Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (526 page)

Boris dragged Santa’s sack to the stern and set it on the grubby, algae-coated deck. “I hear you were quite a lad, little Toby,” he said, cinching the sack closed with a length of waterproof hemp. “I’m sorry I never knew you.”

“Even though you can’t hear me, I am at this moment moved to bid you good-bye,” said Gloria. “I feel rather guilty about not paying more attention to you.”

“The fact of the matter is I’m bored,” said Connie. “Not that I didn’t
like
Toby. Indeed, I’m somewhat sorry we hardly ever played together.”

Boris lifted the Santa sack, balancing it on the transom with his hairy, weatherworn hand.

“I miss you, son,” I said. “I miss you so much.”

“Quite bored,” said Connie.

Boris raised his palm, and the sack lurched toward the water like the aquatic armadillo Toby had caught and freed on the Jordan. As it hit the channel, Helen said, simply, “I love you, Toby.” She said it over and over, long after the sack had sunk from view.

“It’ll be dark in an hour,” Boris told me. “How about we just keep on going?”

“Huh?”

“You know—keep on going. Get out of this crazy city.”

“Leave?”

“Think it over.”

I didn’t need to.

* * * *

I’m a liar now. I could easily fill these final passages with a disingenuous account of what befell us after we set Gloria and Connie back on shore and returned to the river: our breathless shoot-out with the Brutality Squad, our narrow escape up the inlet, our daring flight to the sea. But the simple fact is that no such melodrama occurred. Through some bright existential miracle we cruised free of Veritas that night without encountering a single police cutter, shore battery, or floating mine.

We’ve been sailing the broad and stormy Caribbean for nearly four years now, visiting the same landfalls Columbus once touched—Trinidad, Tobago, Barbados—filling up on fruit and fresh water, course uncharted, future unmapped, destination unsettled. We have no wish to root ourselves. At the moment
Average Josephine
is home enough.

My syndrome, I’m told, is normal. The nightmares, the sudden rages, the out-of-context screams, the time I smashed the ship-to-shore radio—all these behaviors, I’ve heard, are to be expected.

You see, I want him back.

It’s getting dark. I’m composing by candlelight, in our gloomy galley, my pen nib scuttling across the page like a cockroach scavenging a greasy fragment of tinfoil. My wife and the clamdigger come in. Boris asks me if I want coffee. I tell him no.

“Hi, Daddy.” Little Andrea sits on Helen’s shoulders like a yoke.

“Hi, darling,” I say. “Will you sing me a song?” I ask my daughter.

Before I destroyed the radio, a startling bit of news came through. I’m still trying to deal with it. Last October, some bright young research chemist at Voltaire University discovered a cure for Xavier’s Plague.

Andrea climbs down. “I’d be
deee-lighted
to sing you a song.” She’s only two and a half, but she talks as well as any four-year-old.

Boris makes himself a cup of Donaldson’s Drinkable Coffee.

Out of the blue, Helen asks, “Did you copulate with that woman?”

“With what woman?”

“Martina Coventry. Did you?”

I can answer however I wish. “Why are you asking
now
?”

“Because I want to
know
now. Did you ever…?”

“Yes,” I say. “Once. Are you upset?”

“I’m upset,” Helen says. “But I’d be more upset if you’d lied.”

Andrea scrambles into my lap. Her face, I note with great pleasure, is a perfect conjunction of Helen’s features and my own. “‘I hide my wings inside my soul,’” she sings, lyrics by Martina Coventry, music by Andrea Sperry.

“‘Their feathers soft and dry,’” my daughter and I sing together. Her melody is part lament, part hymn.

Now Helen and Boris join in, as if my Satirevian training has somehow rubbed off on them. The lies cause them no apparent pain.

“‘And when the world’s not looking…’”

We’re in perfect harmony, the four of us. I don’t love the lies, I realize as we trill the final line—our cloying denial of gravity—but I don’t hate them either.

“‘We take them out and fly,’” we all sing, and even though I’m wingless as a Veritasian pig, I feel as if I’m finally getting somewhere.

* * * *

Copyright © 1990 by James Morrow.

The apical ancestor for utopian science fiction is, of course, Thomas More’s
Utopia
(1516), a story-within-a-story where a Portuguese sailor, Ralph Hythloday, tells the (fictional) Thomas More all about an island in the New World where people live an idyllic existence without many of the cares and worries that vexed sixteenth-century European society. People take what they need to live on and do not accumulate wealth. There are few laws and no lawyers. People rotate living between the country and the city. Marital infidelity is punished by slavery. Men and women undertake continuous military drills to protect against invasion. And so on: a menagerie of heterogeneous, descriptive detail. Is this the perfect society? Would it have seemed perfect to you if you’d read More’s work in the sixteenth century?

Following More, many other writers and philosophers have written their own utopias, all of which, as Darko Suvin has suggested, share a common characteristic in their definition of a “community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than the author’s community” (1979: 49). But by the twentieth century, many cultural critics were dismissive of utopias. New York Times critic Edward Rothstein shares a typical sentiment when he suggests that “the best we can hope for when it comes to utopias is that they be held at arm’s length” (2003: 23). After all, isn’t utopia, literally, “no Place” (from the Latin “outopia”)?

