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You are here: Home / Politics / Contra Kim Stanley Robinson

Contra Kim Stanley Robinson

by Tim F|  November 9, 20097:29 pm| 85 Comments

This post is in: Politics, Popular Culture

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Quoted in I09*:

Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we’re trying for as a civilization.

It’s a slim tradition since [Sir Thomas] More invented the word, but a very interesting one, and at certain points important: the Bellamy clubs after Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward had a big impact on the Progressive movement in American politics, and H.G. Wells’s stubborn persistence in writing utopias over about fifty years (not his big sellers) conveyed the vision that got turned into the postwar order of social security and some kind of government-by-meritocracy.

So utopias have had effects in the real world. More recently I think Ecotopia by [Ernest] Callenbach had a big impact on how the hippie generation tried to live in the years after, building families and communities.

The general theme here, that we would benefit more from utopian fiction than from the other kind, is not just off base but dangerously wrong.

It lets off utopianism far too easy to say that it works less well than dystopian thinking to make society better. Without exaggerating, I could fairly say that utopian thinking sparked some of the worst things that humans have ever done. It is not even a debatable point. Communism started as a utopian ideal. Gated cults that commit mass suicide (or worse) nearly always stem from a utopian vision. In general the concept of utopia is one of the most efficient means ever found to get well-intentioned people to do awful things.

Fictional dreaming of dystopia is not just less dangerous, it has the polar opposite effect.

Think of the most influential fiction of the twentieth century. Can you remember one utopian work? 1984 and Animal Farm weave so deep in the western psyche that almost every criticism of government that doesn’t go straight to Hitler (that is to say, the effective ones) references Orwell instead. Ditto Lord of the Flies for group psychology. Brave New World looms over every discussion of science ethics since the year it was published. Maybe hippies cared about Ecotopia, but environmentalism has Silent Spring to thank. I read it part way through an ecology degree at an extremely liberal school, in 1998, and the book still punched me in the gut. Has the kook right attacked Edward Abbey lately? I doubt it. They love him just like they love Earth First! and the ELF and any other group that follows Callenbach’s utopian line of thought. If you want to know why the pollution lobby and their GOP pets still throw hate at a marine biologist who died in 1964, read her book. Fifty years later and it still changes minds.

Obviously this doesn’t mean that writers must shelve whatever book project or the world will end. On an average year the United States prints over 150,000 books. The UK prints over 100k more. Throw in the hundreds of thousands printed everywhere else and you have almost a million, save four or five, that people a century from now will never know existed.

It doesn’t bother me that Kim Robinson doesn’t roll with the dystopian cool kids. Admit it, zombies and Atwoodian parables and world-ending Emmerich movies are getting stale. The prob here is that Robinson took it one step further and justified his artistic (or commercial, whatever) decision with an academic argument that could not be more wrong if he took the truth and made a photographic negative.

(*) Although our current version of WP hides it for some reason, this is a link.

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85Comments

  1. 1.

    Linkmeister

    November 9, 2009 at 7:32 pm

    Er, what the hell does he call his own Science in DC trilogy? Maybe it’s not classic dystopian fiction, but the world he creates is pretty damned close.

    (Yes, I’ve read all three books. I have not read his Mars trilogy, although I own it.)

  2. 2.

    General Winfield Stuck

    November 9, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    Utopian dreaming doesn’t just do less well . I can say without exaggerating that some of the greatest tragedies in human history come from utopian experiments

    Didn’t the Utopian fiction of the Permanent Conservative Movement end with the George W Bush chapter. I didn’t like the book, but it was, unfortunately, required reading. More dystopian than anything, if you ask moi.

    Can’t find a link Tim f. to the Stanley works.

  3. 3.

    KCinDC

    November 9, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    So far Star Trek hasn’t led to any mass murders or mass suicides.

  4. 4.

    freelancer

    November 9, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    I’ve started Red Mars, and from the outset, the intro chapter begins en media res, with the idea of a New World utopia gone bad from the outset.

  5. 5.

    freelancer

    November 9, 2009 at 7:37 pm

    @freelancer:

    I just state this because the book so far is fantastic and while not dystopian, it definitely doesn’t gloss over human nature to imagine a pristine rubied Eden. The quote of Robinson just seems odd in this context.

  6. 6.

    Dave L

    November 9, 2009 at 7:40 pm

    The real problem is that we ran the experiment on several plans for utopia in the 20th century, and the experience has left such a lasting bad taste in the mouth that it’s going to take more than a second-tier SF writer to make people reconsider the idea of utopia itself.

  7. 7.

    General Winfield Stuck

    November 9, 2009 at 7:46 pm

    Can you remember one utopian work?

    Of course. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. It is where I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. And Mr. Peabody taught me that though bad things sometimes happen to good people, you have to keep trying anyways. Fractured Fairy tales showed the way to plan for the best, but expect something less than that. Then there was Dudley Doright, who always got the job done, somehow/

  8. 8.

    CaseyL

    November 9, 2009 at 7:48 pm

    @freelancer: The next two books in the series have a definite utopian flavor – though one that, I think, is believable in the context of how humans react to things. IOW, Green/Blue Mars is not ipso facto utopian, but it allows humans to live with more freedom, autonomy, and dignity, and with less poverty, than they’re used to.

    No discussion of dystopias and utopias would be complete without mention of LeGuin’s “The Dispossessed,” with its decaying, post-utopian anarchist lunar society.

    I think there is, or should be, a distinction between utopias which are doomed because humans inevitably ruin them (e.g, “The Dispossessed,” where humans begin with a laudable goal of personal liberty but individual conflicts magnify into social ones) versus utopias which are based on inherently dystopian ideas (e.g., “Brave New World,” where genetic engineering and drugs obviate any free choice from the git go).

  9. 9.

