I'm reading a post by someone about Walkaway, the novel by Cory Doctorow, basically expressing skepticism about society's ability to work that way, and remarking that the story fails to explain how such-and-such mechanism would function in practice.
And I just realized: that someone is *expecting* such detail from what is explicitly a work of fiction, suggests that it is already a credible enough view of the future that it doesn't require suspension of disbelief to engage with it, and that it doesn't register as "obviously fiction".
That is in and of itself quite hopeful, actually.
Loosely related, I can't help but notice that a lot of critiques of the story basically boil down to "it's unrealistic because it's not full of horrible people".
And like, nobody making that critique seems to have caught onto the part where the culture selects for people who aren't horrible, and gives people in general reasons to be supportive and collaborative... instead just assuming today's cultural norms and the hierarchy expected from that, even though that hierarchy is specifically what the story contradicts
In summary, I guess, the critiques of Walkaway reveal a lot of interesting things, but more about the readers than about the book
Another frequent observation is people complaining about the characters being "too perfect" even though the book goes into quite some detail about their imperfections - and I'm wondering if there's some misperception going on here, in the sense that the reader kind of missed the imperfections because the overall tone is focused on "that doesn't make them awful people" rather than the "did something weird or wrong once and is now irredeemably tainted" narrative that you'd find in most stories