I just finished reading Parable of The Sower, and while it’s probably one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, most of the book is focused on survival in a world where every random homeless person and drug user wants to kill the protagonist (you can tell it was written shortly after the crack epidemic and when there was a lot of panic about crime). It was strange that most of the book was just about survival. The protagonist knew they must build something new, but they never quite got to that point in the book.
There doesn’t seem to be much aspirational speculative fiction where people start building something better after a collapse of society and speculates how that may be done or how the new society may function.
The only fiction I can think of off the top of my head that covers a little bit about rebuilding society is the movie The Postman that I watched when I was a kid (I don’t remember if it was good or not). Perhaps Parable of the Talents actually does start covering the building of a better society? (But I read an excerpt, and it looks like it’s going to be, very presciently, about a murderous christian nationalist movement that wants to “make America great again”). I know there’s stuff like Star Trek, but that’s mostly set long after the rebuild; it doesn’t cover in-depth how they got to that point (AFAIK).
4·7 days ago- The Terraformers (2023) by Annalee Newitz. In lieu of a single simple reset, there is a continuous bargaining between capitalistic rentiers and enslaved residents who fight over hundreds of years throughout the final stages of a planet’s terraforming. Homelessness, mass transit, wealth inequality, and racism all are running themes.
- Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2018) by Ed Finn (ed.) and Kathryn Cramer (ed.) is anthology of several science fiction authors who submitted stories with the purpose of specifically counteracting the trend at the time of (post-)apocalyptic stories anticipating a bleak future for humanity. One particularly aspirational story that persists in my memory is Girl in Wave : Wave in Girl by Kathleen Ann Goonan; it is a story about the sociopolitical impact of universal literacy, achieved thanks to the release of an inexpensive medicine that enhances human cognitive abilities, allowing anyone to overcome learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Other stories in the anthology are optimistic for other reasons, but this story comes to mind when I read your post.