    Chuck Butcher

    November 9, 2009 at 7:51 pm

    I don’t know that either kind is less instructive, it is much simpler to construct a story of conflict and that leaves some serious problems in utopian fiction by limiting the story arcs. Problems are easier to foresee and to write convincingly about – it is what we have as regular life, the suspension of disbelief is more easily accomplished.

    I’d say that this somewhat covers the reasons the well -known works you reference are dystopian and that they seriously out number utopian ones.

    When you consider that literature is influential through being read, you have already assumed that both the writing is superior and audience appeal is great. Personally I prefer my “lecturing” to come in the theme and progression of a story rather than as the main point.

  10. 10.

    Splitting Image

    November 9, 2009 at 7:52 pm

    I generally agree with your argument, but I have one quibble:

    Communism started as a utopian ideal.

    Not really true. Marx and Engels both basically thought that “utopian” communists were a bunch of idiots. Engels even wrote a book called Socialism: Utopian and Scientific to underscore the difference between fantasizing about a world where everything is wonderful and understanding how the world works so that you can change it with a long-term goal in mind.

    Ayn Rand is actually a lot closer to the popular conception of a Marxist than either Marx or Engels was.

    Having said that, I’ve always understood the purpose of utopian literature is not just to offer a glimpse of some far-off Happiland, but to make a case that some aspect of contemporary society is directly preventing us from having better lives than we do. In Thomas More’s book, for example, Utopian society works primarily because of the absence of Church corruption which was prevalent in his day. The point is not so much to offer a vision of a perfect world as it is to make people less satisfied with this one and more determined to change it.

  11. 11.

    JHF

    November 9, 2009 at 7:52 pm

    (*) Although our current version of WP hides it for some reason, this is a link.

    Just use the HTML editor and you’ll be fine. Delete, retype “109,” make it a link first, and add the span thing later. You don’t want anything between the anchor tags and the link text. That other stuff goes on the outside.

  12. 12.

    ruemara

    November 9, 2009 at 7:52 pm

    KSR? Of “120 Days of Rain” fame? What the hell does he think he writes? Besides, we’re hard wired for conflict. If goodness, sweetness and purity were as intrisically attractive as he thinks, my last literature class would’ve been on Pollyanna.

  13. 13.

    Zifnab

    November 9, 2009 at 7:56 pm

    @KCinDC: You could lump in Battlestar Galactica, Ender’s Game, or even Star Wars with that. Hell, virtually every space-fairing adventure story – almost by necessity – roots itself in a utopian Earth.

    I’m not sure I’d run off and call utopian fiction this malevolent, toxic force you envision it as. Was “The Once And Future King” and the far gone utopias of Camelot and Avalon so terrible to the millions of children growing up and reading about them? Is the worst thing in the Bible really the description of the Garden of Eden?

    And there are a few dystopianists I could name that are destructive in turn. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged takes place in the dystopian world of makers and takers. L Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth certainly didn’t make the world a better place.

    As for 1984 and Animal Farm, these were more reflections backward on human failure than projections forward on where we need to go as a species. There are a lot of warnings in these books, but not much direction. How does one build good government or live an eco-friendly life style reading about how we’re all going to get oppressed and poisoned and killed?

    I mean, The Founding Fathers were, ultimately, utopianists. They wouldn’t have rebelled from the English Crown and risked life and limb just to build another shitty monarchy with another violent, lazy autocrat at it’s head.

    And the environmentalist movement – although inspired by Silent Spring – still needs a world to aspire to. A world with solar powered cars and fresh, clean food growing just outside your backyard. Silent Spring is a story about a utopia destroyed, and that’s the real sorrow in it. But no one runs out and buys a hybrid car because he’s consigned himself to the looming, soul-crushing despair of a lifeless world just over the horizon.

  14. 14.

    Linkmeister

    November 9, 2009 at 7:57 pm

    @ruemara:

    What the hell does he think he writes?

    Yes. Thank you for agreeing with my comment at #1. ;)

  15. 15.

    Linkmeister

    November 9, 2009 at 7:58 pm

    @Zifnab: From my agnostic-to-atheistic perspective, you could add “Left Behind” to your list of dystopian works.

  16. 16.

    Zifnab

    November 9, 2009 at 8:03 pm

    @Linkmeister: Left Behind wasn’t any sort of recognizable literature.

    I got about half way through the first volume and gave up because the writing was so absolutely, unbelievably terrible. Give me a freak’n Joel Osteen sermon, a Jerry Falwell rant about teletubes, two hours of the 700 Club, anything but that godawful swill.

  17. 17.

    Joel

    November 9, 2009 at 8:04 pm

    well, to be fair, thomas moore was a pretty influential figure.

    of course, his ending was far from utopian.

  18. 18.

    Why oh why

    November 9, 2009 at 8:05 pm

    Communism started as a utopian ideal? I don’t get it, how was the Russian revolution more utopian, or more idealist, than the American revolution? (imagine that, a Republic in an Colonial America!)

  19. 19.

    Ryan Cunningham

    November 9, 2009 at 8:08 pm

    “The general theme here, that we would benefit more from utopian fiction than from the other kind, is not just off base but dangerously wrong.”

    No. He’s NOT saying that at all! You’re completely mischaracterizing what he said, Tim! He’s saying utopias are neglected, not that they’re BETTER than dystopias. Re-read what he says. The only comparison he makes is that one is HARDER TO WRITE than the other. He never says that utopias are more important or have more of an impact or are even more of a net positive.

    And he’s right. It IS important and highly relevant to take a break from listing all the things you’re against and what the horrible consequences will be to state clearly what you believe and what it is you’re striving for. Once in a while, it’s good and important to write about your hopes instead of your worries!

  20. 20.

    Drive By Wisdom

    November 9, 2009 at 8:14 pm

    I could fairly say that utopian thinking sparked some of the worst things that humans have ever done.

    If you mean the founding of America, there are plenty of liberals right behind you.

  21. 21.

    freelancer

    November 9, 2009 at 8:14 pm

    @Zifnab:

    Gah! Slacktivist is your friend.

