(no subject)

[lollardfish]

Ok sci-fi fans, what are your favorite science-fiction utopias? I'm thinking about teaching a class on utopias next year, and want to use some reasonably contemporary fiction (as well as Plato, More, Bellamy, Lost Horizon, SimCity, and other stuff).

Comments

[morganlf.livejournal.com]

I've taught LeGuin's The Dispossessed before and it went over well.

[neogrammarian.livejournal.com]

I am told that Nalo Hopkinson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalo_Hopkinson) has some cool sci-fi utopias out there, and she's a postcolonial writer, so there's some cool cross-cultural angles there as well.

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Cool. Will you be teaching the dystopia, too?

I do a dystopia assignment with my AP Language class. Here's the assignment sheet: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg384q3w_56f7fr2c&pli=1

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. It's a subject of considerable debate between the personalities in my head.

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'd think it'd be hard to do the one without at least introducing the other. Few utopic visions have succeeded in practice without devolving into dystopias on one level or another. I personally quite like how Wicked overturns the idyllic childhood image of Oz.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a theme we'll certainly address. This course fits into a sophomore seminar which involves reading a book on race and immigration in America. I sort of think that we'll get to dystopia both by looking at exclusions in utopias (I want them to read John Winthop's "city on a hill" speech) and historical realities surrounding the authors of utopias. I'm not sure. It's a great assignment (and the Oz/Wicked thing is brilliant).

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Wicked has a lot more going on than the musical would lead most people to believe. It's an excellent satire of utopia, and encompasses tons of socio-political commentary on everything from racism to genetic engineering to class structures to religious establishment and charismatic evangelism. Whew. :) The kids who choose that text are usually stunned to realize how thorough and wide-ranging it is.

Anyway... Oz is sometimes viewed as Baum's utopian vision for America. Could be worth considering in and of itself.

[neogrammarian.livejournal.com]

This just reinforces my need to read this- did you have them read the novel or the libretto for the musical?

(I may be updating my Children's Media Culture comp class this summer, and the wheels in my head are now turning...)

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Oh, the novel! Many of them have seen the musical, which played here in Toronto a couple of times. Even so, b/c of the nature of the course and the fact that I'm trying to deepen and broaden their repertoires in preparation for AP Literature the following year, I need them to read literary works.

Every once in a while, people on my AP listserv dismiss Wicked as "non-AP-worthy"... and I beg to differ, usually posting a long defense of it as a clever and highly topical satire. It's worth a look. It's too bad most of the author's follow-ups just weren't as solid.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to read Wicked, I can see that.

[neogrammarian.livejournal.com]

non-AP-worthy. Piffle. You know as well as I do that a clever essay about an out-of-the-ordinary novel stands out from the crowd and can attract positive notice to a student's college app.

"many of them have seen the musical"....sometimes I forget how culturally challenged much of the US is, simply on account of its isolation, and distance from major cities. Here I am, an English professor; yet I've never gotten to see the show, b/c it's never toured anywhere vaguely near anywhere I've lived. (Tho it did finally tour through a place I -used- to live, but I didn't have the time for the 16-hr roundtrip drive to go see it.)

Ah well. Perhaps someday.

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

You know as well as I do that a clever essay about an out-of-the-ordinary novel stands out from the crowd and can attract positive notice to a student's college app.

You have no idea how many stupid and insecure and parochial and unimaginative and ignorant and bull-headed and canon-worshipping so-called "AP English teachers" there are on my list. For every three or four who do know this about student essays, there is one who thinks if it's not written on The Scarlet Letter, it won't get a top score.

And then there are those who believe that The Kite Runner is the literary achievement of the generation...

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Riffing on a related topic: my partner's daughter had to audition for entry to Houston's arts magnet school. As she was applying to the musical-theater program, her audition requirement was to perform a piece "from any published musical." Her choice? The opening number from the musical episode of BTVS, which had aired the previous season.

The judges loved it! One of them (himself a Buffy fan, as it turned out) nearly fell off his chair laughing when she announced what she'd be singing. And it most certainly was NOT something they'd already heard 6 or 8 times that day. We are convinced that her having the creativity to do that was part of the reason she got in.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Nice! This pleases me.

Utopia?

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Actually, re-reading Oz again when my children were small; it made my flesh creep. No death, therefore no children, nothing to strive for, nothing to fear . . . I know it sounds like what people think they want . . .

I am now reminded of a story in which everything in the world dissolved except the people; there was no sickness, no death, no growth, no hunger, just infinite existence on a featureless globe. This had happened because the Devil had convinced every single soul on earth that they wanted to live forever, so their wish was granted. The hero managed to finagle a way out of the wish and life returned to normal--wish I knew the name and author.

