But it wasn't the quality that held him.

It was the hope.

The hope existed in science-fiction novels. Man lived beyond 1970 in Robert Heinlein's books and Arthur C. Clarke's. But not on television. Television brought us the grim visions of Rod Serling and the Outer Limits. Television showed us the world ending, not thriving.

STAR TREK showed us a world in which the human race somehow survived the nightmares of the mid-twentieth century, and developed a culture that went to the stars in peace and exploration. Hope, for a generation that didn't have any.

The possibility that the world wouldn't end, that wars like Vietnam would become anathema to the human race. The idea that human beings of all races, all nationalities, and all credos, could get along.

The belief that we had a future after all.

It was that vision that kept Dean home on Fridays. And made him first in line to all the movies. And made him stay home for the premier of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the off-chance his new girlfriend (me) hated that STAR TREK stuff.

Well, the new girlfriend loved that Star Trek stuff. The first short story I ever wrote was STAR TREK fan fic about Jim Kirk coming to Superior, Wisconsin, and saving a lonely fifteen-year-old from

Never mind. You get the idea. I was twelve at the time. Fifteen seemed awfully sophisticated back then.

STAR TREK didn't have the wider implications for me in those days. I simply loved the series. It came on every day after school (about four o'clock). My best friend, Toni, told me about the show, and we started watching it together. We even wrote a STAR TREK novel in Mrs. Anderson's English class (except for the week we took off to read The Exorcist, which we kept hidden in our English text). We were going to finish over the summer, but during the summer Toni moved away, and I was left to watch STAR TREK alone.

By the time I was fourteen, STAR TREK was cool. All my friends watched it. We all discussed it. And during those discussions, I learned to read the credits on TV shows. When my new best friend, Mindy Walgren, heard that my favorite STAR TREK episode was "City on the Edge of Forever," she loaned me a short-story collection by Harlan Ellison, the guy who had written that marvelous episode. Harlan's short stories led me to his essays, and his essays led me to some of the best writers working in the field at that time.

A television program opened a whole new world for me. The world of science fiction. The world of short stories. The world of essays. Television, instead of turning me away from books, led me to books. It expanded my horizons instead of limiting them.

I will be forever grateful.

I love to write STAR TREK novels because I like to play in the STAR TREK universe. I've played in it since Mrs. Anderson's English class twenty-four years ago. But I don't write the books solely because of that. I also write them for people, like me, who go from television to books. In STAR TREK novels, some of the best writers in the SF field get to play with SF ideas too big for the television screen. Like Jerry Oltion's planet rescue in Twilight's End or Peter David's wonderful spin on time travel in Imzadi.

Dean plays with big ideas in our STAR TREK novels (the commuting-through-time idea in The Escape was his; and so were the Jibetians in The Long Night). But he brings something else to our books.

He brings the hope. Because he's never forgotten how badly it's needed.

You see, sometimes ten years is a long time. When I graduated from high school, Vietnam was a name from a (seemingly) distant past. The kids in my class went to college or into the workforce. No one died (except in car wrecks). We never ducked or covered. Those yellow-and-black signs were dust-covered oddities in old buildings. We knew we'd live to see our grandchildren. We knew the world wasn't going to end.

We had hope and we didn't even realize it.

Which isn't to say STAR TREK became irrelevant. It didn't. But we took different things out of it. We talked about the show's racial unity. We liked the way women held positions of power. We liked the strange new worlds because we believed we'd visit them someday.

That there would be a future was a given. We simply had to decide how to live it.

How important was STAR TREK in creating that attitude?

Let's be real for a moment. We are talking television, after all. Television is entertainment. Entertainment is a way to kill a few hours. Nothing more.

Right?

Maybe. Maybe not.

You see, I believe we create the futures we can envision. If we can see only death and destruction ahead, then that's what's going to happen. But STAR TREK and science-fiction novels gave us a future, a real future, a future to envision. It touched me at twelve. It touched Dean at sixteen.

And it touched countless others in his generation and mine. His needed the hope. Mine needed the goals.

How important is STAR TREK?

Important enough.

-Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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So, it's not like thirty years ago, dude; and there's like, you know, a dozen sci-fi shows on the tube now rilly. (Forgive him, Caesar; for he is a Southern Californian and thinks the customs and traditions of his native speech are laws of English.) There are or were paranoid detective shows about alien conspiracies, silly shows about Space Marines who can't even get a haircut, shows about humans fleeing (a) cyborgs, (b) aliens, (c) the remnants of our own evil culture; there are or were shows about alien cops, alien pops, and pets from a peculiar planet; there are or were so many time-travel shows that you haven't time to watch them; there are or were ... dude, I don't have the patience, man. You know the list; you probably watched them all ... I did some only once.

