Dystopian ≠ Realistic
Why I won’t ride that bandwagon
I grew up reading science fiction. Old science fiction. Wells. Verne. Asimov. Heinlein. Clark.
Were those guys great writers? Not on your life. Not a one of them could hold a candle to David Brin, C.D. Cherryh, Dan Simmons, or Octavia Butler.
But in those days, we didn’t ask great craft of science fiction writers. What we asked of them — and got — was great ideas. They gave us visions of the future.
Rocket ships, computers, robots, flying cars, time travel, immortality. Humanity no longer plagued by poverty, disease, and war, populating outer space. They invited us to let imagination play with possibility, and hope, and yes, believe.
In other words, most old SciFi writers were utopians.
That term has taken on a nasty odor in recent decades. We associate it now with naïvely optimistic visions of humanity perfected, or glassy-eyed collectivists, devoid of individuality, desiring nothing but the common good.
Americans especially, after nearly a century of government-produced and government-encouraged anti-communist propaganda, are conditioned to reject in knee-jerk fashion any challenge to capitalistic dogma. So the very notion of a duty to support the common good — even in such matters as a mask to keep from spreading deadly viruses — can trigger violence.
Sir Thomas More’s 1516 novel Utopia described an island where people lived in perfect Christian community, free of greed and free of conflict. Charismatic leaders in various times and places have tried to make that vision work, but those colonies have never lasted longer than the person holding them together, often falling into bitter acrimony over sexual or other jealousies.
But in its most generic sense, “utopian” is a direction of social evolution, the opposite direction being “dystopian.” The question is, will human culture go on solving problems and providing for its members (us) a better quality of life, or will it devolve into the 17th-Century kind of life described by Thomas Hobbes as “nasty, brutish, and short”?
Utopia implies perfection, but one need not believe in the perfectibility of human beings or their social institutions to believe progress is possible. Dystopian writing shows a culture in decline; utopian writing shows one learning from mistakes and getting better.
Pessimism’s easier to sell these days. Boomers are the last generation to have witnessed an extended period of growth in quality of life. Millennials have watched their world be overtaken by wave after wave of technology (some of it helpful), information (some of it accurate), and political warfare (some of it lethal), all accompanied by levels of income inequality not seen since medieval times, against the lowering final curtain of the climate apocalypse.
Small wonder they are more inclined to trust those who describe a future in which our creations have, like Dr. Frankenstein’s, become our nemesis.
Those of us who have lived somewhat longer know how many ways our world is cleaner, safer, and more just than what we had not all that many years ago. Yet we also, worn down by the increasingly brazen predations — and dictatorial ambitions — of a “president” who mocks the very concept of good breeding, may be tempted to succumb to cynicism and despair.
Why not climb onto the bandwagon of dystopia? Is that not the only realistic way to view the coming times?
Some say yes, but this pandemic scares me, and I want to fight it any way I can.
No, not the COVID-45 pandemic. I’m talking about the mental viruses, the pandemic of malignant myth that has been spreading largely unchecked now for several decades.
We are meaning makers. That more than any other thing defines us. Human beings are the stories that we tell ourselves and one another.
Science fiction gave us tales of people solving problems. Typically, the hero was presented with a challenge so new that his scientific gadgetry was useless and he had to fall back on the first and greatest of all human tools: his mind. More specifically, his imagination. His ability to think outside the box. To survive, he had to overcome his old assumptions.
But he was from a race of problem solvers, dreamers who had beaten all the odds to rise beyond the limits of a world oppressed by gravity and air pollution. Homo Sapiens took on all comers, bug-eyed monsters from beyond the Milky Way with unknown weapons and technologies. We were boldly going where no one had gone before, confident that whatever might be out there, we were equal to the challenge.
Our adversary now is more insidious than Asimov’s or Roddenberry’s villains. It is dystopia itself, the absolutely unsupportable conviction that my greatest enemy is you.
Instead of telling one another stories of how people work together, now we practice sneering cynically at jokes whose punchlines all remind us that what matters is the bottom line. We have bought into the notion that the game is zero-sum — no one can win unless somebody loses. We’ve been sold a bill of goods that tells us might makes right, and only fools look out for anyone but number one.
We’ve been conned into believing that the problems of humanity cannot be solved because the problem IS humanity. They tell us we have no choice but compete for all of the resources necessary just to stay alive, because there’s not enough of everything to go around.
Bull. Shit.
We aren’t the problem. We are the solution. We are — all of us — resources, value generators. We are capable of feeding all of us, clothing all of us, providing healthcare, education, and opportunities for all of us. The only scarcity is artificial, the scarcity produced by 90% of the planet’s resources being held by 1% of its people.
That’s who wants us to believe the reason we can’t have nice things is because our neighbors had too many babies. That’s who wants us to give up our dreams of real prosperity for everyone. And that’s who’s being served by writers who waste their imagination telling stories proving why we shouldn’t bother using ours.
If we want to build a better future, we must first imagine one. Better yet, imagine many.
My MFA thesis is going to be about a man who builds a single-structure habitatation for 3000 people. He invests in them, providing them with food and education, helping them start businesses, enabling a community to grow and thrive together. No glassy-eyed collectivists, but individuals who know their neighbors are their friends. That first arcology becomes the model for many more, which are the means by which humanity prepares for the inevitable climate disaster, and after cleansing centuries emerges with new wisdom and a new conception of what “human” beings are.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Maybe you can write a better one. I hope you will.
But I believe that writers are the ones who can and must reclaim our future. And the only way to do it is to tell some better stories.
More by Edward Robson, PhD:
Could Donald Trump Pass the Turing Test? | by Edward Robson, PhD | ILLUMINATION | Medium