Its always weird to me when people use U Le Guin as an example of "optimistic" sci fi. Some of her writing is extremely bleak. Of course she is pretty prolific and has written a lot of different types of things.

Fundamentally i think the issue is that novels usually have to be about conflict. If everything is peachy you dont have a novel. I think it takes much more skill to write an interesting optimistic near future sci fi novel that is actually about the technical change instead of just using it as a setting.

Most of the optimistic technology novels i can think of that i liked were far future - Iain banks. Maybe greg egan although optimistic isnt exactly the right word. They show an interesting world, but its clearly not our world. Is it really an optimistic take on the future of technology if the technology in question is hundreds of years in the future?

Perhaps you'd like something like "Song for a new day" by Sarah Pinsker.

I dont really know if it fits as "optimism", but i'd like to mention "The Fortunate Fall" as a really interesting novel about technology.

SCIENCE FICTION IS OFTEN DESCRIBED, AND EVEN DEFINED, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.

When I was learning to drive, I was afraid of hitting the curb. It made me a bad driver. My driver's ed guy told me the common sense advice of 'don't pay attention to the curb - watch the road'. When I internalized that, I drove much better.

It was so simple.

We cannot even conceive of a good future today. We have no vision of what the better future looks like. We need positive fiction to help paint the picture.

Paying attention to the negative just gives you more negative.

The hard question is why it is so hard to imagine a good future. Maybe because we no longer understand our own core problems deeply.

The world waits for the new story.

And you don't run out of problems. When you solve some problems, you're left with better problems than the ones you just solved. You might not yet know about the new better problems, but rest assured they're there.

It rather reminds me of a recent Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) interview where he lamented what seems to be an emerging excess focus on villains, not "good guys" - and making them way too glamorous:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/vince-gilligan-...

If our fiction is only ever showing us dystopias and villains - it's not hard to see how that could be problematic for the wider collective psyche...

Also, “Another Now” by Yanis Varoufakis is very explicit in a path to a better future.

I heard about it late last year and picked up a used copy. I ended up reading about 2/3 of the stories and, 10 years after the book's publication, my general feeling was:

1. The stories are overwhelmingly positive and sometimes compelling. But a decade later, the real-life uses of most of the technologies used a plot devices has fallen short of the aspirations in the stories. Reading the stories left me with a feeling of disappointment, seeing that we as a society opted to use most of the technologies in more negative ways (mass surveillance, continued indifference to the amount of carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere, etc.). As a result the stories also felt very naive.

2. The book contains copious links to essays that are hosted on the webpage [0]. They are all gone now; from what I can tell, none of the essays are available at the original URLs. There are also no redirects. The essays have disappeared.

I suppose point 2 is perhaps simply ironic and not much more. I am not sure how to take point 1 though; maybe it is just difficult to read positive predictions that turned out to not happen. Maybe they had an impact though, and things could've been worse in the absence of the books? I am not sure.

[0] https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/

[1] https://www.book-info.com/isbn/0-06-220471-8.htm

Humankind by Rutger Bergman

He's also written Utopia for Realists, which is on my to read list.

If you're open to an oddball suggestion, New Atlantis by Francis Bacon is worth considering.

Its not even technically correct as the original sentence was "...generate profit so great their boss was able to finance his own private space program." They didn't say he funded his space project with amazon profits, they are saying that as a result of the profits bezos was able to fund a space program. Which is undoubtedly true as the amazon equity wouldn't be worth much if amazon wasn't making any money .

There is no point nitpicking someone because they used one term instead of the other: Bezos’ fortune is derived from Amazon’s activity, and the rest of us has no interest in changing our vocabulary to abide by some obscure tax code rule.

NOT the Amazon Basics Wed Wun! Don't EVER push the Amazon Basics Wed Wun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_IE_0-Xlis&t=181s