Works of Utopian Fiction

Works of utopian fiction have generally either failed as literature, or have succeeded only at the price of partially subverting the author's intent. The reason may be found in what the proverb that happy is the country that has no history, and its counterpart, reputed to be an old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Good fiction is founded upon conflict, and conflict is precisely what is generally banished from conceptions of an ideal society. Just as one cannot write a very gripping domestic drama about a happy, placid society, so one cannot write a gripping social drama about a happy, placid society.

The temptation of the skilled utopian writer, then, is to create a counterpoint society to the ideal one, a corrupted society, and to place the two in conflict. The danger in this temptation is that the corrupt society will be far more fascinating to read about than the ideal one. The consequences can be seen in perhaps the earliest utopian work, Plato's dialogues Critias and Timaeus. Plato conterpoised an ideal former Athens, constructed along the lines of his Republic, with a corrupted Atlantis. Yet it is his Atlantis which has been a source of fascination through the centuries, while his Athens remains artistically dead.

In The Dispossessed (New York: Harper, 1974), science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin attempts to surmount this conundrum by acknowledging that her ideal society, the anarcho-syndicalist planet Anarres, is itself imperfect, with a

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r these conditions, the degree of contact among the interstellar colonies is minimal (indeed, it is rather curious that embassies should have been established). But the protagonist of the novel, Shevak, is a physicist, and he has been working on a theory of "simultaneity," a theory which, if perfected, would eliminate the long travel times between stars. This possibility explains why the authorities of A-io, one of the major powers on Urras, have allowed Shevak to come from Anarres, and have established him at a university. As he explains to the Terran ambassador, after his escape from his genteel confinement (and after experiencing the violent suppression of a mass demonstration by A-io's poor), "'when [the theory] was done, I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it. . . . what they want,' he said, 'is the instantaneous transferral of matter across space'" (p. 343). LeGuin does not spell out the political implication, but it is difficult to read this reference to a threat as referring to anything other than the possibility of interstellar aggression by A-io. Such aggression might not take the form of outright interstellar invasion fleets; if A-io possessed a monopoly on swift interstellar travel, it

Category: Literature - W