  22. 22.

    Malacylpse

    November 9, 2009 at 8:17 pm

    You could lump in Battlestar Galactica, Ender’s Game, or even Star Wars with that. Hell, virtually every space-fairing adventure story – almost by necessity – roots itself in a utopian Earth.

    If BSG counts as utopian, I think we have a failure of terminology. Utopian literature is not premised on technological progress, as your list implies. Utopian lit has as a premise a society without basic conflict. Dystopian lit looks at what kind of power structure – a boot in the face of mankind, forever – would be required to remove those basic conflicts.

  23. 23.

    General Winfield Stuck

    November 9, 2009 at 8:18 pm

    @Drive By Wisdom:

    If you mean the founding of America, there are plenty of liberals right behind you.

    Now that was uncalled for. We just don’t like Dick Cheney’s America, nor yours most likely. Bet you didn’t know the founders were our hippy ancestors. Now you do.

  24. 24.

    Sophist

    November 9, 2009 at 8:19 pm

    Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard…

    Anyone can do a utopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines and the writing the opposite…

    This argument is so stupid. Bad, lazy writing is always relatively easy, and writing a crappy dystopia is no easier than writing a crappy utopia. What KSR means is that writing a good Utopia is harder. Which, I mean…duh. What’s your point.

    Communism started as a utopian ideal? I don’t get it, how was the Russian revolution more utopian…

    “Russian Revolutiuon” and “Communism” are not interchangeable terms.

  25. 25.

    Linkmeister

    November 9, 2009 at 8:20 pm

    @Zifnab: Grins. Agreed. Notice I said “works,” not “literature.”

    And I concur with @freelancer: Slacktivist is your friend. Fred has more persistence in his little finger than I have in my entire body; there’s no way I could slog through even one of those things, and he’s on Book 2.

  26. 26.

    Ben JB

    November 9, 2009 at 8:21 pm

    I have to disagree with you a little bit, Tim, and not for any of the reasons that some people here have so far brought up, which I agree with (Marx and Engel’s Marxism not utopian according to them, KSR’s own work trades in utopian/dystopic tropes, dystopia lends itself more easily to narratives, etc.).

    I don’t think you’re totally wrong when you say that utopian images license people to do terrible things to people in the here-and-now for some image of what the future could be. But I think KSR’s main point is worth re-considering: it’s easy to imagine things could be worse, but it’s not always easy to imagine how they could be better, starting from where we are.*

    That is, rather than take our utopian situation as a given (“once upon a time, after the state withered away”), KSR’s fiction (and his understanding of utopian fiction) spends a lot more time thinking about the process of history than a lot of other utopian / dystopian fiction. That is, whereas a lot of (19th-century) u-/dys-topian fiction had a chapter on “When it all changed,” KSR’s books tend to be all about that moment–which is ongoing.

    So, yes, imagining something over the horizon can be bad for ethics, since you tend to ignore means and focus on ends, but in KSR’s own fiction (and here I’m thinking of the Mars trilogy and his alternate history “The Lucky Strike”), the focus is on both.

    *And this isn’t even getting into the whole idea of apocalypse-as-utopia–the idea that a massive war is coming and then we’ll show the enemy what’s what–which I think we’ve seen in some extremist political rhetoric. At least, I get a little sick when people talk about the coming civil war, since they usually talk about it with such evident glee.

  27. 27.

    Josh

    November 9, 2009 at 8:24 pm

    Tim F, I’m with Ryan at Comment 19. If you think Stan Robinson is being dismissive of dystopic fiction, you don’t know his work very well.

    I’d say the problem with utopic fiction is that too few people ask, “Whose?” Robinson’s a middle-class Leftish U.S. male, and his utopia is going to differ from Suzy McKee Charnas’s, Samuel Delany’s, Pat Buchanan’s, Barry Goldwater’s, and others’. There’s something eerily universalist in the idea of utopic vs. dystopic.

  28. 28.

    scarpy

    November 9, 2009 at 8:26 pm

    @Zifnab:

    I don’t think the US founders would count as utopian thinkers. Utopia is supposed to be the perfect society. The Constitution is more a series of hedges against disastrous societies. A “more perfect” union, but never envisioned as a perfect one.

  29. 29.

    MNPundit

    November 9, 2009 at 8:27 pm

    Because Utopia led people to bad stuff it’s a dangerous ideal? Contra ANYTHING taken to a logical conclusion. In fact the only thing Dystopias have done is provide a blueprint. Mas media capture? Demagoguery? You name it! Dystopias are a how to!

    See, see how easy that was?

    Good fucking God Tim.

    But then again, I rather LIKE the Brave New World of Brave New World. We could do their selection process better with genetic engineering, or genegineering if you want to get hispter about it but the dissidents aren’t even killed, they just are sent to a dissident colony where they seem have minimal requirements and are free to free-think. I don’t think you can actually obviate the need for a conversational relationship with a drug–we’ve been trying for 50 years and have had no luck–but people got on fine without it in the novel.

    The only problem with BNW is that the world is stagnant, if there’ s a meteor strike etc. humanity dies.

  30. 30.

    wmd

    November 9, 2009 at 8:31 pm

    KSR definitely has some dystopian writing, the Mars trilogy… Years of Rice and Salt both have dystopic elements.

    How much have Jon Brunner’s dystopias had influence? The Sheep Look up? Shockwave Rider? Stand on Zanzibar? The latter two had possible endings that weren’t dystopian, but the main line narrative was certainly so.

  31. 31.

    Ben JB

    November 9, 2009 at 8:31 pm

    To be clear, “The Lucky Strike” ends with a better world (no nukes) from a different historical position (no nukes dropped on Japan), which isn’t exactly like a utopian fiction, except that the focus is all on the historical process of the actors who choose differently.

