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re: Utopian SF
Robert — (archived)

Your observation about WWII apparently killing utopian fiction is very interesting. I wonder if it was the combination of the war plus reinforcement during the Cold War that suppressed interest in utopias? What I've read suggests that there was a brief period of euphoria immediately after the war ended, utopian hopes for the UN and a "new world order", surely fertile ground for utopian fiction...then the Iron Curtain rang down, and the long twilight struggle began. No room for utopia after that, except as escapism. (And I would think that "utopia" differs from escapism in that we take utopias more seriously for their promise of eventual realization, but in the Cold War no utopia seemed remotely plausible.)

"Burroughs' interchangeable idyll"...one man's leather-and-sword potboiler is another's idea of utopia may be right, precisely because of the temptation to identify with the hero, his glory, and certainly his well-earned reward. [natural seque] I remember Glory Road well, it caused an adolescent hormonal flush to read about Gordon's "glory reward". There was a story with a utopian appeal to a teenager.

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