Race & Immigration

[neogrammarian.livejournal.com]

oh, yeah, then you def want to look at Hopkinson. As I understand it, her utopias are set w/in dystopias- and given her position as a product of colonialism, these dys/utopias are highly politicized.

Re: Race & Immigration

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I will, thanks.

Re: Race & Immigration

[neogrammarian.livejournal.com]

You could also, of course, show them Fritz Lang's Metropolis and discuss early 20th immigration patterns to the US from Europe & the rise of fascism/total war/communism.

(sorry- will stop commenting in a minute- didn't realize I had as many ideas on this topic as I clearly have!)

Re: Race & Immigration

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I definitely want to bring film into the class. I may show some of Lost Horizon, cause it's pretty and stuff. Metropolis is a great idea.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Beta Colony. Jackson's Whole for the dystopia.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

LeGuin?

B

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, probably. I just don't really enjoy her writing that much personally!

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Oh, you could also send them to one or more of the websites that asks them to learn what their actual political stances are, beyond the limited left/right spectrum. I've done this before in teaching utopia/dystopia (specifically Handmaid's Tale. I sent them there, got them to define what would constitutes "utopia" for them based on what they discover about their political tendencies and how they compare to historical ideologies (they got into groups with like-minded individuals and sketched out a rough outline of what their "country" was like). Then I gave each a random problem that their country would have to deal with, like the assassination of their leader, the breakdown of their infrastructure, a geo/environmental disaster, etc. We discussed whether their utopic vision would survive the problem, deal with it, and why/how.

Here are the sites:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
http://www.moral-politics.com/xpolitics.aspx?menu=Home

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they do this in PoliSci 101. It's interesting the way you connect it to utopia though.

I actually plan to have them play the new Sim City game with a comparable pedagogical goal, assuming I can get my friends who made it to donate some copies. I'll also look into flying one of them out to talk about trying to model society. The new game forces you to make choices that lead towards different kinds of societies.

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Cool! Too bad I just don't have the time to get immersed in Sim City anymore. Or Civilization. Time-gobblers, all!

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but if you're going to use it in class, it's research! Of course, being a super-geek, I am currently trying to model society in ASCII for the game Dwarf Fortress (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/), which is hi-larious.

Since you asked

[maverick-weirdo.livejournal.com]

Adiamante by L.E. Modesitt
I liked this one, in some ways it is a "realistic" utopia

for some interesting, but unrealistic utopian ideas:
The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith (a libertarian utopia)
The Truth Machine by James L. Halperin (The invention of a "infallible lie detector" leads to utopia through the surrender of privacy)

I happened to discover these two books in the same month. An interesting contrast of extremes.

Re: Since you asked

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

it's a wonderful world

[rvrjoe775.livejournal.com]

You already mentioned Bellamy, one of my personal favorites. I also quite enjoyed Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. For some film levity, you might consider Brazil by Terry Gilliam.

Don't overlook Orwell, natch.

Re: it's a wonderful world

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

"Harrison Bergeron" pairs nicely with Brave New World -- pre-determination of social roles. Also, F451 (which most people mistake as simply an indictment against censorship, but is really about the difference between a thinking society and an entertainment-dulled one) pairs nicely with an examination of Reality TV and similar pseudo-real entertainment experiences. But I think that strays a bit from the focus of immigration and exclusion as reflected in utopic/dystopic literature. They're more about control and engineering of the existing social structures. 1984 could be good for the whole immigration/exclusion thing because of the expliotation of xenophobia to control the population and distract from internal problems.

Re: it's a wonderful world

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

My main objection to Orwell, Bradbury, and Huxley is that there are a million things to read, and I want to avoid things that some might have read in highschool if at all possible.

Re: it's a wonderful world

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, very good point. I'd personally read all of them by the end of Grade 9, and usually one or more of those are on some HS curriculum somewhere, from what I've been able to judge.

Re: it's a wonderful world

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yup, I think Grade 9 for me too.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Not exactly Utopias, but definitely somewhat-idealized worlds:

Diane Duane's Doors books (The Door Into Fire, The Door Into Shadow, The Door Into Sunset). This is Utopia-under-attack, and the plot is about how the heros beat back said attacks. Warning: strong sexual themes, including homosexuality* and rape; nothing really graphic, but not glossed over either.