    Actually, if I was going defend utopian fiction as important political acts, I would say that the point of utopia is to move the Overton window of acceptable discourse, in which case, I would think that imagining a better world would be useful for all political programs.

  32. 32.

    Zifnab

    November 9, 2009 at 8:32 pm

    @Malacylpse:

    If BSG counts as utopian, I think we have a failure of terminology.

    I admit I’m not totally up on my BSG, but I was under the impression the colonies were generally at peace and the worlds had been long ago terraformed into variations on paradise.

    The politics might have been a little rough and touble, but before the Cylon return, they were still floating around in decommissioned anti-Cylon warships from an entirely previous war.

  33. 33.

    Emma Anne

    November 9, 2009 at 8:33 pm

    @KCinDC: So far Star Trek hasn’t led to any mass murders or mass suicides.

    My first thought as well. Star trek was free to tell a lot of other interesting stories because the society from which the crew came was relatively free of problems with money, religious conflict, racism, sexism, etc.

    A lot of science fiction uses this trope. Honor Harrington is another. Manticore isn’t free of conflict obviously, but it has largely solved sexism and racism, poverty, illness, aging, education . . .

  34. 34.

    PaulW

    November 9, 2009 at 8:34 pm

    I took a class on literary utopias back at UF in 1988… the only thing we learned was that utopias always have some flaw that the author A) overlooks or B) handwaves as though it won’t be a problem… but it will.

    When applied to real-world situations, there were places like Oneida and Brook Farm, and a whole list of them on wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Utopian_communities

    And they all failed either due to A) Money or B) Morals.

    Communism certainly fits under the trope of Utopian lit/philosophy. So does the collective works of Ayn Rand and her libertarian Objectivism.

  35. 35.

    Nellcote

    November 9, 2009 at 8:35 pm

    Speaking up for the book “Ecotopia” here. It was a fun read with some good technological concepts.

  36. 36.

    Why oh why

    November 9, 2009 at 8:36 pm

    @scarpy:

    That’s why they didn’t go with “Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness and free Ponies”: too utopian.

  37. 37.

    Reason60

    November 9, 2009 at 8:37 pm

    The singularly creepy aspect of any utopian vision is the concept of a world where bitter division and conflict has disappeared.

    Apparently in order for utopia to come about, everyone needs to share the same viewpoint, worship the same thing or lack thereof, and hold teh same set of values.

    A perfect world for me, is one where people disagree and argue and bicker- just maybe not to the degree we have now.

  38. 38.

    el donaldo

    November 9, 2009 at 8:37 pm

    What about Samuel Delaney’s Triton and Dhalgren? Maybe not strictly utopias. More like fictional near-perfect anarchies where the novels’ characters, because of their humanity and/or nostalgia, fell short of from time to time. Not fully successful works, but daring, exciting experimental fiction in any case.

  39. 39.

    Zifnab

    November 9, 2009 at 8:38 pm

    @scarpy:

    Utopia is supposed to be the perfect society. The Constitution is more a series of hedges against disastrous societies.

    I don’t know if they had the hubris to believe they would achieve a perfect society, but the Revolution was spurred on by a lot of idealism. You had people quoting John Locke’s social contract and postulating on natural rights when they were putting the country together. They were moving the ball forward, and they won’t have been able to do that if they simply sat around envisioning all the terrible stuff a new leader was going to do to them.

    Actually, one could say that the Articles of the Confederacy was a government fashioned from dystopian fear. The colonists outlawed everything they didn’t like in government – tax collection, consolidated power, any sort of unified military. The Constitution, by contrast, was a much more positive piece of legislation that sought a balanced government rather than just looking to abolish it entirely.

  40. 40.

    PaulW

    November 9, 2009 at 8:42 pm

    @Why oh why:

    Communism started as a utopian ideal? I don’t get it, how was the Russian revolution more utopian, or more idealist, than the American revolution? (imagine that, a Republic in an Colonial America!)

    Because it wasn’t.

    The American Revolution was more a REACTIONARY rebellion than a REVOLUTIONARY uprising. While the inspirations were Enlightenment concepts, they were being managed and promoted by some of the most conservative thinkers and doers in the Colonies (Washington and Adams come immediately to mind). The Constitution itself, while the foundation of a form of government not truly seen since the days of the Roman Republic, was itself a conservative document that set LIMITS on what government could do at a Federal and (in some ways) State level.

    Communism, and to an extent Marxism, were more utopian in their goals (It will end the cycle of slavery for the underclasses! It will lead to a classless society where the State will eventually whither away!) without realizing their methods of trying to build such a state were corrupting said ideals in the first place. You need to compare and contrast Lenin’s political philosophy to the likes of Rosa Luxemburg to see where Marxism would be a failure… and to see where Rosa’s global communism would also be a failure!

    Sorry if I rambled.

  41. 41.

    Zifnab

    November 9, 2009 at 8:53 pm

    @Reason60:

    The singularly creepy aspect of any utopian vision is the concept of a world where bitter division and conflict has disappeared.

    Yes, but that’s usually by bringing an end to conflict over basic necessities. No one is starving in the classic utopia. No one is homeless. People all tend to be literate, educated, and fairly polite.

    The idea is that in a utopian society, people have run out of things to argue violently about. You don’t need to win a fight over who gets to live closest to fresh water in order to drink it. And arguing over the finer points of religious dogma doesn’t necessitate stabbing your colleague in the eye.

  42. 42.

    Tim F.

    November 9, 2009 at 8:54 pm

    Bringing up the US Constitution is moronic. The Federalist Papers explicitly point out that framers designed a system that takes into account that power will always attract the atavistic side of humanity. They were right, and that’s why it worked. That isn’t conquering human weakness or any other such transcendent notion that characterize utopian thinking. They explicitly acknowledged that people mostly seek power for the wrong reasons and will always do so. We call that pragmatism.

  43. 43.

    Tim F.

    November 9, 2009 at 8:58 pm

    @PaulW: This.

  44. 44.

