For the Kids Who Will Grow Up After Dystopia, Part 1
About a year ago now, I was keeping tabs on one of those over-diagnosed,under-bullshit-tolerant boys of color whose parents had, for better or worse, lobbied to public school system into funding a one-on-one instructional assistant (me) to follow him around all day. My job was essentially to help him fake conformity with pedagogies that, despite many skilled and well-meaning teachers, seem structurally designed to repel a child’s interest.
The boy’s English class was in a unit on dystopian fiction: the kids had a choice of a dizzying array of contemporary YA novels; no Orwell or Huxley in sight. I strolled around the tables and picked up books. I read the jackets. They were uniformly depressing and all followed the formula: first, isolate a “contemporary issue” (the kind the twittering classes write, read and overshare think pieces about: narcotrafficantes, say, or social media, or body image). Second, make this isolated issue the organizing principle of a future society so geopolitically and economically implausible as to resemble an old-school didactic allegory trapped in the body of a proper science-fiction novel.
Kim Stanley Robinson, a giant of SF that is both “hard” (realist) and utopian, compares the genre to a pair of 3D glasses: “One lens of science fiction’s aesthetic machinery portrays some future that might actually come to pass,” Robinson writes in the leftist magazine Commune. “The other lens presents a metaphorical vision of our current moment… Together the two views combine and pop into a vision of History, extending magically into the future.” Dystopian fiction, then, is like sci-fi with the realist lens missing: the present “heightened by exaggeration to a kind of dream or nightmare,” more akin to poetry or surrealism than to SF’s attempt to imagine the future as History. For Robinson as for Commune editor Jasper Bernes, utopian thought is the necessary antidote to a dystopian literature that has become lazy, cynical and politically quietist. While Bernes’s article in the same issue looks back to what is still the seminal work of modern utopian literature, Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, Robinson looks to a literary future of “next thought: utopia.”
Around the same time the Commune pieces appeared online, Analog Science Fiction and Fact ran a guest editorial with a similar-sounding title: “Dystopic? Or Myopic?” But Edward M. Lerner, who “worked in high-tech and aerospace for thirty years, as everything from engineer to senior vice president,” attacks dystopia under a rather different banner: center-right bright green rather than ultra-left black and red.
Nonetheless, I was excited to read anyone else interested in interrogating a genre that seems to fit Frederic Jameson’s framing all too snugly: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” The next sentence is less widely quoted: “We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” That is, dystopia is at least a recognition of capitalism’s ecocidal drive, but it stops short of imagining just what could halt the juggernaut of the blind drive for accumulation and replace it with a conscious vector of desire, of History properly speaking. For anyone interested in science fiction as a way of tackling questions of time, space, futurity and the lurid, slo-mo nightmare of the late-capitalist “windless present,” Jameson’s whole piece, published in New Left Review in 2003, is a rewarding read — it’s ostensibly a review of an architecture book, but riffs on the built environment like a parkour runner, leaping from Marx to LeGuin to cyberpunk to LeFebvre.
Not to bound too far from Lerner’s Analog editorial, however: the piece regrets the “hopelessness and misery” of today’s ubiquitous dystopias. However, Lerner’s “not criticizing classics” like Orwell, Rand and Huxley, though he seems to think they are not really SF: “But these classics… are political or sociological in nature, and the emergent pattern that distresses me involves science fiction. The prevalence of dystopian SF, I firmly believe, is a Bad Thing.” This is a rather bizarre distinction on the face of it; 1984 with its telescreens and Brave New World with its test-tube babies were written as science fiction, even by the narrowest technocentric definitions. Does Lerner think “science fiction” can be about science in some way that transcends or escapes politics and sociology? Surely not, but the weird distinction he tries to draw is telling nevertheless.
Of course fans and writers of social science fiction would surely agree with Lerner’s call for “a nuanced look at possible futures: neither Pollyanna-ish nor defeatist” — and even, for us YA writers anyway, with his unapologetically moralizing concern with dystopia’s “societal message” to “young… impressionable” readers.
The whole red-green spectrum of the socialist left would also support Lerner’s mockery of Malthusian doomsayers old and new. We would also join him in lauding a “can-do, problem-solving attitude” toward ecological crisis, though we might pick a different exemplar than Green-Revolution Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug. As an aspiring writer of utopian social science fiction, I’ve found fertile intellectual soil in Monthly Review’s ecosocialist analysis of capitalist agriculture, and its horizon of an agro-ecological campesinx alternative.
Lerner, meanwhile, wants SF to sound the familiar (and tinny) bright-green capitalist clarions: “expanding the economic pie” through “technology, human creativity, and the as-yet-untapped wealth of the ocean floor and… beyond our planet[!]” No doubt Elon and Jeff’s disruptive pioneers, after a few light years of galactic colonialism as the ultimate “spatial fix” to capital’s historic contradictions, will feel the need to re-connect with their authentic, spiritual selves by attending yoga classes with James Cameron’s noble blue savages on their verdant moon.
While bourgeois thought can imagine ecological utopia only on some other planet, even LeGuin puts her utopia on a moon the revolutionaries are given in exchange for leaving Planet Capitalism alone — and sending back regular shipments of scarce minerals. Robinson puts his ambiguous utopia on Mars, but in “Dystopias Now” suggests a fertile new direction: the “science” in “science fiction” enables a cautious optimism of the will, because we know that it is physically possible for 10 billion of us to live equitably and sustainably on this planet, that utopian science fiction about such an ecosocialist future could in fact be a form of realism.
Sitting in that bleak English class, I began sketching out the rudiments of a geopolitically and ecologically plausible, late-21st-century world in which spaces for utopian experiment have opened, and I can start to imagine what growing up and education would be like in these ecosocialist enclaves. Stay tuned for the followup to this piece, where I’ll discuss a fellow leftist contemporary YA-SF writer, Cory Doctorow, who carries on the lineage of my youthful idol William Gibson in more utopian directions. And I’ll give a teaser of how my own utopian project differs from Doctorow’s, and draw out the thinking behind some of these comradely divergences.
