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UTOPIAN_BLOCK
April 3, 2007
Rev: November 23, 2007
There's a cliche about "utopias": when
you get a perfect society, it turns out
to be so dull you want to get rid of it.
It's perfection is it's fatal flaw. Examples of this
trope are legion...
As I remember it, Robert Graves, "Let
even as a kid I had the Northwinds Rise" (1949):
some skepticism
about this one. "The bread is very
nice, and the butter
Probably I had some is very nice too --
logical objections: but neither one of 'em
it isn't, literally, has got any salt in
"perfect" if it's so 'em."
boring you can't
stand it. And there's a Marvel
"graphic novel" I've got
And in general, we're kicking around about
so far away from Dr. Doom conquering the
actual "perfection" world and becoming a
speculating about it's more-or-less benign
nature at all would dictator, and then getting
seem to be a tricky really bored with it.
business.
LETTERS_FROM_EARTH
I find the widespread
convinction that
"utopia is impossible" UTOPIA
suspicious.
Since perfection
sctually, it could be is impossible,
that the prevalence of we don't need to try.
this idea is a commentary
on the present day world.
It's the sort of idea
people have, gazing at
suburbia, imagining
"utopia" as the suburban
dream implemented NOWHERE_MAN
globally...
And that connects us up with
UNINTENDED
As everything does for me these days.
There are few science
fiction stories about
*actual* perfect
societies... the
fatally-flawed utopia is Fiction after all,
a more common pattern. requires some sort
of conflict, which
Huxley's "Brave makes it a difficult
New World" (1932) form to use to write
about the absence of
conflict.
There's a Larry Niven short
story: "Safe at *Any* Speed",
There is another set in a high-tech heaven,
pattern: the "best of where all the fixes are in.
all possible" worlds, a
world far better than It's essentially a one-joke
our own in almost every story -- something very bad
respect, and yet not happens, but even that isn't
without problems and much of a problem, because
conflict. nothing is really a problem
any more.
A place where the fight
continues, but a place There's no hidden
where you (or at least, existential crisis
the author) would be or spiritual flaw
happy to fight. featured on stage.
PROVIDENCE Though if you want to
be fussy about it, the
Iain M. Banks main character himself
"The Culture", seems like quite a bore,
and the world he reflects
Ed Bryant's doesn't sound like such
Cinnabar an exciting place to be.
Another point of
Delany's Triton, perhaps: reference, Varley's
he called it an suburbanized Mercury
"ambiguous heterotopia", and so on.
and that describes his
"Stars in my Pocket" Why does that
quite well also. seem so terrible,
compared to
DELANY Heinlein's "Menace
From Earth"
SOCIAL_REGISTER scenario?
These are idealizations Something about
of The Urban: a much the 1970s...
less static perfection
that does not try to
sweep every speck of
dirt off stage.
Gibson's "The Sprawl"
might be another example. HOLLOW_AMBER
Perhaps notably, Gardner Dozois
tried on a quip like this:
"the cyberpunks really do think that
technology is making the world worse,
they just *like* it that way."
GENESIS_OF_THE_CYBER-PUNKS
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