    Andre

    November 9, 2009 at 9:00 pm

    Iain M. Banks’ entire Culture millieu is about a utopia. His stories aren’t usually set inside the utopia because he likes writing about conflict, but the idea is that all this gruesome stuff he writes about is interesting precisely because there really is an alternative that is objectively better.

    Julian May’s Remiliard books (Saga of the Exiles/Intervention/Galactic Milieu trilogy) are again about a utopia, more or less. Again, the storytelling happens outside the utopia (either in another timeline or prior to the pivotal event that brings humanity into the Unity) but there’s always the subtext that things could be better if people just wanted them to be. (Yes, most of her books are about people rebelling against utopia, but most of them eventually realise what they’re giving up.)

    Utopia isn’t written about often, not because it’s dangerous or uninspiring, but because most novels are (as per Aristotle) a working out of a conflict, and any utopia will inherently have less interesting conflicts from an outsiders perspective.

  45. 45.

    tripletee

    November 9, 2009 at 9:02 pm

    It doesn’t bother me that Kim Robinson doesn’t roll with the dystopian cool kids.

    Anyone who thinks KSR is a starry-eyed utopian is probably someone who hasn’t read much of his work (or the linked interview) very closely, IMO. Both his Mars trilogy and the 40 Signs of Rain series focus on societies in the midst of painful transitions, with various dystopic/utopic factions vying for supremacy. He’s not going to suddenly focus exclusively on writing shiny happy tales about the perfect future society. I think he’s just saying it would be nice if there were a little more balance in today’s scifi. I agree with him – Blade Runner is cool and all, but occasionally it’s nice to read something that doesn’t make me want to black out all of my windows and start shooting heroin.

  46. 46.

    Tim F.

    November 9, 2009 at 9:02 pm

    @Andre: Banks justifies his utopia using one of the most literal deus ex machinas in the history of literature.

  47. 47.

    General Winfield Stuck

    November 9, 2009 at 9:04 pm

    was itself a conservative document that set LIMITS on what government could do at a Federal and (in some ways) State level.

    It was conservative in this way, and liberal from it’s brevity on limits for the people.

  48. 48.

    deeba

    November 9, 2009 at 9:07 pm

    What with 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, as well as Fahreheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale, US High School reading lists do seem pretty heavy on dystopia.

  49. 49.

    tripletee

    November 9, 2009 at 9:08 pm

    @Zifnab:

    I admit I’m not totally up on my BSG, but I was under the impression the colonies were generally at peace and the worlds had been long ago terraformed into variations on paradise.

    Negative. As the series progressed and we got more backstory, it was apparent that the colonies suffered from a host of familiar ills – crime, poverty, religious conflict, ethnic discrimination, etc etc. The prequel series, Caprica, set several decades before BSG, looks to be even more grim.

  50. 50.

    Why oh why

    November 9, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    @PaulW:

    It seems the Russian revolution is only deemed “utopian” because it ultimately failed. In any case, calling Adams or Washington “conservatives” when they worked hard to end the rule of the King over their Land, and separate the Church from State (to say nothing of the rest) is dubious at best. And they were certainly not “reactionary” either: in reaction to what?

    They were fed up with the old BS and true revolutionaries.

  51. 51.

    Why oh why

    November 9, 2009 at 9:14 pm

    @PaulW: It will end the cycle of slavery for the underclasses! It will lead to a classless society where the State will eventually whither away!

    Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!

  52. 52.

    MBunge

    November 9, 2009 at 9:15 pm

    “The only problem with BNW is that the world is stagnant, if there’ s a meteor strike etc. humanity dies.”

    Methinks someone missed the point of the story.

    Mike

  53. 53.

    Jason Bylinowski

    November 9, 2009 at 9:16 pm

    Just came (unfortunately, late) to say that Kim Stanley Robinson is a mega-genius. The Mars books single-handedly got me onboard the hard sci-fi bandwagon and pretty much brought me out of a minor depression at the same time. His attention to detail is astounding, I honestly felt like he had a window to the future and was just describing it to me. I also agree with what he says here about utopia, and I think the Mars books, although not quite utopian (transnational megacorps rule the world here), the world that eventually shapes up by the end is, I think, about as good as can be expected.

  54. 54.

    General Winfield Stuck

    November 9, 2009 at 9:18 pm

    Just like the present. Folks get mixed up personal conservatism and societal or governing conservatism.

  55. 55.

    Jason Bylinowski

    November 9, 2009 at 9:38 pm

    And just because I’m feeling saucy: on the subject of utopian societies, I actually have a fairly simple viewpoint: I think that not only is Utopia possible, I’m pretty sure that it’s inevitable in that it is one of two possibilities we see before us as a society. What isn’t possible is the status quo. At some point as time moves onward, we’re either going to agree to grow up, or else we’re going to blow ourselves back into the stone age, or to the primordial slurry.

    Wanna bet what I’ve got odds on?

  56. 56.

    Hawes

    November 9, 2009 at 9:40 pm

    What are you TALKING about?

    Zombies never go stale!

  57. 57.

    Marc

    November 9, 2009 at 9:56 pm

    every criticism of government that doesn’t go straight to Hitler (that is to say, the effective ones) references Orwell instead

    Not sure they’re any better. Routine denunciations of Big Brother and thoughtcrime usually come from people who are only too eager to put on the jackboots when their boys are in power. (What’s Newspeak for “Dixiechick”? Which room hosts the “enhanced interrogation techniques”? Do it to Ahmed!) Orwell-bait is just a more pretentious form of Godwin-bait from the sort of person who thinks citing their twelfth-grade reading list makes them an intellectual.

    Also, maybe worth thinking about the distinction between utopian political thinking and utopian fiction, which is safely walled off from reality and can’t do as much damage. Although I guess you could just say that Atlas Shrugged technically counts as some kind of utopian blueprint, and then I’d have to admit I’m full of shit.

