Just Kidding. We’re Doomed After All.

In science fiction there has always been a profound tension between utopia and dystopia. 

This tension pre-dates Hugo Gernsback’s invention of the term “science fiction” by a considerable margin. If you were to go plodding back through the wastelands of 19th Century popular literature, you would find a lot of examples of utopian science fiction, and most of it would be just plain awful. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria, William Norris’s News from Nowhere, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race: all of them were very popular and sold very well in their day, and all are almost unreadable now, except as a source of ironic humor. 

Why? What’s the problem with Utopia?

Ignoring the imbecilic grasp of economics and naive view of human relations usually expressed in utopian novels, the fundamental issue seems to be that utopian societies are boring. If everyone is happy, well-adjusted, and comfortably well-off, where’s the conflict? Where’s the tension? Where’s the story? 

We take it as given that war is more interesting than peace; conflict more interesting than congruence; change more interesting than stasis. On a human scale this is why we have “crime” stories and not “law-abiding nice people” stories; “people with terribly messed-up romantic lives” novels instead of “happily married monogamous couples” stories. On a macro societal scale this is why utopia so often veers into dystopia. We don’t trust utopias—or more accurately, the people who are people peddling their utopian vision. We like our utopias with dirty secrets, seamy underbellies, a healthy dose of oppression and a little rust and rot somewhere. We seem to yearn for something to struggle against.

Maybe it is just simple boredom. A lot of people do seem to feel the need to shake things up when they find themselves getting too comfortable, just to stay interested in their own lives.

But why does science fiction so often seem to require not merely the level of violence common to heroic fantasy, but the near-complete destruction of civilization and near-annihilation of mankind? Is it merely a matter of taking something that’s already fascinating—war—and turning the volume up to eleven? 

Or is it a failure of the writer’s imagination? Is it just plain too much work to imagine what things might be like if our civilization continues to progress for another 500 years, and therefore easier to envision a world in which some drastic historical discontinuity has occurred and we’ve been bombed back to stone knives, bear skins, tribal rituals and rap music? 

Could this recurring destruction-and-rebirth theme be evidence of some deeply latent misanthropic streak; some profound dissatisfaction with the world as it is today, which expresses itself as a wish to imagine that we can reset history to some earlier checkpoint and run it again—only this time, we’d do it right, because people like us would be in charge? Is the truth of the matter that hard-core SF fans have a lot more in common with the hard-core eco-Luddites than we'd really care to admit?

Or is it simply a matter of having read The Swiss Family Robinson at an impressionable age?

Your thoughts and comments? 

—Bruce Bethke