At its core, science fiction is about imagining how the world might be otherwise, and this impulse toward change connects sf to utopian writing. Their similarity becomes clear when we consider how science and technology change daily life. Thomas More’s Utopia invented its fictional island’s culture as a foil to specific problems in contemporary England, including enclosures that dispossessed peasants of their land to make way for grazing sheep, a practice motivated by technological shifts in English manufacture that changed their main export from raw wool to woolen cloth. Thus, a shift in one area of life—the technological capacity to produce good cloth—had consequences that extend far beyond the cloth’s quality or the efficiency of its manufacture. Utopian writing works through such connections and consequences: it imagines an elsewhere that might result from different historical contingencies and uses the contrast between its depictions and ordinary life to prompt readers to understand the material world as malleable.
Utopian works articulate a need for change beyond differences caused by scientific development, of course, and key works in the canon are renowned for their political visions more than for their scientific extrapolations. Science fiction, similarly, encompasses works that imagine difference capaciously, not only new scientific paradigms or inventions, but also new ways of organizing daily life, of understanding social categories such as gender or race, and of organizing labor and the distribution of wealth. Thinking of this utopian mode, Suvin argues that sf texts, in contrast to realism, are “not only a reflecting of but also on reality.”1
Utopian writing uses the contrast between its depictions and ordinary life to prompt readers to understand the material world as malleable.
More’s Utopia played on the double meaning of the Latinate word when pronounced in English: both u-topia, no place, but also eu-topia, good place. Critics debate whether specific titles, including More’s original, truly intend to represent ideal alternatives or if they function as satires of both the ordinary world and the authoritarian project of legislating a perfect society. There is much to admire about More’s Utopia: it is rationally organized, with no private property, little crime, great productivity, no capital punishment, and no irrational pursuit of wealth (gold is regarded with derision). Yet there are things about Utopia we may wish to question as well, such as its use of slave labor or its marriage customs, which severely punish premarital sex and allow brides and grooms to review their proposed partner fully naked before committing to the contract. The first part of More’s work is written as a dialogue between a fictionalized More and Raphael Hythloday, a world traveler who regales the company with tales of diverse societies he has seen on his travels. Hythloday points out that all customs seem bizarre, even insane, to someone looking at them through the social norms of a different culture, a version of “seeing through alien eyes” that will become one of the central tools in sf’s repertoire.
More’s work is joined by numerous other voyages to strange new worlds, including some that imagine travel to the moon or beyond such as Kepler’s Somnium, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638), and Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde trilogy that imagined life on the moon (1657), the sun (1662) and the stars (this last volume has been lost).2 Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) is noteworthy for its demonstration of contemporary women’s interest in science. Describing another world (the sky has different stars) that can be accessed via the North Pole, this adventure narrative tells of a young woman who becomes a leader after traveling to this world and eventually organizes an expedition back to conquer her original world. Like many seventeenth-century works, The Blazing World engaged with the new philosophical ideas and new scales of perception then emerging in European culture, alongside innovative methods of research that gave rise to the Scientific Revolution.3 It was originally printed with Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, a critique of the mechanist view of nature central to the work of her contemporaries Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, among others.4
As this tradition of narrating tales to different worlds took hold, the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific institution, was granted a charter in 1660. We thus see the modern, scientific worldview emerging alongside a tradition of writing that would become sf. Francis Bacon’s utopian work, New Atlantis (1627), which portrays an idealized vision of human futures based on scientific discovery and technocratic governance, envisioned a research collective, Solomon’s House, that we might take as a model for the Royal Society itself. In these early utopian worlds, innovations in science and technology go hand-in-hand with better governance and economic prosperity. Following the Industrial Revolution, when the pace of technological change reached a new peak, we see another flourishing of utopian works. This later tradition was concerned with ameliorating the social ills that came with technological progress that was wedded to capitalism and thus unchecked by concern for the lives of workers crowded into urban slums, injured by a lack of safety standards, and suffering the health consequences of polluting industries. Socialist utopias, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), imagined futures premised on economic revolutions, rooted in collective ownership and a balance between material gains and human happiness.