But none invaded the American psyche as STAR TREK did the sometimes campy, sometimes brilliant chronicle of Kirk and Spock and the crochety, old dude who was a doctor, not an antediluvian ark-builder. So, like, why not? Why didn't Space: $19.99 or Space: Behind and Between take off and grab America by the ah by the lapels and shake us into submission?

I can't tell you for certain; I'm not Howard Rosenberg, and nobody pays me three hundred Gs a year (or, these days, should I like say three hundred K?) to tell you why TV shows are cool or suck. But one thing even I notice: of all that litany of sci-fi shows, past and present, even marching off into the distant future ... only one showed us a human race driven to explore space by our natures, not our failures.

In STAR TREK, we weren't chased away from Earth by metallic cyborgs with red dots in the middle of their foreheads; we weren't blown out of orbit, riding our own moon, by the explosion of a backyard barbecue; we didn't get lost in the starry deep; we weren't invaded; we didn't have to take in a refugee alien population; we didn't stubbornly rebuild a space station that big, bad aliens had destroyed four previous times. Earth wasn't destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, the empire didn't strike back, we didn't become unstuck in time, and bug-eyed monsters haven't infiltrated the FBI. In STAR TREK, we set out deliberately to explore the galaxy you know, like the whole strange new worlds, new life, and new civilizations rap, dude.

Don't misunderstand: a lot of the other sci-fi shows were cool; they didn't all suck. In fact, I enjoyed watching most of them. Well ... let's say some of them. But only STAR TREK actually embedded itself into American culture, making the Starship Enterprise as instantly recognizable as the dude with the red cape and the big, red S (or the yellow dude with spiky hair and a skateboard). And (coincidence?) only STAR TREK was about humans with a future humans needing to reach out to the stars, not because Earth was closed to us, but because it's in our natures to demand to know what's over the next mountain range, what's across the ocean, what's past the last planet in the solar system ... we're monkey-boys, all of us, and we're driven by a mechanism so deep it must be evolutionary to monkey around with stuff we find.

I don't know why no other show has tried to tap into the potential of the human need for exploration, excitement, and (as Freeman Dyson says) "disturbing the universe." Maybe the rest of TV Land thinks that theme is already "owned" by STAR TREK; or worse ... maybe the guys who produce shows where the human race is on its last legs really, honest-to-God, believe humans let's be honest, Americans don't even have a future ... and don't deserve one.

If they really think that, then they should make depressing police procedurals or produce a gaudy talk show, with its endless parade of whining weirdos for whom America is dead. If a person has no vision or hope for the future or doesn't believe in the greatness of the human race; if a person can't see any damned good coming from science and technology; if he thinks There Are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know then he has no damned business calling himself a science-fiction writer. Stay outta my field, you sniveling creeps!

I'll just take Kirk and Picard, Janeway and especially Sisko instead; they've read their Heinlein and Asimov they know there's a brave new universe out there, full of such people as ... as STAR TREK is made of. Remember Bob Browning: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." Is there any other show where men and women constantly reach far out past yesterday's grasp? Not even, dude. So let's, like, you know, give STAR TREK credit for being in that sense the only real science-fiction show that's ever been on TV.

-Dafydd ab Hugh

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"THAT'S WHAT SETS YOU APART FROM THE REST OF US, JIM. YOU look at these alien people with nine eyes and no arms, and you see the fact that they just want a home and safety. You look at aliens in terms of how they're like us, while everybody else sees how they're different."

I'm not sure whether Dr. McCoy said this to Jim Kirk in First Strike, or I said it to him myself during a misty moment at the schooner's wheel, but I'm sure one of us did.

Star Trek as a TV show, or shall we say as fourth-wall theater, gave us a glimpse into a future we wouldn't mind living. While most science fiction of the 1960s and much of it now shows us a glum, dismal, postholocaust future where people wear rags and are reduced to ratlike behavior, STAR TREK gave us a clean, bright future with crisp military panache melded into the dynamism of individuality.

Jim Kirk was the individual who set the design, and without him there would be no STAR TREK today, but not because he was perfect or charismatic, though he was certainly the latter. Jim Kirk provided a magnetic compass for us because he was charismatic and yet deeply flawed. Yes, as classical heroic drama has always shown us, the hero's imperfections and how he handles them are the real barometers of heroism. Perfection is easy. With perfection we don't need drama to provide exemplars in life, and in fact we don't even need heroes.

