One reason I like John Wyndham’s sci fi novels is that they happen in a recognisable political world. A disaster happens, the Triffids take over and society falls apart, and when the world floods in The Kraken Wakes the government shows itself to be believably ineffectual.
I’m not up with sci-fi so don’t know how true this is:-
In optimistic visions of the future, there is a liberal and democratic world government, or perhaps an interplanetary federation. In dystopias, there is a single global tyranny. In post-apocalyptic novels and movies set in the aftermath of a nuclear war, nuclear bombs seem to off gone off everywhere in the world, even in places remote from the homelands and allies of the major combatants….
Wars, hot or cold, are .. missing from standard science fiction versions of the future. Interplanetary wars don’t count, and neither do wars with robots or zombies. I mean wars among nation-states or global alliances or regional blocs. George Orwell’s 1984, inspired in part by James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, imagined a world divided among three totalitarian blocs: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. I can’t think of any other well-known examples of geopolitics in science fiction…
Great-power rivalry, demographic collapse, mass migration — three of the major forces reshaping the world — have been all but completely absent, both from classic science fiction and newer novels and movies that have shaped public consciousness….
There are sci-fi aficionados who read this site, so have they come across anything? My own sense is that futuristic novels like a nice big calamity that brings human society down to tribal level, which is easier to grasp than competing nation states.