The Neandertal world in Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids trilogy. Again, not a perfect Utopia, and one of the problems with it is clearly delineated in the third book, but the notion of the Alibi Archives might be a good one for discussion. Warning: one major plot hook is the rape of the female protagonist, and the (IMO very realistic) descriptions of her PTSD-type reactions to it; also, the Neandertal society is organized around universal bisexuality.

* Actually, homosexuality and heterosexuality per se don't really exist in Duane's universe; you love who you love, and no labels are attached to it. This is part of the reason I see it as a Utopia, but people who can't accept that worldview are going to have a problem with it.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I don't know either, but I'll check them out over the summer.

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Stranger in a Strange Land deals with the ultimate immigrant -- Valentine is from another planet -- who sets up his own utopia (which mirrors Heinlein's own utopic vision) within the society he adopts.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was contemplating it, especially because of the real-world responses to Stranger.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I immediately thought of Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge. It's even more interesting when you consider it in conjunction with The Gold Coast and The Wild Shore. From the Wikipedia entry:

This trilogy is also referred to as the Orange County trilogy, and is the first of Robinson's important works. The component books are titled The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988) and Pacific Edge (1990). It is not a trilogy in the traditional sense; rather than telling a single story, the books present three different future Californias.

The Wild Shore portrays a California struggling to return to civilization after having been crippled, along with the rest of America, by a nuclear war. The Gold Coast portrays an over industrialized California increasingly obsessed with and dependent on technology and torn apart by the struggles between arms manufacturers and terrorists, while Pacific Edge presents a California in which ecologically sane, manageable practices have become the norm and the scars of the past are slowly being healed.

Though they initially appear unconnected, the three books actually work together to present a unified statement. The first shows humanity crippled by a lack of technology, the second humanity swamped and almost completely dehumanized by too much technology (along with the attendant environmental damage) and the third a workable, livable compromise between the two. Although the third is, in effect, a Utopian novel, there is still conflict, sadness, and tragedy. The stories all contain a common character, whose circumstances serve to put the three alternatives in perspective.

I'm also surprised no one has mentioned an older book, Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islandia_(book)) (1942).

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

I would also vote for Pacific Edge; it's one of the few "utopias" that I would actually, wholeheartedly want to live in. (It doesn't hurt that Robinson is one of the best writers working today.)

It is much easier to think of interesting literature about dystopias than about utopias.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah. But I like the idea of pushing students to try and construct an ideal society, and then poking at it.

[regularpapi.livejournal.com]

If it were me, I don't think I'd do dystopias--on the theory that a class on utopia will inevitably involve dystopia anyway (as in "ew, who'd want to live in that sanitized evironment anyway--seems more like dystopia"). Runs the risk of losing focus, since there are zillions of bad imagined worlds. My friend Marshall used to say that all imagtined futures were either the dirty future (ie, blade runner) or the clean future (ie, Logans Run). I guess you could say that the clean future tends to be about the relatioonship between utopia and dystopia. I'd imagine that there's be hundreds of books that deal with the relationship between the two modes. One might be the cloning novel Never Let Me Go, which begins with a kind of utopian innocence in what seems to be a boarding school and then turns into a sci-fi future dystopian larger world.

People teach whole classes on renaissance utopias--More, Bacon's New Atlantis, etc. All that new world fantasia stuff. The Tempest.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I was imagining that we'd spend a lot of time critiquing utopias and heading into dystopia, much as you say. And I have to decide whether I can shed my historians' cloak (which would drive me to read Plato and More and the others) or just teach a modern literature class.

Which would be a fun thing for a medieval historian to do.

[bellebonnesage.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it would count, but Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age includes many many co-existing societies, each set up to allow what their members think is important.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

It's pretty dystopic though. Neat world, and one of my favorites.

[valancymay.livejournal.com]

Gate to Women's Country, Sheri S. Tepper.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Sincerely meant utopias, or the "this is not as good as you think it is" utopias?

The Dispossessed is possibly the best of the bunch already mentioned, and LeGuin doesn't hide the fact that her utopian society has difficulties.

Wicked's society is becoming more and more oppressive, and the WWoftheW starts out with good intentions that go horribly wrong.

Not mentioned yet: "With Folded Hands" and The Humanoids, both by Jack Williamson. "With Folded Hands" is sufficient for finding the utopian-but-oops flavor that Williamson presents. Read the book only if you liked the short story.

Ian Banks has a series of books that contain, among other things, artificial intelligences that run a society known as The Culture, which appears to be genuinely utopian. Not all societies are part of The Culture though, so there are conflicts. Fair warning, I find Banks reliably loses my interest midway through a book, and I have to force myself to get past that to finish the book.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Thanks!