  58. 58.

    charles johnson

    November 9, 2009 at 10:00 pm

    “Think of the most influential fiction of the twentieth century. Can you remember one utopian work? ”

    Ayn Rand’s gibberish were certainly utopian works. And you can only believe in them if you’re the kind of tard who falls for utopianism.

  59. 59.

    Craig

    November 9, 2009 at 10:02 pm

    Many influential books have been about the _development_ of a utopia; it is true that you don’t get much of an interesting story once everyone is already living happily ever after. Robert A. Heinlein could scarcely pick up a pen without crafting a utopian society (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Job, Starship Troopers–no, really; think about it). We have of course Kim Stanley Robinson’s own Mars trilogy. We have (shudder) Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, in which Galt’s Gulch is a textbook utopian community. If only they would have made good on their threat to leave us all forever.

    Some of my favorite utopian work, which I highly recommend, is found in Iain M. Bank’s “Culture” novels, of which Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games are both good starting points. It’s sort of like someone really thought through the implications of the “Star Trek” shows…what do warp drives and replicators and really smart computers _mean_ for a society?

    I am much more sympathetic to Robinson’s words than is Tim F. No good preacher speaks of only Hell or only Heaven. Utopian fiction is aspirational; dystopian fiction is cautionary. They both have a place.

  60. 60.

    Batocchio

    November 9, 2009 at 11:25 pm

    I think I get what you’re saying, but I’d frame this very differently. Utopian fiction, and dystopian fiction, both can be very useful. I wouldn’t blame the authors that much, at least the good ones. The problem normally arises when their fans try to apply the novel to real life, and refuse to adapt to reality. Rand is the best example of that.

    I’m also a fan of Iain Banks, mentioned upthread, and his Culture is a great utopia, but he’s constantly exploring its flaws and contradictions with outsiders and malcontents. I second the recommendation for Player of Games – I’ve read it a few times. (Banks discusses politics a bit in a speech published at the end of State of the Art, actually.)

    I’m all for theory and imagination in general. However, for anyone interested in actual problem-solving, practice informs theory and vice versa, ad infinitum. It’s a learning process. Empiricists and pragmatists do pretty well with that – it’s the ideological zealots and shills who are hostile to the reality-based community. The Heritage Foundation will argue against policies like raising the minimum wage on purely theoretical grounds, and ignore studies that refute them. Likewise, McArdle isn’t interested in solving problems at all, and she’s not even that good a propagandist.

  61. 61.

    Martin

    November 9, 2009 at 11:28 pm

    @Reason60:

    Which is why the Borg probably represents the only utopian state to have closed all of the loopholes. Take away individuality, and the utopian ideals all fall nicely into place.

  62. 62.

    Tom Ames

    November 9, 2009 at 11:41 pm

    I started to read Ecotopia in college, really wanting to like it. But man, that was a crappy, smug, self-satisfied piece of writing.

    It seems to me that the only way a Utopia can work–whether it’s Islandia or wherever Ayn Rand set her drivel–is to populate it with cardboard cutouts of real people. Utopian fiction is a truly dishonest genre in this regard: the scenes described usually only work if people are something other than they really are.

    Walden Two is an exception to this: B.F. Skinner really did think that people were not much more than cardboard cutouts.

  63. 63.

    Joe Buck

    November 9, 2009 at 11:50 pm

    Tom Ames mentions Walden Two, which is utopian as well as awful. But clearly the most influential utopian work of the 20th century is Star Trek.

  64. 64.

    Hob

    November 9, 2009 at 11:59 pm

    Tim: If you haven’t read KSR at all, then I guess I see how you could take that out-of-context interview excerpt the wrong way. I’d be surprised if Charlie didn’t know better– maybe that “slackers” headline was tongue in cheek; if not, it was just dumb. In any case, I very strongly recommend that you read his books, but if not, please trust me & the others here: this is a guy who has always paid a lot of attention to the scariest aspects of history & humanity, and shows no sign of stopping. He has *also* written some stuff you could call utopian– sometimes at the same time– and it’s pretty interesting and, I think, important for the reasons he describes.

    I don’t think “utopias are hard” is just a “duh, what’s your point” point either. Robinson is trying to get people interested in attempting this thing, because it’s so rarely been seriously approached and is almost never done well. Just figuring out what “done well” even means in this case is pretty hard. His point is that there may be some overlap between the challenge this poses for a writer and the challenge we all have these days as grownups in a fucked-up world.

    So, the part of your post that really did piss me off isn’t about the misrepresentation of KSR’s work. It’s your notion that *fiction* about a better world must be pernicious Stalinist cult fodder. With all due respect: what a load of reactionary shit! Stalin, Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate et al. did not dominate people by writing *novels*. If they had actually tried to do it that way, they would’ve produced crappy screeds that were only suitable for the already self-indoctrinated to wank over (cf. Rand)… or, massively flawed but compelling stories that people could argue about, that actually tried to make a case for their awful ideas using recognizable human characters, and tried to really imagine what life could be like by their ruled. Not surprisingly, none of the pernicious people you’re worried about actually tried doing that. It risks making people think.

    Atlas Shrugged, Left Behind, and The Turner Diaries are all political novels in different ways, and all pretty freaking evil. And it’s notable how *not at all* interested they all are in describing life as they’d like it to be.

  65. 65.

    Hob

    November 10, 2009 at 12:01 am

    Tim: If you haven’t read KSR at all, then I guess I see how you could take that out-of-context interview excerpt the wrong way. I’d be surprised if Charlie didn’t know better– maybe that “slackers” headline was tongue in cheek; if not, it was just dumb. In any case, I very strongly recommend that you read his books, but if not, please trust me & the others here: this is a guy who has always paid a lot of attention to the scariest aspects of history & humanity, and shows no sign of stopping. He has *also* written some stuff you could call utopian– sometimes at the same time– and it’s pretty interesting and, I think, important for the reasons he describes.

