”Zgreb is a miner on an asteroid. Life in the mines is extremely difficult. The only thing that helps the miners to endure the almost unbearable hardships is a drug called ‘amber’, very expensive and difficult to obtain. Desperate, many miners end up committing suicide. Revolted by this intolerable situation and by the indifference of his employers, Zgreb strives to incite the other miners to rebellion. As soon as he manages to persuade them to strike, some huge, demon-like cyborgs called ‘Ghouls’, working for the international company producing ‘amber’, capture Zgreb and force him aboard a spaceship which brings him back on Earth."

Earth is like Hell. The development of technology has resulted in disastrous environmental pollution. The air is yellow and contains a huge amount of toxic, especially sulphurous, gases. The inhabitants of Earth can only breathe with the help of oxygen masks and very often they end up dying of asphyxia. There is almost no water left. Monopolized by an international company, pure water is extremely expensive and the water sold on the black market is dirty and contaminated by plenty of bacteria causing the deaths of thousands. Food is extremely scarce too. Most people survive by eating cockroaches, worms, spiders and – when they can find them – rats. The wealthiest ones undergo complex alterations of their organism, by means of a combination of genetic engineering and nanotechnology, so that they can feed on sand and stones. An incredible number of deadly microbes have emerged. The king of these mini-killers is a virus called LYS. It attacks all the vital organs of humans and provokes atrocious hallucinations in infected people: the victims believe that they’ve turned into vegetables; usually they think they are broccoli, but sometimes they believe themselves transformed into tomatoes, cauliflowers, cabbages or pumpkins.

Zgreb manages to survive anoxia and lack of food and water thanks to his surreptitious wealth, consisting of diamonds that he had stolen in the mine, at a moment when the guardians were muddle-headed by excessive doses of ‘amber’. By living on the asteroid, Zgreb is immune to the LYS virus.

Things go badly when mysterious Z-particles attack the Sun. Their contact usually results in the destruction of any luminous celestial body.

Only a few months remain before the Sun will explode. That will be the end of planet Earth.

Zgreb manages to board a spaceship stealthily. He survives the catastrophe, but he will have to spend the rest of his life in deep space which he hates profoundly.”

Does all this seem somewhat familiar?

That isn’t surprising. The text is an amalgam of some recurrent themes and points of view encountered in current SF: unhappiness; despair; ugliness; exploitation; decadence and decay; atrocities; disasters; pessimism; defeatism… There isn’t enough room for an exhaustive list. It is, nonetheless, true that compared to the nightmarish worlds of contemporary SF, even Dante’s Inferno seems like Disneyland. Loaded with pessimism and dismay reaching the apogee of their gloomy glory, present day SF bears a remarkable resemblance to Marvin, the paranoid android in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For those who haven’t read the book, Marvin is a depressive robot, constantly moaning, overcome with despair and disillusion. Nobody can abide Marvin’s company. An A.I., who was unfortunate enough to listen to Marvin’s points of view about life and the universe for a few hours, ended up… committing suicide!

The occurrence of negative and pessimistic SF isn’t new. Since the beginning the 20th century and for many years, under the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, SF was full of monstrous robots eager to destroy their creators and often the whole of humankind.

Isaac Asimov saved the world of SF from the tiresome aggressiveness of robots affected by destructive madness. Even nowadays, Isaac Asimov is regarded as ‘the father of robotics’, the brilliant visionary who inspired the most famous specialists in robot construction to realize their most audacious projects, such as the modern robots which are able to learn and to adapt.

However, Asimov did not create his fictitious robots in order to contribute to the advance of robotics. As he acknowledges in the introduction to his book I, Robot, Asimov’s true motivation for creating his mechanical heroes, obeying the three laws of robotics, was not of a scientific, but rather of a literary nature. A hardened SF reader and a brilliant scientist, Asimov could no longer stand any more stories where “the robot destroyed his creator” which was the most frequent recurrent theme in the SF of his time. He also regarded the sickly fear of science expressed by this theme (which Asimov named ‘The Frankenstein Complex’), as exaggerated, irrational and unfair to science. The fact that he was right on this point was presumably the reason why the career of destructive robots in the world of SF soon came to anend.

The improvement of the reputation of robots by Asimov (with the exception of Marvin; even Asimov could do nothing in his case) did not please everybody. For some obscure reason, a few SF fans and writers suffered from nostalgia. They missed the ‘Frankenstein Complex’.

