I’ve noticed that a load of online publishers are hungry for “Hopeful Sci-Fi”. Stories in which technology solves the world’s problems. They’re paying well for it, some of them. Looks like that sort of fiction is hard to find. I wonder why.
I open my copious files of short stories to see if I’ve got anything that might fit their submission guidelines.
Nothing does. 
I’ve got a story in which cultured meat begins to evolve neuronal activity and a story in which a terminally ill rich man enters the cryogenic state whilst still alive so as to improve his chances of eventual recovery. Another story in which a robot given a chemical emotion battery learns how to emotionally manipulate other robots for personal gain. A child parented all the way into adulthood by a super-patient AI who gives all-positive feedback and never calls him to account for his behaviour or requires him to interact nonviolently. A high-school literature class that offends George Orwell by their opinions on his book, so he vanishes the book and the teacher turns into a telescreen. The closest thing I’ve got to the “Technology Will Rescue Us” trope is a deadly asteroid headed towards Earth and the super-wealthy fleeing to a base on the Moon while the scientists secretly manage to deflect the asteroid just enough to hit the Moon instead of Earth.
My default position on unbridled technological advancement is a loud, “No! Don’t open that box!” Tech, in my authorial imagination, plays the part of a Hydra, replacing every problem solved with two new problems. It’s not all shiny happy Star Trek shaking hands; it’s Big Brother and Frankenstein, Dr Moreau and Zachariah. In one of HG Wells’s short stories, nursing mothers are replaced en masse with robotic infant-feeders, releasing adults from the duty of bonding with their babies. That wasn’t meant to be horror, but it horrified me—and the image still comes back to me every time I see parents on social media boasting about how they’ve bought a chatbot to free them from the onerous burden of interacting with their children. The emergent function of science fiction in our civilisation has been not so much to light the way as to wave the red flags.
Scientists of the real world are thinking of transmitting the rules of chess to the galaxy at large as a way to initiate non-time-sensitive dialogue (because an answer might take centuries to arrive). How would you write that into fiction? Let’s say sentient aliens pick up the message. A war game. One that must end in either stalemate or surrender without the option to fight to the death. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
I never thought I would be a horror writer, but every time I come up with a sci-fi premise, it takes a swerve into darkness. Here’s a dribble on prehistoric technology: “The Beginning of the End”, first published on 50-Word Stories:
After I died I watched my invention rolling on through generations and centuries—ever larger, ever faster, more numerous, powered at last by the burning of Earth’s darkest fuels until the air itself changed and the suffocating world headed towards another night.
I would un-invent the wheel, if I could.
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Fiona M Jones writes short-form and micro fiction, CNF and sometimes poetry. Her work is published everywhere except Antarctica, and most of it sits somewhere in here: https://fionamjones.wordpress.com/.