    I don’t think “utopias are hard” is just a “duh, what’s your point” point either. Robinson is trying to get people interested in attempting this thing, because it’s so rarely been seriously approached and is almost never done well. Just figuring out what “done well” even means in this case is pretty hard. His point is that there may be some overlap between the challenge this poses for a writer and the challenge we all have these days as grownups in a fucked-up world.

    So, the part of your post that really did piss me off isn’t about the misrepresentation of KSR’s work. It’s your notion that *fiction* about a better world must be pernicious Stalinist cult fodder. With all due respect: what a load of reactionary shit! Stalin, Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate et al. did not dominate people by writing *novels*. If they had actually tried to do it that way, they would’ve produced crappy screeds that were only suitable for the already self-indoctrinated to wank over (cf. Rand)… or, massively flawed but compelling stories that people could argue about, that actually tried to make a case for their awful ideas using recognizable human characters, and tried to really imagine what life could be like by their rules. Not surprisingly, none of the pernicious people you’re worried about actually tried doing that. It risks making people think.

    Atlas Shrugged, Left Behind, and The Turner Diaries are all political novels in different ways, and all pretty freaking evil. And it’s notable how *not at all* interested they all are in describing life as they’d like it to be.

  66. 66.

    Hob

    November 10, 2009 at 12:02 am

    In a better world, there would be no double posts.

  67. 67.

    Joel

    November 10, 2009 at 12:16 am

    Isn’t “Foundation” fundamentally a utopian saga?

  68. 68.

    Brachiator

    November 10, 2009 at 12:53 am

    The general theme here, that we would benefit more from utopian fiction than from the other kind, is not just off base but dangerously wrong.

    Literature ain’t preaching. There is no reason, none, abso freaking lutely none, that literature provide any kind of “benefit.”

    This guy ain’t just off base. He is clearly on something and is in serious need of detox.

    Hob – Atlas Shrugged, Left Behind, and The Turner Diaries are all political novels in different ways, and all pretty freaking evil.

    Atlas Shrugged, evil? Talk about pearl clutching.

    By the way, dystopia ain’t easy. Lord of the Flies was rejected 21 times before it found a publisher. A review of a new biography of William Golding in the UK Literary Review suggests that many professional readers couldn’t even get past the first few pages of the manuscript.

  69. 69.

    Viva BrisVegas

    November 10, 2009 at 2:49 am

    One man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia. That is the entire point in writing about them. A static utopia represents an end of history, in which there is no longer dramatic conflict. Writing a narrative about one that rises above the level of a teenager’s diary is virtually impossible.

    All the science fictional utopias I can think of actually represent disguised dystopias. Even Bank’s Culture offers a universe in which ultimately humans and aliens are manipulated by Machine Minds for their own ends. Sometimes nicely, sometimes not.

    The subtitle of the Dispossessed was “An Ambiguous Utopia”. The point of the story was not that that Anarres represented a failed utopia, but that it represented the striving for such. Le Guin was saying that it is individuals that seek utopias, not societies, so by necessity all utopian societies will fail to fulfil individual utopian goals.

    But she is also saying that it is the shared striving towards utopia that is the noble pursuit. Not the utopia itself, which is ultimately unachievable.

  70. 70.

    Wile E. Quixote

    November 10, 2009 at 2:52 am

    @TimF

    It lets off utopianism far too easy to say that it works less well than dystopian thinking to make society better. Without exaggerating, I could fairly say that utopian thinking sparked some of the worst things that humans have ever done. It is not even a debatable point. Communism started as a utopian ideal. Gated cults that commit mass suicide (or worse) nearly always stem from a utopian vision. In general the concept of utopia is one of the most efficient means ever found to get well-intentioned people to do awful things.

    Martin Amis speculated on this in Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. It’s a great book.

    There are some other great dystopian novels that people don’t know about but might want to check out because they go in a different direction from most dystopias and instead of imagining governments or social movements run amok imagine a future where huge corporations have done so: Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, about a hypercapitalistic society dominated by advertising agencies and huge corporations. Richard K. Morgan’s Thirteen and Market Forces.

  71. 71.

    Wile E. Quixote

    November 10, 2009 at 2:53 am

    @Sophist Pedantic Dickweed

    “Russian Revolutiuon” and “Communism” are not interchangeable terms.

    Yes, and “Bush administration and conservatism” are also not interchangeable terms. The revolution/conservatism cannot fail comrades, it can only be failed.

  72. 72.

    Wile E. Quixote

    November 10, 2009 at 2:58 am

    @Sophist

    Bad, lazy writing is always relatively easy

    But the trick is to get paid large wads o’ wonga for it like the folks at the Corner, The Weakly Standard, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol and McMegan McArdle. I’ve got the bad lazy writing part down. I could write badly and lazily written books about how to write badly and lazily, but I haven’t figured out how to get anyone to give me money for it yet. Damnit! Why must I work for a living? Haven’t I suffered enough?

  73. 73.

    Anne Laurie

    November 10, 2009 at 3:26 am

    @deeba:

    What with 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, as well as Fahreheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale, US High School reading lists do seem pretty heavy on dystopia.

    Don’t forget To Kill A Mockingbird, where Scout discovers that her small-Southern-town utopia is literally founded on a history of oppression & the ongoing suffering of many, many people.

  74. 74.

    Viva BrisVegas

    November 10, 2009 at 3:35 am

    @Wile E. Quixote:

    Damnit! Why must I work for a living?”

    You have the wrong relatives.

  75. 75.

    Hob

    November 10, 2009 at 4:25 am

    @Brachiator: I won’t ask you not to be a dick, but could you make more sense when you’re being one?How was I “pearl clutching”? I didn’t say Atlas Shrugged was shocking or horrifying or outrageous, I just said it was evil. There are plenty of bad books out there saying evil things; that doesn’t mean they’re going to kill us all– although Tim seems to be arguing that they will.