These socialist utopias introduced a more important innovation to the form. Their travelers explored ideal societies distanced from the reader’s home not by geography but by time. In each, the protagonist falls asleep to awaken in a world transformed. This form prompts its readers to envision even more insistently the path from their world to the new one, a transformation within reach were they to adopt the values admired by the fiction. The nineteenth century also continued the tradition of geographically displaced utopias, building on an eighteenth-century tradition of satire (Samuel Butler’s Erewhon [1872]), taking up recent scientific ideas (Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race [1871]), or questioning conventional gender roles (Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora [1890]).
Into the twentieth century, writers combined social satire with visions of how the world could be transformed, often engaging with the philosophical implications of science. Such texts were later categorized as part of the distinct genre named by Gernsback in the 1920s. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) combines evolutionary projection with a harsh critique of class division, newly imagining technology (rather than sleep) as a way for his protagonist to experience the future not merely one hundred years hence, but hundreds of thousands of years later. Perhaps the best-known feminist utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) is both a vision of a world where women are not constrained by patriarchy and an argument against contemporary medical science premised on the inherent weakness and fragility of women.5 The explosion of feminist science fiction in the 1970s, in dialogue with the second-wave feminist movement, would continue to imagine women-only societies or gender-segregated societies, sometimes as utopian spaces of women’s freedom, other times as dystopian intensifications of existing, irrational gender segregation that feminists critiqued.
The term dystopia to describe worlds worse than the existing one began to be used in the mid-twentieth century for narratives that enacted social critique by intensifying to their logical ends the most damaging tendencies of the contemporary world. In H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1910), his sleeper awakens not to the utopias of previous texts, but to a future that has squandered the promise of the socialist dream and established an oppressive plutocracy instead.6 Some of the best-known and still influential works of sf come from this tradition, including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), a satire of totalitarianism, is less famous but equally powerful and was a direct influence on Orwell. These foundational dystopian works draw attention to the role that technology plays in totalitarian societies, from the omnipresent surveillance in Zamyatin’s and Orwell’s works, to the manipulation of embryos to produce distinct castes of workers in Huxley’s.
The dystopian tradition outpaces the utopian one into the twenty-first century, a fact sometimes lamented. The disproportion is intensified because sf texts are much more widely embraced now than they were in the earlier periods, especially in film and videogame adaptations that gain a large following. With the recent resurgence of extreme right politics, midcentury works critiquing totalitarianism such as Nineteen Eighty-Four are newly popular, while film series such as The Hunger Games (2012–2015), based on young adult (YA) novels, are massive, international hits. One of the most interesting things about dystopian fiction today is its dominant position in the YA fiction market. Many of the most popular among such texts are speculative, and they generally depict dystopian worlds: to name only a few, Neal Shusterman’s Unwind dystology (2007–2015), his preferred term for this series; Mira Grant’s Newsflash series (2010–2016); Paolo Bacigalupi’s Shipbreaker series (2010–2017) and The Doubt Factory (2014); Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (2008) and Homeland (2013); Marie Lu’s Legend trilogy (2011–2013); not to mention those more widely known due to film adaptations, such as Divergent (2014–2016), The Maze Runner (2014–2018), and The Darkest Minds (2018).7
Such YA works respond to the increasing sense of precariousness in a twenty-first century of intensified economic disparity, polarizing and often racist rhetoric, looming climate change, and uncertain prospects for employment. The embrace of dystopian fiction gives voice to a generation who will enter adulthood during a time of widespread pessimism about the future, although these texts do not necessarily capitulate to this view. Many of them express concerns about the ethics of science given a history in which science has at times been complicit with oppressive political forces: eugenics that authorized sterilization without consent; racist science that attempted to rationalize slavery and experimented on captive African American populations; medical science’s compromised intersection with insurance and pharmaceutical industries; and a history of military and surveillance technologies. Such texts depict a future in which the old prey upon the young, seeking to extract or otherwise exploit young people’s vitality, or they are set in a future police state of heightened ethnic and economic segregation, enabled by more invasive surveillance tools.
