The Eternal Pageantry of the Post-Scarcity Mind

Post-scarcity science fiction tends to be low interpersonal conflict. In the Walle-E dystopia, everyone is fat and lazy, nobody is fighting or striving. In Star Trek and the Culture series, the conflict is mostly pushed to the frontier, where unassimilated civilizations still lurk — the assimilated tend to be so Enlightened and Reasonable that intense interpersonal conflict is unimaginable. When…