Is the future optimistic with utopian romance?

There’s a lot of bad news out there, I won’t enumerate it all, I’m sure it hasn’t passed you by. And sometimes I think, I’d like to write a story set in a world where it’s all turned out well. But that’s a hard sell. If there’s a utopia, something must always go wrong. There’s the first murder in a hundred years. It turns out to be built on the blood of innocents. The government is infiltrated by lizards. You know the drill.

Which is when it occurred to me that there’s one genre that doesn’t require any of these systemic failures. Romance. The sky isn’t going to fall and stop Betty meeting Benny. An army of robots haven’t come to bleed the nutrients from Kal, Zak and Jay’s polyamorous collective.

And now I kinda want to see a romance where the background is a near future utopia, where he’s a cloud seeding pilot and she’s a carbon sequestering engineer and they’re a translator for the cetacean initiative. The future has worked out just fine and the only question is who fancies who, and will they live happily ever after?