Back to utopia

[YankeyMCC]

Interesting article in today's globe about the role of Science Fiction in developing polical ideas.

(snip)

IN 1888, when Massachusetts newspaperman Edward Bellamy published his science fiction novel ''Looking Backward," set in a Boston of the year 2000, it sold half a million copies. Never mind the futuristic inventions (electric lighting, credit cards) and visionary city planning; what readers responded to was the transformation of a Gilded Age city of labor strikes and social unrest into a socialist utopia (Bellamy called it ''nationalist") of full employment and material abundance.

(snip)

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/11/20/back_to_utopia/

[Emperor_Norton_II]

1. Not exactly utopia, but still relevant...

http://www.cloggie.org/esseff/millennial-reviews.html

A series of reviews about classic science-fiction stories set on or around the turn of the century. It's interesting to read, because it shows how much science fiction is shaped by political climates as opposed to shaping them.

[phantom power]

2. I've heard it said that...

most science fiction isn't really about the future. If you scratch the surface, it's mostly about the present (whenever it was written).

There's a neat little anthology of "Soviet Science Fiction," with an intro by Asimov, where he theorizes about certain limits of Soviet science fiction, in particular about the kind of SF that deals with alternate societies and hypothetical futures. Since the official position of the USSR was that their society was the ideal toward which everybody else ought to be aspiring, it wasn't politically correct to speculate about society being different in the future (or the present).

Somehow, that seemed relevant, but darned if I can remember why.

[NewHampshireDem]

3. It was interesting, but I think Jameson's theory is flawed

1. I don't agree that more than a handful of dystopias are attempts to define utopia by what a utopia isn't. The whole 'graven images' thesis is conveniently broad and ambiguous. I think rather that science fiction (or speculative fiction) and philosophy have matured past believing that a (single) utopia or utopian vision is even possible. How many of us would want to live in More's Utopia, Plato's Republic, or the Taliban's Afghanistan. One man's utopia is without a doubt another man's dystopia.

2. There is a whole range of science fiction that is not exactly utopian but is set in a world (or universe) that could be described as utopian--the 'post-scarcity' society. Iain M. Banks's Culture universe, for example, could be described as utopian. However, it probably is not because it lack the heterogeneity of previous utopian imaginings. That is to say, most writers today acknowledge that hell is other people and a utopia can only be a universe expansive enough to include a great deal of personal and social lattitude. The sample cited by the article is just to narrow--and god awfully out of date--to be representative.