The waning of the utopian imagination through the mid- to late twentieth century is linked to a similar sense that social conditions have steadily become worse rather than better (the trajectory of most early sf). The disappointment as communist revolutions turned into totalitarian states, the reassessment of imperial achievements in light of colonial independence movements and other anti-racist activism, and the horror that the promises of scientific advance resulted in the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation and massive environmental damage led many to conclude that utopianism was hopelessly naïve at best, complicit at worst.8 The turn toward pessimistic visions is perhaps best embodied by nuclear war apocalypse stories that quickly followed in the wake of the atomic bomb. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), depicting the last days of the final humans in Australia, is the best known among them due to the popular film adaptation in 1959. It was joined by several other texts that unflinchingly concluded that humanity risked extinction, including Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 (1959), about the inevitable failure of an underground facility intended to help the elite wait out radiation; Helen Clarkson’s unjustly neglected The Last Day (1959), which gave disturbingly accurate descriptions of the stages of death by radiation; and Judith Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth (1950), a novel that views the war from a domestic rather than a military point of view.9
The relative absence of straightforwardly utopian works from midcentury on can be explained by this widely shared view that the twentieth century was an ongoing disaster. Many writers and thinkers turned against the ideal of utopia altogether, offering visions dubbed “anti-utopia”—that is, works that are intended to satirize either a specific vision of utopia or the entire project of utopianism altogether. Tom Moylan, a key theorist of the intersection of utopianism with sf, argues that in the wake of such critiques a new kind of “critical utopia” emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Critical utopias respond to this pessimism by creating more dialectical visions, worlds that demonstrate their “awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition” but at the same time remain committed to the ideal of a better world, to utopia as a desire or dream.10 Moylan names as “critical utopias” works such as Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), a countercultural vision of sustainable lifeways; Joanna Russ’s masterful The Female Man (1975), a complex exploration of the consequences of gender ideology on female subjectivity, which follows four iterations of the “same” woman as she develops on parallel worlds with distinct gender rules; Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia,” which contrasts two worlds, one mainly capitalist, the other anarchist, to consider what each offers the individual in terms of freedom and stability; and Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton (1976), responding to Le Guin with the subtitle “An Ambiguous Heterotopia,” which focuses on an individual who is made unhappy by the putatively utopian freedom to occupy fluid gender identities given his subjective investment in essentialized gender identity.
As this brief survey indicates, such works foreground the difficulties of achieving utopia and put pressure on the singularity of the ideal that characterized earlier iterations of the form. Moylan uses the term “critical” in the way that cultural theorists use it when referring to critical theory, that is, as engaged in critique, not simply the negation like the anti-utopia. He also differentiates between a notion of “utopia as blueprint,”11 the fully worked-out plan so tediously on display in many nineteenth-century utopias, and what Jameson would come to call utopia as desire or impulse in his foundational essays, collected in Archaeologies of the Future (2007).12 These works acknowledge that utopia is never finished, that any configuration of the world will always continue to include difference rather than conform to some idealized rule, and thus any true utopia will be dynamic, open to continual change. This mode of thinking about utopianism is also connected to Ernest Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (3 vols, 1954–1959), which was a formative influence on Suvin’s definition of sf. Much of the scholarship on sf explores this connection to utopianism, and new works such as Eric Smith’s Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction (2012) and Philip Wegner’s Shockwaves of Possibility (2014) continue to argue that this relationship is constitutive, albeit using different criteria than did Suvin.13
Responding to Moylan’s idea of the critical utopian, Lyman Tower Sargent argued for the category of the “critical dystopia.” He observes that dystopian texts do not simply voice a lack of hope for the future, but instead work to warn us against these frightening futures. Dystopia, as a warning that things can get worse, contains the seeds of believing that with better choices we might avoid these nightmares.14 Both utopia and this kind of critical dystopia—as differentiated from anti-utopianism, which is anti-change—emerge from the belief that affective response to images of the future helps to bring specific futures into being. Many recent dystopias, especially those directed to a YA audience, demonstrate this quality, enabling us to understand the prevalence of this mode less as a sign of despair about the future and more as a spur for young people to shape their futures toward something other than an intensification of present trajectories.