What to make, then, of the continued popularity of Utopia? My foray into Amazon.com suggests that there has been at least one new edition of the English translation of
Utopia
every year. Even more interesting: searches through the online Korean bookstore, Kyobo Books, suggest the same for Korean translations.

What makes utopia popular may be one of the characteristics that makes SF attractive—the desire for alternatives to the perceived present, that sense of “cognitive estrangement” that Suvin identifies as the chief characteristic of SF as a genre. It may be, in fact, that it is the intimation of utopia itself that accounts for the popularity of SF, not only with readers, but with critics eager to draw out alternatives to our world of deep inequalities.

Utopia can said to begin with the first stirrings of modernity, with the kinds of curiosity about other people and the questioning of the present that, a short 200 years or so after More, had flowered into the Enlightenment itself. Not surprisingly, utopian SF has been some of the most intellectually dense SF produced, and, accordingly, a long-time favorite for academic critics. Heir to modernity, utopias describe a
break
with the present, an “other” that is the product of a critical reflection on the present. The first literary utopias were islands of various sorts—distant lands like “Australia” (in Gabriel de Foigny’s 1676
La Terre Australe Commue) where returning visitors would report on the perfect lives of the utopian inhabitants.

Of course, the other way to create distance from our contemporary present is through time. By the end of the seventeenth century, essayists like Bernard de Fontenelle had begun to popularize the idea of progress—of things getting better and better through the passage of time. With this logic, if one waited long enough, things would be much better than they are now, a conceit that carries through several nineteenth-century utopias, including Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward, 2000–1887
(1888), where the narrator awakens from a hypnotized sleep to find the world transformed into an ultra-rational paradise.

But, all of these utopias, whether islands separated from the mainland or island in time, generally extrapolate on some central novum—some central difference from the present—that, taken to its logical extreme, results in utopia. Those novums include the abolition of private property (More), the establishment of a scientific oligarchy (Bacon), and the elimination of poverty (Morris).

Whatever the novum, the intent is to critique the present. Much of the animus behind utopian speculations in the nineteenth century came from the decidedly mixed experiences people were having with modernity in general—capitalism, urbanization, alienation—and the social and cultural alternatives they could come up with. Marx and Engels famously critiqued these efforts at “utopian socialism” in their Communist Manifesto as so much wishful thinking, but this critique of the present is one of the more enduring characteristics of the utopian imagination—one shared, incidentally, by Marx and Engels themselves.

But extrapolating on some novum into the future also opens up the possibility for “dystopia”—the reverse to the utopian coin—where it was imperfection that is “perfected,” with nightmarish results. In Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
(1932), the perfection of eugenics allows for the state to engineer a rigid caste of citizens, each with a different physique and intelligence. While in George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949), it is the capacity of the state to control information itself (through language and media) that has been perfected.

It’s worth asking why someone would write a utopia or a dystopia in the first place. Are utopian writers really advocating the worlds they described? And are dystopian writers really predicting such awful futures? One of the foremost theorists of the utopian, Frederic Jameson, has written that the function of utopia “lies not in helping us imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future—our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity or future—so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined” (2005:46). Here, utopia and dystopia reveal the limits of the present to imagine its Other. Bounded by the genre conventions, the language, and the ideas of the present—including the culture which, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, we have both authored and been authored by—our utopian sketches can only suggest something different. Not a blueprint, then, but a sketch.

By the end of WWII, there seems to have been a falling off of utopian writing in SF (with, of course, many notable exceptions like Kurt Vonnegut’s
Player Piano
(1952) and Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451
(1953)). Certainly, many of the writers who dominated the post-war SF scene tended to eschew utopian themes. Or, rather, they were motivated by what Sargent called “anti-utopia”—the projection of a United States–inflected present into the distant future, where armies of soldiers and white-collar bureaucrats populate the stars looking for new planets to suburbanize, a theme parodied in Fredrick Pohl’s and C. M. Kornbluth’s
The Space Merchants
(1958) (Sargent 1975).

However, with the social activism of the 1960s, there came a new emphasis on imagining radically different alternatives to the present, as well as confronting the shortcomings of our imaginations. Unlike previous writers who utilized the utopian or dystopian form as a kind of laboratory for their visions of the good (or bad) life, the utopian SF produced from the 1960s on was a good deal murkier. It is no mistake that Le Guin’s
The Dispossessed
(1974) is subtitled “an ambiguous utopia”: Not only was the strident tone of the classical utopian tradition no longer appropriate in a more relativist age, but the emphasis of the post-1960’s utopia shifted from the “guided tour” to more anthropological themes: everyday relationships between people (Le Guin 2008).