But life isn't perfect. Neither are any of my captains, and I've sailed with several. As many of you know, I work as a deckhand and helmsman aboard several Tall Ships, including the tough old 125' Baltic trader topsail schooner Alexandria out of Alexandria, Virginia, the pilot schooner William H. Albury out of Man-o'-War Cay in the Bahamas, the 1883 Portuguese fisherman barkentine Gazela of Philadelphia, which is the oldest and largest working square-rigger on Earth, and the breathtakingly fast Baltimore clipper Pride of Baltimore II. I mention these ships because they are all a piece of the Enterprise to me. She is their legacy.

My captains range from a former Chesapeake Bay tug captain to a former CIA mercenary. Yeah, really. I've never had a female captain yet, but I've worked under many female first and second mates and bosuns, some of whom had their captain's licenses, so I also feel quite comfortable watching Captain Janeway at work. There are some people under whose command I won't go to sea but I'd go with her.

She's not perfect either. If I ever run into a captain who seems to be perfect, I ain't signing on that ship.

Why not? Because I'm not perfect; neither are any of my shipmates, and for that matter neither are any of my ships. A "perfect" captain just couldn't function on the real sea, with a real crew and real trouble, and that means life or death to those of us who man the sheets and halyards.

My work on ships is certainly one of the reasons STAR TREK is so comfortable for me, though I do write in other genres and media. I seem to keep coming back to STAR TREK no matter how far I wander whether my continual returns are like springtime or the flu season is a matter of personal taste, but I leave that to the readers. Surely it bears an eerie resemblance to going back out to sea no matter how taxing, wet, crowded, hot, cold, or scary the last voyage was, I keep signing back on.

Yes, that's what I mean it's not always fun, but it's always a challenge, and that's what fuels me. I have yet to tire of watching my captains try to sort out a gripping situation, wrestling with their own flaws and the flaws of the amalgamated crews, usually a gaggle of persons from all walks of life and any dozen given philosophies. I watch my captains trying to figure out which person has which best ability, and which duty that person just shouldn't be assigned to and all this very often in the midst of notable danger, whether during Hurricane Andrew or piloting upstream on the swollen Mississippi.

Or trying to pull the starship out of a gravity well or to survive a battle of monumental odds. Yes, I watch my starship captains the same way. I've watched Jim Kirk for the better part of my life, and he's a bundle of extremes, both noble and petty, and even nobility can be a fault in some situations. What sets him apart is his determination to work through those faults. I never tire of examining that kind of person, and STAR TREK has continually given us a vehicle with which to hold that mirror up to ourselves and take a close look.

To date I've written more Jim Kirk books than any other author. I've spent more hours watching him over and over again and working with him than anyone. With so many thousands of words to write about him, I've had to examine his personality very closely and find out just what about him makes me keep watching, so I can make you keep watching.

What I discovered during the writing of First Strike was Jim Kirk's relentless plumbing for the commonality between people and peoples. He'd stare into alien eyes, if he could find them, and sift out the ways he and that alien were alike. That's where he'd start from the point of familiarity. Everyone who met him crewmates, aliens, enemies felt instantly as if they'd known him for years. They might not like him or agree with him, but they always knew where he stood, because he would chip out that common element and work from there.

Most science fiction concentrates on the differences. Kirk and his crew had the idea that there would be, had to be, something in common even with the oddest creature, and all we had to do was find that thing, that common desire, goal, passion, no matter how small.

Jim Kirk looked at women much the same way the ultimate alien, of course. He saw not only face or hair or figure, or how different women were from one another, but how much they were the same. He saw not females, but femininity. His attitude changed when, in the episode "Metamorphosis," he found out the Companion was female, just as it changed during "Devil in the Dark" when he found out the Horta was a mother protecting her young.

William Shatner knew that also, instinctively if not professionally. If we pay attention to the way the professional science-fiction writers wrote the original STAR TREK and the way Shatner played it, we discover that Jim Kirk wasn't a hound after all. He was an appreciator. He appreciated women for the poetic loveliness he saw in all of them, human or otherwise, and he appreciated aliens for the relationship that could be built out of a vacuum.

That's what set the original STAR TREK apart from other science fiction and sets the pace for us now it went out of its way to show how individuals, ever separate unto ourselves, are more like than unlike. That is also what real captains have to do bring together crewmen who may never have seen each other before, and by the time the ship leaves the dock make us all have a common goal. Usually it's something quite humble, like making the next port on schedule. Occasionally, survival itself is at stake. But sea and space are great equalizers keep the water out, the people in, and get to the next port.

Whatever happens between is just the pub story we'll tell.

So be careful whose command you sign under. Make sure your captain has flaws and a good stout temper. Your chances of surviving are better, and you might even have a great adventure between those dockside sighs of relief.

Fair weather,

-Diane Carey