I haven't read either of the new books you mention. That's because I've moved more or less exclusively to Indie published (e)books available on Amazon. The sense of optimism / positivity you mention in the golden age books tends to still be there. The characterizations seem to be better though. Or at least they can be, there's plenty of dreck
The one traditional publisher that is still publishing mostly positive books is Baen. A decade or so ago I bought everything Baen published, I no longer do that, but I still buy some books there.
I actually jumped down to the comments to ask whether Evan reads Baen (and then saw you already had!). In particular, the Honor Harrington series has this outlook, or so it seems to me.
In RL conversation, I've called this mode of storytelling "problem/solution" science-fiction, because so much of the fun of it is just thinking, "Aw, heck, that's it, she'll never get out of this one!" and then seeing how she does, in fact, get out of this one. It's not really my usual cup of tea, but it's a bunch of fun to read something along these lines once a year or so.
In fact (not to get political, but...) it seemed to me that the Sad Puppies controversy was mostly about whether optimistic, science-first, problem/solution science-fiction should still be prestigious. The verdict, alas, was a resounding "no," but the worm will turn. (I was pleased to see Andy Weir nominated in 2022!)
And the Hugos have now been outsourced to China, probably permanently. Along with Worldcon. The resulting wailing and gnashing of teeth from the faithful is extremely Schadenfreudelicious
Sarah Hoyt (one of the Sad Puppies) called these positive outlook stories "Human Wave" which I think is a pretty good catch all phrase
I read book one of the Honor Harrington series a long while back, and enjoyed it, but I heard mixed things about the rest of the series so I didn't continue. If you recommend it, maybe I'll put it on the list to give it another try?
Regarding the Sad Puppies... your view sounds a little like Eric Flint's? (To name another writer of optimistic fiction I've enjoyed sometimes!) Even beyond the Sad Puppies, the distinctions he draws ring really true to me in a lot of areas. https://ericflint.net/hugo-controversy/divergence-between-popularity-and-awards/
I can recommend the first three Honor Harrington books without reservation. They're all that same basic structure, and they're all tightly plotted enough to delight.
In Book 4 and onwards, it's been a lot more hit-and-miss, as sometimes happens when an author is successful and his editor lets him start getting away with flab. As I said, I'm only reading about one a year, so I only recently finished Book 7, where I think the first hundred pages could have been cut without repercussion.
As for Eric Flint's article (who incidentally wrote some Honor Harrington later on? weird coincidence)... I think he's definitely got a handle on several large pieces of the puzzle, and I agree that those distinctions are worth holding on to. (OTOH, the dynamic that produced the Jemisin/Leckie/Martine years is also much more than random in-group fluctuations. It's not politics, exactly. It's *bigger* than politics, something more fundamental... something I've been trying and failing to write about for about a year now.)
I've been hearing people praise Golden Age SF as optimistic about agency for decades and I find it confusing.
For a man versus environment story like The Martian, it makes sense to say that knowledge and agency is the only thing that matters.
Knowledge and agency are valuable in war, but is any story about war optimistic?
I recently came across a Neil Gaiman essay in which he claims that the moral of 95% of pulp SF is "people are smart. We'll cope." That makes sense for the one story he describes, about an invention that upends everything and the suggestion is that the positive developments are more important than the disruption to people who gambled on obsolete monopolies. This is optimistic. And it takes agency to actually negotiate such a settlement. But this is a very small slice of pulp SF, not 95%, more like 5%. War is where such a negotiation failed.
In a zero-sum game like war or racing for a particular discovery, there is conservation of agency. The kids in Red Planet start the war because no one else has agency. Is this optimistic? How about Foundation, where Hari Seldon has agency because everyone else is predictable? In the sense that "it all adds up to normality," it is a positive update to discover that no one else has agency because the world system produces just as much it did before you learned it, but you have more leverage than you thought. But it leaves the mystery of what destroyed everyone else's agency. Maybe you don't have agency, either.
I suppose you could say that Atlas Shrugged is optimistic about war in that it proposes that a system aligned with human agency will defeat one opposed to it. Is the Moon is a Harsh Mistress framed that way? But in that book the Loonies merely preserve their freedom while leaving the Terrans to tyranny. And even Lunar society starts decaying at the end. Does civilization eat agency? That sounds pretty pessimistic to me. Pick your battles is good advice, but whether someone judges it optimistic or pessimistic depends on what they think the heroes should be able to accomplish, which seems pretty arbitrary.
You mention recent dystopias. 1984 is a pessimistic dystopia about a government focused on attacking agency. But recent books like the Giver or The Hunger Games are about individuals overthrowing oppressive governments, aren't they? (I checked wikipedia and it sounds like only book 3 is about revolution, while in the first two the government is pretty good at manipulating the heroine.)
The Stars Are Legion reminds me of the Golden Age story The City and the Stars, a travelogue through a decaying civilization. The characters do not make use of fundamental science, but they gather and exploit knowledge of the artificial environment. Isn't it optimistic about agency? I think there is something else in these stories that you (and many others) are picking up but describing wrong.
