Utopian & Dystopian Visions in Science Fiction

Utopian & Dystopian Visions

in SciFiA Short (Story) Blast of the Future from the

Past: Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories, OLLI-UA Tucson

Kris Swank, Pima Community College-NorthwestTuesday, September 30, 2014 (1:30-3:30 PM)

KRIS SWANK• Library Director, Pima Community College, Northwest Campus

• Fantasy literature scholar specializing in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, gender, ethnicity & dystopias

• Forthcoming essay in Harry Potter for Nerds II, ed. Travis Prinzi “Harry Potter as Dystopian Lit.”

• M.A. Languages & Literature, Mythgard Institute

• pima.academia.edu/KrisSwank

Utopianism Defined Thomas More, Utopia (1516) u- or ou- ("no" or "not“) + topos (“place”) = “no-place” or “not-place”

Utopianism = “social dreaming” “If we are hungry, we dream of a full stomach. If we are sexually frustrated, we dream of sexual fulfillment. If we are frustrated by something in our society, we dream of a society in which it is corrected”

—Lyman Sargent (3-4). 1

Utopia –an imaginary society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space

The Two Sides of UtopiaEutopia Thomas More (1516) coined eutopia eu- (good, well) = “happy place.” 2

Eutopia or positive utopia--a non-existent society considerably better than the society in which the reader lives.

If you behave thus and so, you will be rewarded with this.

DystopiaJohn Stuart Mill (1868) coined dystopian dys- (bad, ill)Dystopia or negative utopia--a non-existent society considerably worse than the society in which the reader lives.If you behave thus and so, this is how you will be punished. Jeremy Bentham (1818) coined cacotopia kakos (evil)

Philip K. Dick’s Definition of SciFi “We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: it is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society; that is, our known society acts as a jumping-off point for it; the society advances out of our own in some way, perhaps orthogonally, as with the alternate world story or novel. It is our world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, our world transformed into that which it is not or not yet. […] this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society so that as a result a new society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition. He knows that it is not his actual world that he is reading about [however…] science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances.

—excerpt from a letter to John Betancourt, 14 May 1981.

Our World Dislocated: Contemporary DystopiasEcological“Make Room! Make Room!” by Harry Harrison (made into film, Soylent Green)The Road by Cormac McCarthyMad Max (film)Waterworld (film)WALL-E (film)

TechnologicalRobopocalypse & Robogenesis by Daniel H. WilsonTerminator (film)The Matrix (film)

Biological Never Let Me Goby Kazuo Ishiguro

The Handmaid’s Taleby Margaret Atwood

Children of Men by P. D. James's

The Lottery (TV) The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

The Walking Dead (TV) Dawn of the Planet of the

Apes (film)

Early Literary Utopias Utopianism is a universal human phenomenon1

Plato, The Republic (380 B.C.)

Thomas More, Utopia (1516)

Tomasso Campenella, The City of the Sun (1602)

Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627)

Feminist Utopias Man's Rights; or, How Would You Like It?

Annie Denton Cridge (1870) Mizora, A Prophecy,

Mary E. Bradley Lane (1880-1; 1890)

New Amazonia, Elizabeth Corbett (1889)

Arqtiq: A Story of the Marvels at the North Pole, by Anna Andolph (1899)

“Sultana’s Dream,” by Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain (1905)

Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)

Socialist Utopias The Great Romance,

The Inhabitant (1881) The Diothas; or, A Far Look

Ahead, Ismar Thiusen (aka John Macnie) (1883)

Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy (1888)

News from Nowhere, William Morris (1890)

Capitalist and MachineDystopias

The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells, 1895

“Machine Stops,” by E. M. Forster, 1909

R.U.R. (play)Karel Čapek, 1920

Metropolis (film), Fritz Lang, 1927

Totalitarian Dystopias “The state is everything, the

individual is nothing, regulation prevails, and that which cannot be regulated is outlawed or extirpated.”

—Richard B. Vowles

pervasive government surveillance lack of free speech the suppression of free

association lack due judicial process cruel and unusual punishments

Totalitarian Dystopias(1920s-1940s) We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1920

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932

Anthem, Ayn Rand, 1938

Kallocain, Karin Boye, 1940

“The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson, 1948

1984, George Orwell, 1949

New Wave Dystopias (1960s-1970s) A Clockwork Orange,

Anthony Burgess (1962; film, ‘71)

“Make Room! Make Room!” Harry Harrison (1966; Soylent Green, ’73)

Logan's Run by William F. Nolan (1967; film ‘76)

John Brunner, “Club of Rome Quartet”: Stand on Zanzibar, 1968 The Jagged Orbit , 1969 The Sheep Look Up, 1972 The Shockwave Rider, 1975

Courtesy of Harlan Ellison; photograph Christer Akerberg/Sweden

Copyright © by Marian Wood Kolisch

NEW WAVE DYSTOPIAS (1960S-1970S)

Our World Dislocated: Contemporary DystopiasEcologicalThe Road by Cormac McCarthyMad Max (film)Waterworld (film)WALL-E (film)

TechnologicalRobopocalypse & Robogenesis by Daniel H. WilsonTerminator (film)The Matrix (film)

Biological Never Let Me Goby Kazuo Ishiguro

The Handmaid’s Taleby Margaret Atwood

Children of Men by P. D. James's

The Lottery (TV) The Walking Dead (TV) Dawn of the Planet of the

Apes (film) 12 Monkeys (film)

YA Dystopias (New Millennium ) The Giver, Lois Lowry, 1993

Genesis, Bernard Beckett, 2006

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, 2008

The Maze Runner, James Dashner, 2009

Matched, Ally Condie, 2010

Divergent, Veronica Roth, 2011

Red Rising, Pierce Brown, 2014

Resources1. Sargent, Lyman Tower. "The Three Faces Of Utopianism Revisited."

Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1.2. Edward Surtz, S.J., and J. H. Hexter, eds., The Complete Works of St.

Thomas More, vol. 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965); 20.3. “Twentieth Century Dystopian Fiction.” International Anthony Burgess

Foundation. Blog (n.d.), www.anthonyburgess.org.4. Boye, Karin. Kallocain. Intro. Richard B. Vowles. Trans. Gustaf

Lannestock. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 1966. Rpt. in The Literature Collection. Univ. of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center, 2004. http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Literature/Literature-idx?id=Literature.BoyeKallocn .

5. Sturgis, Amy. “Not Your Parents’ Dystopia.” Reason.com (26 Aug. 2014).