Dystopia, as a warning that things can get worse, contains the seeds of believing that with better choices we might avoid these nightmares.
The frameworks of critical utopia or dystopia foreground works that ask questions instead of providing answers, often exploring multiple configurations of social worlds. They often avoid politics of perfection or purity, recognizing the complexity and difficulty of fostering heterogeneous communities. In foregrounding questions of complicity and compromise, negotiation and struggle, such works engage their readers in projects of critical thinking and choice rather than try to win these readers as recruits to any particular vision of the future. Dialectical works within the utopian tradition are often connected to social movements that have found sf a potent tool for change, such as feminism, queer activism, and anti-racist struggles. Joanna Russ’s To Write Like a Woman (1995) offers a trenchant critique of the sexism of much of the sf tradition alongside the reasons why she and many of her contemporaries embrace sf to articulate visions of women’s freedom from patriarchy.15 A tradition of African American sf existed long before it was categorized as Afrofuturism, and one of the most celebrated African American sf authors, Octavia Butler, is justly famous for works that interrogate the difficulty of achieving an inclusive and just community.16 In the work by musicians and performance artists such as Sun Ra, George Clinton, DJ Spooky, and Afrika Bambaattaa that was crucial to developing Afrofuturist sensibility, we often see utopian futures rooted in African cultural forms and values, brilliantly captured in John Akomfrah’s short film, The Last Angel of History (1996), a mix of documentary interview and sf frame that explores a buried history of African technology. The impact of this film is among the reasons why a tradition of Black sf aesthetics continues in work by artists such as Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu, and others.
Beyond genre writing, those seeking to shape collective visions of the future often turn to sf imagery, another way to participate in utopianism. The rhetorical conflation of technological innovation with progress writ large emerged alongside genre sf. From this point of view, we can see things like the Crystal Palace, home to the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, and the tradition of World’s Fairs as part of a larger sf cultural discourse. Combining displays of the wonders newly accomplished by science with public entertainment, such fairs emblematized the sense of wonder about technology also conveyed by especially pulp sf. The 1939 New York World’s Fair, The World of Tomorrow, was premised on this intimate relationship between sf speculation and a wondrous future and was chosen as the location for the first ever World Science Fiction Convention by a fledgling—and largely still American—sf fandom.17 The Space Race of the 1960s was similarly strongly influenced by optimistic sf visions of spaceflight and future human residence in the stars. These, too, are utopian dimensions of sf, although decidedly less interested in the reflexive interrogation of “the good” that was taking hold in print sf.
Today, the recent enthusiasm for manned missions to Mars and its eventual colonization exemplify how this spirit of technocratic sf utopianism remains alive and well—yet also deeply in dialogue with its dystopian shadow. Elon Musk’s ambitious SpaceX program, including the promise of commercial spaceflights, and the pronouncement by respected scientist Stephen Hawking that the human race “has no future” unless it goes to space, promiscuously mix science fact with science fiction, utopian promise with the hint of dystopian threat.18 In his science journalism book, The Future of Humanity (2018), Michio Kaku rhapsodizes about how our technological prowess will enable humans, unlike other species, to escape the inevitability of extinction by transcending the limits of our biology, our ecosystems, and our planet.19 Kaku writes with the urgent passion of pulp sf but presents his visions as unquestionably plausible, indeed, as necessary futures. His vision of transcendence will strike many as dystopian rather than promising, reminding us of the ambiguities and complexities of utopian thinking, that every model of a perfect future (for some) will be a nightmare of erasure for others. Damien Chazelle’s film First Man (2018), dramatizing the history that led to Neil Armstrong’s first moon walk, makes these stakes starkly clear when it features blues singer Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word performance “Whitey on the Moon”—an acerbic critique of the choice to fund spaceflight while African American communities remain impoverished—in its soundtrack.20 Both utopian and dystopian visions are an important part of the rhetorical toolkit that informs the range of ways that sf is taken up across utopian cultures.