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Many science fiction stories are what we call "cautionary tales." They are called "cautionary" because the things that happen in the story are bad. Part of the reason authors write stories like these is so that we can *avoid* things like that happening.
The stories show how people were short-sighted or made mistakes with technology and science and the horrible things that can happen.
IDK... I just suddenly felt the need to explain this very clearly for some reason.
Even if some of the people in the story are cool, or the mood of the story is cool... it's still a bad thing that the technology went all wrong... I ...
Agreed.
I was born in the late 1950s and read a lot of science fiction while growing up. Stuff like Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, The Marching Morons, and John Brunner's Club of Rome Quartet.
So my entire life has been watching the world go through a slow motion disaster as each of those novels became true. 
I am waiting with dread for the global spread of Star Trek's Eugenics Wars.
What really frightens me is Heinlein's description of Nehemiah Scudder in the afterward to his Revolt In 2100...
@nyrath @futurebird What makes that doubly painful is the knowledge that if the late-era Heinlein were alive today, given where his thinking was going, he'd almost certainly identify today's liberals as the equivalent of Nehemiah Scudder and think of Trump and particularly Elon Musk as liberators. I certainly see plenty of his fans making that kind of leap.
Star Trek: TNG did an episode, "The Drumhead", that was a courtroom parable about a Joe McCarthy-style witch hunt. I recently saw an excerpt from that on YouTube and most of the comments were from people drawing parallels between the villain of the episode and liberal governments supposedly oppressing us with COVID prevention measures, vaccination and "wokeness". The problem with this kind of art is that you can take it just about any way you want.
@mattmcirvin @nyrath @futurebird A lot of people rightly or wrongly see the progressive Left as, in C.S. Lewis's words, "a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims". That and the appropriation of every morality tale and derogatory label to be talking about those we disagree with. "Fascist" is particularly problematic, especially given that it's now replaced "totalitarian", back-implying that that evil was/is unique to the Right.
@60sRefugee @nyrath @futurebird Sure, and there are always people out there who are going to try to enforce progressive norms in an illiberal way.
There's a perpetual rhetorical problem we have, though, in that every effort by liberals or leftists to apply this criticism internally to their more fanatic elements gets *immediately* appropriated by the right as a giant hammer to bash anyone to the left of William F. Buckley.
(viz. "political correctness", "SJWs", "cancel culture" etc. Ironically it leads to a euphemism treadmill, given that the euphemism treadmill is one of the nightmare consequences they like to harp on.)
@60sRefugee @nyrath @futurebird As an aging liberal I am deeply skeptical of the nostalgia for Soviet-style Communism that some of the younger leftists seem to have, because the Soviet Union really did suck, and I think the kids lose sight of that sometimes.
But in a world so dominated by a rapacious version of market capitalism that even nominally Communist states somehow enthusiastically participate in it, I can't entirely blame them. There's a hunger for alternatives.
Historically, the US tends to have reacted to disasters of unrestrained hypercapitalism through liberal reforms that keep the basic system in place but establish pro-social controls. But we've been in this phase of rejection of that for 45 years. It remains to be seen whether we can do that again.