The New Utopians
Kim Stanley Robinson and the novelists who want to build a better future through science fiction.
How will the world end? Take your pick among an array of near-future catastrophes: rising sea levels, overpopulation, mass extinction of species, nuclear proliferation, uncontainable viruses, not to mention more fanciful but alarmingly plausible scenarios like a giant asteroid or superintelligent computers run amok. The prophets of doom are unusually loud in our time, and almost every vision of the future, whether by sober ecologists or wild-eyed science fiction writers, carries with it the stench of despair. The collapse of civilization has become its own narrative cliché.
But dark predictions have always had a sunny counterpart—the dream of a better world. Just as heaven and hell are complementary destinations, so are utopia and dystopia rivalrous siblings, each offering radically different outcomes, but both concerned with the idea of how humanity can shape its common destiny. The first utopias offered a revolutionary idea: The social order, as it exists, is neither inevitable nor the best we can hope for. Thomas More’s 1516 tour of an ideal island state called Utopia gave the genre
its name, an idea later refined by Francis Bacon in the
New Atlantis (1627), in which lost sailors discover an island where the inhabitants have perfected the scientific method. Catastrophe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was ordained from above; sickness, plague, famine, these were out of the control of man. Utopia was a place of perfect social control, where the weather always behaved itself.
Countering these hopes were the satirical responses of more pessimistic writers like Jonathan Swift, whose
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) can be read as an early warning about false utopias. Brook Farm was a notorious mid-nineteenth-century experiment in
communal living that some of America’s leading writers, including Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne, tried and failed to establish in the 1840s. (Hawthorne’s disillusionment with the experience, and his general scorn for hare-brained utopianism, was recorded in his 1852 novel
The Blithedale Romance.) Yet if utopia is easy to mock, it remains a central inspiration for social activism. Countless practical reform movements have taken heart from utopian imaginings. Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward (1888) was a central text to Progressive-era America, just as H.G. Wells furthered socialism with the creation of a fictional world state in his 1933 novel,
The Shape of Things to Come.
In contemporary culture, utopia has all but disappeared from our imaginative map while dystopias proliferate. The social order is no longer broken down by a failure of the political imagination, but by catastrophic climate events that deliver a new interval of geologic time: a dry or frozen planet beset by anarchy, population decline, even
new speciation. Sometime after 1972, a global thermonuclear war leads to the desertification of the Earth, the near extinction of our species, and the rise of the
Planet of the Apes (as well as seven sequels). Since 1979, Mad Max and his merry crew have fought for what little gasoline and water is left in a landscape of parched, desolate highways. In novel after novel, written with her characteristic gingery wit, Margaret Atwood has given us bad news about the ways in which humanity can mess up our collective destiny, whether it be the eugenic theocracy of
The Handmaid’s Tale—her response to the rise of the religious right in the 1980s—or the genetic engineering gone awry in the
MaddAddam trilogy. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t spell out the exact nature of the catastrophe that wrecks the world of his bleak 2006 novel
The Road, but the barren, ashen landscape of the novel feels post-nuclear. In the 2013 film
Snowpiercer, a train runs on an infinite loop over a flash-frozen Earth, its inhabitants trapped in a closed ecosystem ruled by martial law.
Climate change, so difficult to grapple with because it requires the cooperation of nations across the globe, points to how our environmental problems are fused with the narrowing of our political options. The end of history, much heralded by Francis Fukuyama, has been accompanied not by a flourishing of democracy but by plutocratic-friendly gridlock that prevents any political action that challenges the interests of entrenched wealth. The enemy of utopia isn’t dystopia, but oligarchy. The cultural critic Fredric Jameson
summed up the dilemma of our epoch when he quipped that someone once said, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Amid the crowded field of artists crying doom and gloom, the science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has been an anomalous figure in the genre for almost 30 years. He’s made it his life’s work to write books that keep alive the idea that humanity can create a better future for itself. Robinson writes in the rigorous subgenre of hard science fiction, which requires respect for known natural laws rather than flights of fancy. In his books, the scientists are heroes: His Mars is not an alien planet, but a landscape to be terraformed into radical new farms; his Antarctica is a landscape for environmental research and eco-sabotage; and government grants, if applied for, can often save the world. Robinson’s work illustrates both the promise and peril of radical optimism, as well as the habits of ordinary people in extraordinary landscapes.
“Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines,” Robinson
told science fiction short story writer Terry Bisson in 2009. “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.”
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