    And if by “this guy” you mean Robinson, then you’re wrong for the same reason Tim is. You’re attacking a straw man that just isn’t Robinson’s point of view at all– he’s not saying writers should be more preachy, he’s saying that a certain kind of imaginative effort can be a good thing. As for why he’s opining about this in the first place, this quote of an excerpt of a not-linked-to interview makes it hard to tell, unless you’ve heard of KSR and know that his last four books are about a near-future climate catastrophe with only small glimmers of hope… so when he says it’s almost too easy to write dystopias just by quoting the headlines, he’s not criticizing other writers, he’s acknowledging a potential criticism of many of *his* books. OK?

  76. 76.

    Little Dreamer

    November 10, 2009 at 4:26 am

    @Zifnab:

    Is the worst thing in the Bible really the description of the Garden of Eden?

    You’re kidding, right? What about Sodom and Gomorrah? What about Armageddon and the final battle in the book of Revelation? What about the times that Jerusalem was attacked, occupied and the people taken captive to Babylon?

  77. 77.

    Mum

    November 10, 2009 at 7:26 am

    You may not be a fan, but Atwood’s books are far from stale. I just finished “The Year of the Flood,” the second part of her dystopian/post-apocalyptic trilogy (“Oryx and Crake” was the first). I thought both books were excellent and I’m looking forward to the third.

    Any arguments about dystopian literature versus utopian literature are really pointless. Any work of dystopian includes the notion of its opposite: the question of “what if.” What if we had done this instead of that; what if we had listened to the Cassandras and the Rachel Carsons, etc. We could even argue that any contemporary utopian literature, except that reeking of Pollyanna, would also have reference to its opposite, especially since, even on a good day, those tipping points seem to loom ever larger.

  78. 78.

    DecidedFenceSitter

    November 10, 2009 at 7:55 am

    Modesitt does several utopias, generally to discuss other concepts – such as the use of power, what is God?, responsibility among others. Almost always it is in a world with nanotechnology, so once again, there are no scarce resources.

  79. 79.

    qb

    November 10, 2009 at 8:42 am

    Everybody just read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin. Answer all your utopian questions. Actually, not. But read it anyway.

  80. 80.

    grendelkhan

    November 10, 2009 at 9:37 am

    David Brin calls that sort of dystopia a self-preventing prophecy. It’s sad, in a way, but we’re motivated more by horror stories of how our society could turn out wrong than by stories of how it might someday all be okay.

    qb: Interested folks can read it over here; it’s very short.

    I can’t tell whether or not it’s an indictment of any society that allows others to suffer for the benefit of its upper classes (i.e., ours), but I suppose it works plenty well as one. All of us are aware that we benefit from terrible injustice in some fashion, and none of us (evidently) have gone to live as hermits in the wilderness.

  81. 81.

    chopper

    November 10, 2009 at 10:27 am

    @Craig:

    this. a true dystopic work is one in which the dystopia wins. many utopias in fiction start out on the other side and make their way over through following the author’s own philosophic framework. rand is an example, from her short works like anthem to longer ones like atlas.

    true dystopic stories are like 1984.

    i guess some others like the road and children of men fall into that category, because only the lucky one makes it out at the end, but neither really offers any warning, more a bleak setting that wasn’t able to be avoided (at least not by anything the author was pushing.)

  82. 82.

    Hob

    November 10, 2009 at 11:50 am

    @Little Dreamer: I think the “check battery” light is on on your sarcasm detector… or maybe it’s mine…

  83. 83.

    Brachiator

    November 10, 2009 at 1:09 pm

    I didn’t say Atlas Shrugged was shocking or horrifying or outrageous, I just said it was evil. There are plenty of bad books out there saying evil things; that doesn’t mean they’re going to kill us all—although Tim seems to be arguing that they will.

    Atlas Shrugged is just a novel. To call it evil is indeed pearl clutching.

    And if by “this guy” you mean Robinson, then you’re wrong for the same reason Tim is. You’re attacking a straw man that just isn’t Robinson’s point of view at all—he’s not saying writers should be more preachy, he’s saying that a certain kind of imaginative effort can be a good thing.

    Some writers say the dumbest things when they are opining about the state of literature, as opposed to doing what they do best. To suggest that a certain kind of imaginative effort can be a good thing is pretty stupid. The dystopic works cited stand up because they are vivid and imaginative. Most utopian works go nowhere.

    As for why he’s opining about this in the first place, this quote of an excerpt of a not-linked-to interview makes it hard to tell, unless you’ve heard of KSR and know that his last four books are about a near-future climate catastrophe with only small glimmers of hope… so when he says it’s almost too easy to write dystopias just by quoting the headlines, he’s not criticizing other writers, he’s acknowledging a potential criticism of many of his books. OK?

    Whether or not it’s easier to write dystopias is trivial. Writing a good book is always hard.

    OK?

  84. 84.

    Hob

    November 10, 2009 at 1:33 pm

    Brachiator: If you think having a strong opinion about a novel is hysterical or unmanly or whatever, take it up with Tim. He’s the one saying that writers with misguided visions are dangerous.

  85. 85.

    Jhombi

    November 10, 2009 at 4:24 pm

    “Mankind will never see an end of trouble until…lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power…become lovers of wisdom.”
    ~ Plato (428-348 B.C.), Greek philosopher, The Republic

    What Plato failed to identify was that “power” is the corruptor. Many of the cited utopias in the previous listings, Camelot for example, were only utopias for the few and were ephemeral at best. Camelot fell due to the passions of its members and the awesome powers they were entrusted with and with which they betrayed their ideals and their compatriots.

    I find that dystopias represent the ground state of humanity and utopias represent those precious moments when we act on the advice of the better angels of our natures. Most human societies seem to institutionalize misery and compartmentalize it so that some lucky few can avoid it. Anything that appears to level the field frightens those who feel that they will be brought down in contact with the misery ground state.

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