I haven't read either of the new books you mention. That's because I've moved more or less exclusively to Indie published (e)books available on Amazon. The sense of optimism / positivity you mention in the golden age books tends to still be there. The characterizations seem to be better though. Or at least they can be, there's plenty of dreck
The one traditional publisher that is still publishing mostly positive books is Baen. A decade or so ago I bought everything Baen published, I no longer do that, but I still buy some books there.
I actually jumped down to the comments to ask whether Evan reads Baen (and then saw you already had!). In particular, the Honor Harrington series has this outlook, or so it seems to me.
In RL conversation, I've called this mode of storytelling "problem/solution" science-fiction, because so much of the fun of it is just thinking, "Aw, heck, that's it, she'll never get out of this one!" and then seeing how she does, in fact, get out of this one. It's not really my usual cup of tea, but it's a bunch of fun to read something along these lines once a year or so.
In fact (not to get political, but...) it seemed to me that the Sad Puppies controversy was mostly about whether optimistic, science-first, problem/solution science-fiction should still be prestigious. The verdict, alas, was a resounding "no," but the worm will turn. (I was pleased to see Andy Weir nominated in 2022!)
And the Hugos have now been outsourced to China, probably permanently. Along with Worldcon. The resulting wailing and gnashing of teeth from the faithful is extremely Schadenfreudelicious
Sarah Hoyt (one of the Sad Puppies) called these positive outlook stories "Human Wave" which I think is a pretty good catch all phrase
I read book one of the Honor Harrington series a long while back, and enjoyed it, but I heard mixed things about the rest of the series so I didn't continue. If you recommend it, maybe I'll put it on the list to give it another try?
Regarding the Sad Puppies... your view sounds a little like Eric Flint's? (To name another writer of optimistic fiction I've enjoyed sometimes!) Even beyond the Sad Puppies, the distinctions he draws ring really true to me in a lot of areas. https://ericflint.net/hugo-controversy/divergence-between-popularity-and-awards/
I can recommend the first three Honor Harrington books without reservation. They're all that same basic structure, and they're all tightly plotted enough to delight.
In Book 4 and onwards, it's been a lot more hit-and-miss, as sometimes happens when an author is successful and his editor lets him start getting away with flab. As I said, I'm only reading about one a year, so I only recently finished Book 7, where I think the first hundred pages could have been cut without repercussion.
As for Eric Flint's article (who incidentally wrote some Honor Harrington later on? weird coincidence)... I think he's definitely got a handle on several large pieces of the puzzle, and I agree that those distinctions are worth holding on to. (OTOH, the dynamic that produced the Jemisin/Leckie/Martine years is also much more than random in-group fluctuations. It's not politics, exactly. It's *bigger* than politics, something more fundamental... something I've been trying and failing to write about for about a year now.)
I've been hearing people praise Golden Age SF as optimistic about agency for decades and I find it confusing.
For a man versus environment story like The Martian, it makes sense to say that knowledge and agency is the only thing that matters.
Knowledge and agency are valuable in war, but is any story about war optimistic?
I recently came across a Neil Gaiman essay in which he claims that the moral of 95% of pulp SF is "people are smart. We'll cope." That makes sense for the one story he describes, about an invention that upends everything and the suggestion is that the positive developments are more important than the disruption to people who gambled on obsolete monopolies. This is optimistic. And it takes agency to actually negotiate such a settlement. But this is a very small slice of pulp SF, not 95%, more like 5%. War is where such a negotiation failed.
https://boingboing.net/2014/11/06/neil-gaiman-how-i-learned-to.html
In a zero-sum game like war or racing for a particular discovery, there is conservation of agency. The kids in Red Planet start the war because no one else has agency. Is this optimistic? How about Foundation, where Hari Seldon has agency because everyone else is predictable? In the sense that "it all adds up to normality," it is a positive update to discover that no one else has agency because the world system produces just as much it did before you learned it, but you have more leverage than you thought. But it leaves the mystery of what destroyed everyone else's agency. Maybe you don't have agency, either.
I suppose you could say that Atlas Shrugged is optimistic about war in that it proposes that a system aligned with human agency will defeat one opposed to it. Is the Moon is a Harsh Mistress framed that way? But in that book the Loonies merely preserve their freedom while leaving the Terrans to tyranny. And even Lunar society starts decaying at the end. Does civilization eat agency? That sounds pretty pessimistic to me. Pick your battles is good advice, but whether someone judges it optimistic or pessimistic depends on what they think the heroes should be able to accomplish, which seems pretty arbitrary.
You mention recent dystopias. 1984 is a pessimistic dystopia about a government focused on attacking agency. But recent books like the Giver or The Hunger Games are about individuals overthrowing oppressive governments, aren't they? (I checked wikipedia and it sounds like only book 3 is about revolution, while in the first two the government is pretty good at manipulating the heroine.)
The Stars Are Legion reminds me of the Golden Age story The City and the Stars, a travelogue through a decaying civilization. The characters do not make use of fundamental science, but they gather and exploit knowledge of the artificial environment. Isn't it optimistic about agency? I think there is something else in these stories that you (and many others) are picking up but describing wrong.