Forks in the Road: Why do We Write So Many More Dystopias than Utopias?

Utopia is a funny thing, and I don’t know about anyone else, but whenever I hear the word “utopia” I immediately feel my hackles rise: not because I don’t want the world to get better, but because it always seems to me that it’s used to mean its inverse

Doing Art: Some Ways to Unshackle Creativity

These are not the steps to creativity, nor are they merely tools that you use as you proceed in your own acts of creation. They are options that I hope you can make use of as you work on your art. Anyone who purports to offer you a foolproof guide to creativity is just as suspect as someone who is offering you a foolproof guide to critical thinking. Anyone you believe on this topic is going to (unintentionally?) sabotage you.

The Problem of the Protagonist: A Question of Morality and Subjectivity

I believe that the way that we tell stories has a major influence on the way that we conceive of selfhood and acceptable behaviors, and I think that there are some easy ways we can adjust how we construct our narratives that would be helpful and possibly lead to new and interesting story shapes.

The Collapse of Possibility: The Problem of Aesthetics and Ontology in Science Fiction

But all of this is beside the point: the fact that we can pick out two dominant aesthetics in the visual media form of what is supposed to be a “literature of ideas” is a problem. It indicates, if anything, a lack of ideas. If our options are just a visual vocabulary iteration of the old Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate that no one but the people having it are interested in, we've got problems.