Perhaps it was the “novums” themselves that had shifted. While the concern for evoking human freedom from repressive control remains a theme of utopian SF, works like Marge Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time
(1976) and Joanna Russ’s
The
Female Man
(1975) evoke societies free of heterosexism and patriarchy; imagining such a utopia requires that writers re-think every aspect of human existence—even language itself must be different. However: our capacity to imagine such radical difference is difficult, perhaps impossible within the genre form of the SF novel. Indeed, that failure itself is one of the chief characteristics of what Tom Moylan calls “critical utopias”—utopias (and dystopias) that acknowledge their limits and use those limits to question contemporary society (Moylan 2000). Even the form of the critical utopia is different from that of more conventional utopian fictions, from the stereotypical “there and back again” of the visitor to utopia to a protagonist who shifts uneasily between utopian or dystopian alternatives, as in Le Guin’s “Stone Telling” in her
Always Coming Home
(1985).

This is the work that James Morrow undertakes in his utopian fiction; the imaginative journeys he takes beyond our status quo are rarely comfortable, whether it’s to a world without deceit (
City of Truth
) or a post-theistic world where people are left to formulate their own, Kantian imperatives without the moral intercession of divinity (
Towing Jehovah
). If Morrow’s work sometimes verges on the intellectual, it’s because it sketches real mental labor: Going beyond what we know means, at some level, subverting the entire structure of feeling in which we live. Like other, contemporary, utopians, the lines between utopia, dystopia and satire are never quite clear. Ultimately, this has as much to do with the apparent intransigence our present reality as it does with our precarious imaginations of the future.

Another important characteristic of critical utopian works is their insistence on multiple alternatives. This even has real-life parallels, as in Gerard O’Neill’s 1976 plan for human settlements around Lagrange Point 5. With near-infinite space, and nearly unlimited (solar) energy, there could be an exponential growth of human communities of every type, a Dyson sphere filled with human diversity.

While more critical of (and more interesting than) O’Neill’s plans for what amount to what Kilgore (2003) calls a “suburban diaspora,” writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken MacLeod have rejected what Jameson calls “monological” utopias for a “polyphonic” approach that emphasizes the tensions within and between intentional communities—the process of building a society free of contemporary oppressions (2005: 410). Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (
Red Mars
,
Green Mars
,
Blue Mars
) is about the process of exploring alternatives. As he said in an interview, one of the roles of utopian SF is to critique and subvert current beliefs that the present is inevitable and “that it is possible to improve conditions for humanity over time” (Robinson 2004: 186). McLeod, Robinson, and others explore the oftentimes cacophonous developments that transpire when society undergoes radical change, while Octavia Butler takes on the birth pangs of a new, less destructive, human-alien hybrid in her Xenogenesis (1989).

Seen in this light, much of contemporary SF engages in what might be called “utopian thinking”—that is, an interest in challenging some taken for granted assumption and extrapolating alternative societies defined by difference. The work of Greg Egan, China Miéville, and others are hardly “utopian” in any traditional sense of the term, but still employ their respective novums to undermine our status quo thinking and point in the direction of better lives (if never actually elaborating on full-blown utopias themselves). For example, M. John Harrison’s
Light
(2002) revolves around the questions of postmodernity in a quantum universe, with decidedly utopian/dystopian overtones. Like so much in contemporary SF, it isn’t so much of a prediction of a transformative “singularity” that will upload our consciousnesses to the hive mind than an ironic gloss on information technologies in the present that, far from emancipating us from corporeality and oppressive identities, seem to immobilize us physically and mentally. That is, in Harrison’s novel, as in much of contemporary SF, exploring the limits of freedom and oppression also gestures beyond the limits of our imaginations to other more utopian possibilities.

Broadening our inquiry on utopian sf also means moving beyond the Eurocentric focus of much of academic criticism. Many non-western writers have produced utopian SF that simultaneously works through the contradictions of Western colonization. For example, Pok Geo-il’s
Beneath a Blue Moon
(1992) recounts the formation of a unified Korea on the Moon through the transcendence (and rejection) of terrestrial politics and national boundaries, while Chen Guanzhong’s
The Gilded-Age: China 2013
(2009), simultaneously explores the limits of a bankrupt capitalism and a superannuated authoritarianism. Here, the novum means imagining (or failing to imagine) realities different than a Western-style modernity that has been imposed on other societies through both colonization and through cultural imperialism.

Other, non-western examples may not even register as SF works—one thinks of utopian SF elements in some of the move to “magic realism” in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. Finally, things we don’t even think about as “fiction” may have a certain, utopian content. This was Ernst Bloch’s point in
The Principle of Hope
(originally published in 1959 as
Das Prinzip Hoffnung
) (Zipes 1997). Religion, advertising, fashion—even quotidian, resolutely non-utopian forms may gesture at a better life outside of what we experience now. What’s certain is that the dissonance people feel about the ways things should work and the realities they perceive will continue to generate thoughtful SF well into the future. That is, trends in utopian SF today point to the near-universality of the utopian function, not just as a special way of writing SF, but as a way of imagining the impossible. In the future, it seems likely that SF will continue to challenge us, not through a series of proscriptions and prognostications about the future, but through the demands it places upon us to imagine difference.