When Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1715, he put a name to visionary creations of the perfect society. But “utopia” is the Greek for “nowhere”, suggesting that he thought his fictional creation could never exist. Science fiction creates one of the best forum for utopias, as it enables the author to envisage entirely new lives and civilisations. And yet we seem unable to visualise our own perfect worlds, and few authors deal with them, preferring instead the technological or political possibilities of dystopias.
Dysfunctional, destructive and doomed worlds seem to be the order of the day, often set in either future or parallel times. In these dark places, the planet is long destroyed physically (the darkness and bad weather of Blade Runner, the Apocalypses of the Terminator films and THX 1138) or through social controls gone wrong (1984, Brave New World, Twelve Monkeys). More recently, these catastrophic predictions have been replaced by milder, but no less pessimistic visions. Futurama, Earth, Final Conflict and Starship Troopers all offer visions which have underlying tensions and problems in each society – lack of morality, threats of fascism and the environmental crisis all providing points of concern.
Main Texts:
Blade Runner (video in A/S office, based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick (P21 Sci Dic)
1984 (book and/or movie, PF90300 Nin, PF90301 Cal, V1461)
Related Texts:
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (A/S office, PF89400 Bra)
Blade Runner, Bukatman, S (BFI Modern Classics:1997)
A Canticle For Leibowitz, Walter M.Miller Jnr.
The Handmaids Tale, Margaret Atwood. (A/S office, PR.6051.T77H3)
The Faber Book of
Utopias; Edited John Carey (HC 4100 Fab)
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells (A/S office, V3491)
The Dispossessed Ursula LeGuin, 1974 (PH 92906)
Erewhon Revisited, Samuel Butler, 1901 (PF 83500 Ere, PG3022 Edw)
Solyent Green (A/S office)
Logan’s Run (A/S
office; PZ1 Sci(Nol))
Zardoz (A/S office)
THX-1138
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (A/S office, PH92001, PZ Sci Bra, V1287)
Time’s Arrow; Star
Trek TNG
Mad Max Trilogy (A/S office)
Rollerball, Westworld, The Running Man, Total Recall (A/S office)
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (PF91710, Audio R4336, N1661)
http://www.users.interport.net/~regulus/pkd
http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0896August/Automedia/pkdick.html
http://www.devo.com/bladerunner/blade_runner.html
http://jrowse.mtx.net/pkd/pkd.html
· 1984 has been described as a dystopian novel. To what extent do you see it as satire, prophecy or blueprint? What does it have to say to the contemporary reader about the conflict between the individual and the state?
· Many future dystopias of the Cold war era were set in a world after a nuclear holocaust, or some other disaster which acted as a metaphor for this. Post Cold War, what are our fears, and how are they reflected in fiction?
· Utopias and dystopias are very often presented in plausible settings, involving not-too-distant futures rather than an exaggerated fantasy world. Often these dates have passed (e.g. 1984 and 2001AD). Why is this? Does our imagination stretch further, or are we just pessimists? If so, do you think our own pessimism is self-perpetuating – will our future be dim because we wish it so?
· Consider examples of authoritarian and anarchic future societies; are current utopian writers reacting against global capitalism?
Essay Questions:
Quotes:
Utopia noun 1 An imagined place or state of perfection esp with regard to laws, government and social conditions. 2. an impractical scheme for social or political improvement.
(The New Penguin English Dictionary, ed. Allen, R: Penguin, 2000)
“In other 'republics' practically everyone knows that, if he doesn't look out for himself, he'll starve to death, however prosperous his country may be. He's therefore compelled to give his own interests priority over those of the public; that is, of other people. But in Utopia, where everything's under public ownership, no one has any fear of going short, as long as the public storehouses are full. Everyone gets a fair share, so there are never any poor men or beggars. Nobody owns anything, but everyone is rich - for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?”
(Thomas More, Utopia, 1715:128)
For some time, however, Utopia writers have been faced by the increasingly awkward problem, where on earth to put their undiscovered countries? Lord Lytton solved it in The Coming Race (1871) by not putting his Utopia on earth at all, but under it. While investigating a charred and jagged chasm in a new shaft of a mine, an engineer is surprised to see a row of street-lamps leading away into the distance…
Another solution is to distance your Utopia, not in space, but in time. Since Plato, nobody has been so retrogressive as to place it in the past, but it is often placed in the future. One gets there either by dreaming (News From Nowhere), or by over-sleeping (Looking Backward, and H. G. Well’s When the Sleeper Wakes, 1899), or by operating a special apparatus (H. G. Well’s The Time Machine, 1895), or by an involuntary exchange of bodies with some unscrupulous member of posterity (John Whydham’s Pillar To Post, 1956): or else one is not a visitor at all but a permanent resident, like the bearded heroine of Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins (1953)
In the last resort, Utopias and Dystopias can always be located on another planet.
(Paul Turner, Introduction to Thomas More’s Utopia, Penguin: 1965)
“The book is a warning of the possibilities of the police state brought to perfection, where power is the only thing that counts, where the past is constantly being modified to fit the present, where the official language, ‘Newspeak’, progressively narrows the range of ideas and independent thought, and where ‘Doublethink’ becomes a necessary habit of mind. It is a society dominated by slogans - ‘War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength’ - and controlled by compulsory worship of the head of the party, Big Brother. The novel had an extraordinary impact, and many of its phrases and coinages (including its title) passed into the common language, although the precise implication of Orwell’s warning (and it was a warning rather than a prophecy) have been subjected to many political interpretations”
From The Oxford
Companion to English Literature on 1984
“If Scott could have patented the Blade Runner look, the acid-rain-washed garbage-filled alleys, its melange of Japanese and Mayan monumental architecture, its wonderful gadgets casually dropped into the background texture, he could have bought Shepperton studios from the proceeds of that film alone. Future film historians will build careers tracking its influence, through Batman to Seven, via The X‑Files and the forthcoming American Gothic. At one point in the mid 1980s there was hardly a single video on MTV that was not ripping off the Blade Runner, blue-light chiaroscuro.”
John Harlow, Sunday Times 1996
“A film like Bladerunner…describes how genetically engineered “replicants”, the workers, the entertainers, and soldiers of the future, have begun to rebel against their servile position, deny their less-than-human status, and steal back to earth to mingle with their human models. There they are hunted down and exterminated by futuristic bounty hunters or “blade runners” like Rick Deckard. Yet the bounty hunter faces a difficult task. For he must put aside any human compunction, and on order automatically and unfeelingly kill these beings, practically indistinguishable from the human, whose chief crime is to have asserted their humanity; in effect he must act not humanely but almost robotically - that is mechanically and unfeelingly. While Deckard, a “cold fish” seems well suited to the task, that nature makes him a model of modern schizophrenic behavior, both the force of control and a version of the very thing he is supposed to control.”
J.P. Telotte, Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film, 1995.