Afterword
Frankenstein in Utopia (Part 2)
The idea of Utopia predates Science Fiction as a genre by hundreds of years, if we date from Sir Thomas More’s coinage of the term. Thousands if we go back to Plato’s Republic. It is probably as old as politics itself. And Utopia bears a natural attraction to Science Fiction writers such as myself.
Modern practitioners have proven to be a pretty diverse crowd, including H. G. Wells, Gene Roddenberry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ayn Rand, Kim Stanley Robinson, Iain M. Banks and L. Neil Smith. The treatments of the ideal society run the same gamut as the authors; from post-scarcity anarchism to socialist paradises run by enlightened engineers and technocrats, ecotopias to libertarian meritocracies.
Every human being on the planet has some vision of what is wrong with the world, and what might be done to fix it. Every author brings that sense of right and wrong to whatever they write. For those of us who manufacture entire universes it is tempting to show that ideal world; a place where everything works as it should and all the details are planned out and work as intended.
Every single one of us has our own personal Utopia.
Which is why I hate them.
• • •
Charles Stross, the Scottish Science Fiction writer, once wrote the following: “I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behavior which are unfortunately wrong).”
While I consider myself a Libertarian, I have to admit that I agree with him.
But I also believe that the same analogy holds for any single political, economic, or social structure you care to name or invent.
Unlike Plato or More, Wells or Rand, I personally cannot conceive of any social order that is believably Utopian. The messy reality of human beings will always intervene; their different desires, motives, beliefs, psychologies will always be at odds. Even if you manufacture a world that by every objective measure maximizes the Good, you are left with very deep arguments about what the Good actually is.
Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Utopia is about hubris.
So, if you present me with a Utopia, I start looking for Frankensteins.
• • •
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, and its cousin, H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, are both obvious influences on my own “Moreau” novels. Less obvious an influence is one of the most prominent works by Isaac Asimov, a work that had a very specific impact on the narrative braiding through all these books and their successors—an impact as great, perhaps greater, than that of Frankenstein.
The work of his I’m referring to was still known at the time as the Foundation Trilogy. Within it, and central to it, is the invention of what might be the epitome of that rational Enlightenment universe that Frankenstein both embodied and reacted against, the embodiment of a universe that can be known and understood by the rational human mind: the science of psychohistory.
As created by Asimov’s fictional mathematician, Hari Seldon, psychohistory was a method by which the scientist was able to accurately model and predict the rise and fall of entire cultures. More importantly, it allowed the modeler to determine what actions and resources were required to achieve a desired outcome.
In the Foundation stories, the main driver of the plot is the attempt by Seldon’s Foundation to reduce the duration of a coming dark age by an order of magnitude.
The Foundation books might not strictly be utopian, but that didn’t stop me from looking for a potential Frankenstein in the idea.
Psychohistory is, to put it mildly, the Holy Grail of all central planners and utopians. So I couldn’t help imagining what would happen if it should be wielded by hands—or pseudopods—that didn’t share the ethics, motives, or morality of Hari Seldon’s Foundation.
So I weaponized it.
• • •
Again, it can be seen as allegory, in this case for the thinking behind central planning in general, as well as attempts to manipulate society, politics, and economies more covertly.
If we had such a “perfect” tool as psychohistory at our disposal, it is inevitable that we would assume we knew enough to wield it. And, as with my alien race, when our ignorance or ineptitude finally caught up with us, our reliance on such a “perfect” tool would probably fail with catastrophic results. In my aliens’ case, that failure would eventually wipe out their entire species at the hands of the humans they had tried to control.
We can already see this beginning in Specters of the Dawn. In the two trilogies that followed, these themes only become stronger.
• • •
Specters of the Dawn is the appropriate note to close on. It is also where the allegory about the racial tensions in the U.S. becomes most explicit in the moreau books.
When Specters was written, the Los Angeles riots of 1992 were still fresh in my mind. Now, over twenty years later, another incident of police violence has sparked racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and I am writing these words exactly one week after a white supremacist killed nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
I suspect a lot of people in the U.S. the past year or so have felt like Angel, shell-shocked at how these tensions, this history, can suddenly and violently erupt to the surface. Re-reading Specters in 2015, two decades after it was written, has certainly left me a little uneasy about the parallels between what happens around Angel and what is happening in my country today. We never quite know what event will trigger something catastrophic, and in retrospect we always seem to have been closer to the edge than we thought we had been.
In Part One I pointed out that history has no end point. It just keeps going and going.
On the other hand, it also never goes away completely.
The San Francisco where Angel lived at the start of Specters of the Dawn would have seemed, at least superficially, to have overcome the prejudice against non-humans. There were no blockaded ghettos, the population was at least somewhat integrated, and non-humans appeared in at least a few professions. In all the externalities, Angel’s city would have seemed positively utopian compared to the Cleveland and New York City of the prior books.
But history doesn’t go away, and evils are remembered. And it doesn’t help that the effects of evil can persist long past any evil intent. Just because one group ends its organized persecution of another, the once persecuted group will not suddenly find itself on the same social level as its persecutors. And once all the overt methods of discrimination are removed, all the legal barriers between one segment of society and another are abolished, then the disparities that persist can become even more painful and intractable, because there’s no one thing that anyone can point to and say, “fix this,” and all will be better.
As much as the San Francisco in Specters started as the best case scenario in my world, it still was only a generation removed from the evils that created the world the moreaus live in.
• • •
This probably sounds pessimistic.
For someone that looks forward and sees, somewhere, a perfect society, a future free of the problems we see in our own imperfect present, the anti-utopian idea that society cannot be perfected might seem almost nihilistic. I don’t think it is. I think it’s simply a reflection of society being an emergent property of all the individuals who comprise it. As such, it is messy, and complicated, and not amenable to top-down direction. All persistent change comes up from the individuals in a society, from individual beliefs about right and wrong.
You can’t stop history.
You can’t ignore it.
But once enough people decide to, they can change it.