They soon discovered a new subject allowing them to wail as much as they wished about the potential terrifying effects of the advance in technology: the end of the world.

In contemporary SF literature, this theme recurs ad nauseam. In most stories, “Technology destroys the world. Technology destroys the world. Technology destroys…” with variations on the theme: “Humankind suffers in a world that will soon be destroyed” and “Humankind suffers in a ruined world”. SF writers are so hell-bent on destroying the world that, compared to them, the destructive pre-Asimov robots seem like angels; they are so brilliant in inventing new ways and means to make humankind suffer that, in comparison, the tortures used by the executioners of the Inquisition were like innocent children’s games.

Apparently, SF is in a period of crisis. Some people presume that the Internet is responsible for this; others believe that comics or video games have overpowered SF literature. What nobody seems to notice is that, at this moment, if someone wants to relax, he would prefer to spend an evening in the company of Count Dracula or of J.K. Rowling’s dementors[1] rather than read a gloomy and pessimistic SF story.

It seems, nevertheless, that – at last! - the sun will soon shine in the sad, dark and ghastly world of SF. The person responsible for this sublime illumination is Jetse De Vries.

A technical specialist for a propulsion company, Jetse De Vries is also an SF writer and he was co-editor of Interzone for more than four years.

Since the beginning of his career in SF, Jetse has always been an ardent supporter of an optimistic and positive SF. His non-fiction articles, reviews, essays and interviews have appeared in Interzone, The Fix, The New York Review of SF and elsewhere. His stories, which have appeared in numerous SF magazines and anthologies in the UK and in the USA, are humorous, full of original scientific ideas, always optimistic and pleasant to read. The best example of positive SF is his “Transcendence Express”. In this story, a teacher helps the children of an African country to create biological quantum computers, thus helping them and their parents to improve the conditions of their life.

While he was co-editor of Interzone, Jetse often published various authors whose upbeat SF stories predicted a better future where science helps resolve problems instead of destroying the world.

Recently, he has undertaken an audacious new project: SHINE, an anthology of positive SF texts by authors from around the world. In January 2008, he launched a discussion about the necessity for positive change in SF. In collaboration with SF writer Jason Stoddard, he worked out an ‘Optimistic SF Manifesto’.

The essential points of this manifesto are the following:

-Positive SF includes some factors that contribute to improving the conditions of life and find solutions to all sorts of human problems (social, economic, environmental and many others). These benevolent elements may be real advances in science or simply people trying to do good things and help their fellow men by science or any other means.

-The system depicted in a positive SF story must be diverse, so that it may allow the possibility of possible changes (so: no more clichés such as “All of humankind on Earth is under the dominance of a horrible, totalitarian regime and nobody tries to rebel.”)

-Positive SF has a protagonist or protagonists who can effect change, especially positive change, even if this is limited to helping a small group of persons – or even a single person – and isn’t able to change the world.

-In order to be more realistically accurate, positive changes ought to happen in the near future rather than in a mid-future or a far future bound to be unknown, unpredictable, strange and implausible.

-Positive SF depicts fighters, people working to discover new horizons, facing difficulties with a positive frame of mind, trusting and respecting themselves as well as humankind. No more slackers who can do nothing more than complain about “the man” and “the system”.

The manifesto isn’t restricted to the above-mentioned criteria. Positive SF can spread out to a broad field of ideas and themes. Jetse De Vries has made this adjustment in order to allow more flexibility since he believes that “SF is a very broad genre, open to all forms of expression”.

The debate about positive SF, launched by Jetse De Vries, has already been a success. It started bubbling up in Damien Walters’ blogpost in the Guardian and continued with Lou Anders, Gareth Lynn Powell and Kathryn Cramer.

In November 2008, Alessandro Muré published an article about Positive SF in the Italian magazine Fantascienza.

All this seems rather encouraging. Apparently, Jetse is not a ‘lone wolf’ in defending a positive, more optimistic SF. Let us hope that his efforts will be fruitful, that soon more people in the world of SF will follow the luminous example of SHINE. 

At the dawn of the 21st century, the omnipresence in SF literature of the ‘Frankenstein Complex’, involving fear of science and technology, is no longer justified.

To think positively isn’t a crime. SF could become more optimistic, cheerful, uplifting and bring the light of some hope.

That would not be… the end of the world!