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Notes -
Does anyone have suggestions on books or movies that have a positive vision that they're trying to portray through fiction? To elaborate, I don't mean positive in the sense of morality or optimism, but in the sense that they actually want to show something, rather than tear something else down.
As an example, the older Star Trek series did this well. The show wanted to portray a world where humans were mostly post scarcity, and what a society would look like in that environment. It looked like fully automated gay luxury space communism where most people focused on self actualization that incidentally sided society at large. I'm not a gay space communist, but I've always appreciated that they took the concept and ran with it. Banks' Culture novels fill a similar niche.
I'm not going to go too deeply into counter examples because this isn't the culture war thread, but it's lately felt like that positive vision is increasingly hard to find, awash as it is in "deconstructive reimaginings".
Can anybody recommend things that fit that description? I'm not particularly concerned about the topic, so much as that the creators own the topic and actually think it through to the point where the settings and characters feel natural.
Redwall, maybe?
In some sense, any story in which society are the good guys and the villains are trying to destroy it is a "positive vision" of that society. Redwall Abbey is a place where all the sentient woodland animals come together and share in a community. As far as I know it's small-scale communism in that it's a literal commune. Everyone works according to their abilities and takes according to their need, supervised by wise elders, and benevolently treating visitors, aside from the villains who keep trying to conquer them.
But you could make less ambitious arguments that things like Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter or just any generic fantasy story have positive visions of their society because evil people are trying to destroy it and the good guys are trying to protect it (even if it has some flaws). Probably not what you're looking for as an answer to this question though.
Red wall; socialism in one country, with food this time.
Socialism in one town. The author left the actual population deliberately vague, but order of magnitude we're looking at around 100 people. Which is less than Dunbar's number, so actually realistic for everyone to know everyone at least somewhat and monitor to prevent corruption or slacking that kill large scale communism.
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