"While genre SF has often imagined the dark sides of the future (or alternate presents and pasts), the optimism of its earliest years (the 1920s-40s)—the excitement at the thought of discovering new worlds and new, galactic and extragalactic life, and science and technology’s promise for a better life—are less common (although certainly not absent) in current SF. Dissolution, chaos, dystopic and post-apocalyptic visions of the environment, economies, governments, societies and humanity are SF’s current subjects of choice."
Arielle Saiber, Flying Saucers Would Never Land in Lucca: The Fiction of Italian Science Fiction.
