Ask the right questions
Back in September The Guardian books’ pages published a books blog by Damien Walter under the headline “Science fiction doesn’t have to be gloomy, does it?” Drawing on a range of examples, Walter argued that current SF had replaced the utopian optimism of works from Arthur C Clarke to Isaac Asimov with an altogether too dystopian vision.
Walter’s column reflects a number of real changes, not only in the SF world, but also in the larger world that creates it. For the optimistic SF paradigm was often essentially one of cultural colonisation.
Take Star Trek, the TV descendant of all those novels of heroic exploration and rationally controlled super-societies. Under an allegedly benign, UN-style galactic government, the Enterprise crew was humandominated. The Vulcan Spock gained honourary status by virtue of being, under all the emotionless, green, pointy-eared stuff, “just like us”; a constant motif of the series was asides such as “I could have sworn Spock just smiled”. In the end core human (meaning middle-American) values inevitably triumphed. Genuine ideological diversity that went beyond make-up prosthetics was either converted or annihilated. It’s unlikely Mr Sulu would have been invited to celebrate his real-life, gay marriage on the ship’s bridge.
And while Asimov was never that philistine, many of the writers clustered around that early wave of speculative scientific optimism certainly were. Ostensible utopias that Walter does not mention, such as Robert Heinlein’s macho, militarised worlds run by right-wing football jocks in spacesuits, were even less attractive than the world of the Enterprise.
It’s clear why tropes such as those no longer dominate, and why we won’t see too many future series where the heroes head out to persuade the inhabitants of Betelgeuse of the virtues of clinically precise stealth bombs, gas-guzzling SUVs or free-market economics. “Civilising” missions and untrammelled science no longer hold quite such great appeal. Indeed, a whole sub-genre, “steampunk”, has been devoted to revisiting the discourse of how engineering can save the world.
But just as many of the earlier utopias reflected a context where they did, so do many current dystopian visions also reflect the realities we live with now. Late September would have been a good time to re-read Richard Morgan’s Market Forces, with its observation that “any free-market economist who doesn’t have blood on his hands isn’t doing his job”.
But the speculative writer is often the literary voice that isn’t content simply to live with ugly realities. And what Walter ignores are the many current writers producing hopeful visions of better worlds.
If Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth demonstrated how exploitative stewardship is carrying earth to hell in a handcart, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty — Fifty — Sixty trilogy (final volume: Sixty Days and Counting) demonstrates how more careful science and much better politics could pull us back from the brink. Ken Macleod has tracked struggles for justice across the universe, but his Execution Channel chose to look at the near-future surveillance societies of England and Scotland and at ways of building resistance to an overbearing US big brother. In Halting State, set similarly just ahead of now, Charles Stross pits corrupt and apparently untouchable bankers and politicians against three mavericks, a police officer, a hacker and an accountant, in both real and virtual worlds. It’s the rebels with a sense of ethics who win—and maybe that’s too utopian, but I hope not.
Ethics and ethical debates now form a key component of these optimistic futures: the spacemen with no moral centre who blithely vapourised Martians are definitely in the minority (though their earthling equivalents at My Lai and Abu Ghraib sadly survive). Allistair Reynolds’s various detectives, investigators and prefects fight battles not only with nanotechnology run wild but with corrupted power and competing definitions of what makes entities human; it’s those debates that give the books substance and his tales hope.
Far more than everyday human are the denizens of Iain M Banks’s Culture, even if they are often also supercilious, jaded and snarky. Yet the Culture is not a utopia, and Banks often subverts the “all-knowing super-beings save the world” discourse by revealing Culture’s weaknesses, and demonstrating the strength of small characters with no special powers working together. And China Mieville’s Iron Council takes a fresh look at people’s power and finds that collective work and decision-making are not as impossible as non-speculative modern fiction with its focus on individualism often assumes.
One area where earlier “utopian” fiction was never so for at least half its readers was in its handling of women. Space heroines were either in need of rescue from the monster, or visually pneumatic but emotionally men in drag. That should have ended after Ursula le Guin published The Dispossessed—and Walter does credit both her and Octavia Butler for the transformative power of their writing—but did not.
Yet today Le Guin shares the exploration of future gender roles not only with several of the male writers listed above, but also with women including Sherri S Tepper, Liz Williams, Storm Constantine. Gwyneth Jones and Mary Gentle, whose fantasy Illario was perhaps the most subversive recent unpicking of gender perspectives. These are not creators of candy-coloured future worlds where feminine rule ends aggression, but tough philosophers of the prison of gender, for whom the notions of “alien” and “human” intersect with notions of what is “proper” behaviour for males or females.
Neal Stephenson’s Anathem—which topped the New York Times best-seller list—and Robinson’s Sixty Days and Counting both end with a kiss. If even part-way happy endings count as utopian, they qualify. But the final question for Walter remains: why shouldn’t SF be gloomy? If the point of speculative fiction is to make readers ask “What if?” and “What if not?”, then even Morgan’s bloody-handed investment banker is certainly doing his job.
