That's what a feature on the BBC asks this morning. It's actually a PR piece for a new book Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future but it's a subject close to my heart so I can't let it pass without commenting.

They point out that 'Pop culture has painted a darkly dystopian vision of the future'. It's true, but why do we do this? Is the future really likely to be as bleak as the dystopians like to imagine? Hasn't it always been thus with grey-bearded doom-sayers predicting that we're all going to hell in a handbasket?

Why do we do this? Because it's easy, that's why. Human beings have two major motivating emotions; love and fear. Love may make us do incredible, aspirational things but fear protects us and spurs us into action like nothing else. Fear is essential to our survival and has protected us since long before we crawled from the swamp. It fires up our imagination, making it easy to envisage all sorts of 'game-over', end-of-days scenarios, and that fascinates us. Hollywood understands this of course and seems to have created a CG database of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan for the sole purpose of flooding it, filling it with snow, demolishing it with asteroid shock-waves or populating it with zombies, aliens or the 'last man standing'. The possibilities are limitless when it comes to making up these stories and we lap them up, feeding our fears while slurping sugared water and popping corn.

More than this, our fears see threats even in the rose garden. Take 2001: A Space Odyssey - my personal favourite film of all time. I see this movie as a beautiful, aspirational work of art. Arthur Clarke's enduring hope that although we may be teetering on the verge of self-destruction, if we can just get over our base venality then the stars are ours. But when the film was first released, people were leaving the cinemas with furrowed brows, wringing their hands over the evil computers that would destroy us all or worried that the nasty aliens were using us as some form of obscene experiment.

So dystopias are easy to imagine, easy to write and eagerly consumed. I'm not interested in feeding those fears. I see, in 'my future', a possibility for civilisation that is, while not being exactly utopian, at least post-scarcity and a lot of fun. Of course, we still have the knotty problem of human nature to deal with, but where would we be without it?

So perhaps the relevant question isn't 'Can science fiction save the world?', perhaps we should be asking if we want it to?