Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Utopians are boring

Apparently sci-fi readers agree
Robert — (archived)

...because now that you ask, I have a hard time thinking of a major utopian science fiction story. Maybe that's because a utopia, in its broadest definition, is a happy place with little conflict, and thus little grist for the dramatic mill. Basically, the story begins "And they lived happily ever after", and that's a tough act to follow.

I can think of a lot of science fiction stories about the establishment of a utopia. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Asimov's core Foundation series (though the latter additions introduce a snake into paradise) come immediately to mind. Some of the current "singularity" fiction posits a sort of utopia in imagining positive virtual worlds (the "Matrix" without the sinister agenda) in which we're virtual gods, but what I've read follows the pattern of telling the story of how we got there (again, not much dramatic tension in a story that begins "I am a god and can have everything I want by thinking it").

I'm not sure that I see Asimov's Robot stories as completely utopian. Some of them are warm and have a happy ending (tending to be short stories rather than novels), but others (tending to be novels), such as those involving the mysterious disappearance of Solaria(?), or murder in a robot-run paradise, strongly suggest that utopia isn't all it's cracked up to be. Many, too, feature the contrast between paradise maintained by robots, and the anti-robot human-chauvinist culture of Old Earth--two visions of utopia in conflict.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (77 posts)