6 ms·
Is anyone aware of any good utopian fiction?
by nreilly 8y ago
Is anyone aware of any good utopian fiction?
- mirimir 8y agoI think that Ian Banks' "Culture" series is pretty utopian. The AI Minds are clearly in charge, but they generally treat their human pets well, and with respect. There are effectively no limitations on what people can be, do or have. Except perhaps meaning, and that's a major theme. But there is a novella, State of the Art, which features contact between the Culture and 1980s Earth. And that is very dystopian. As are his treatments of various other civilizations that the Culture manipulates. Edit: grammar Also, many of those novels feature messaging threads among ship Minds. And some of them are mind-boggling.
- nreilly 8y agoThanks. I've got a couple of Ian Banks books in my to read list, but this will bump it up.
- arethuza 8y agoWorth noting that the dystopian part of State of the Art is the Culture's view of Earth! One detail from the story that I love is the ship Mind's hobby of collecting individual snowflakes from the worlds it visits with a desire to find two identical snowflakes....
- mirimir 8y agoWell, yes, it's the Culture's Minds' view of Earth. But arguably that's also Banks' view. Plus of course his view of the Culture. Also, some Culture citizens quite liked the Earth. However, they came off as rather crazy ;) There's a Mind in another novel who collects recordings of human minds, and experiments with them. Other Minds strongly disapprove. But then, the Culture overall experiments with other civilizations that it encounters. Also, it wasn't until I read State of the Art that I realized that the Culture is not part of Earth human future. I gather than he assumes humanoid panspermia and/or convergent evolution.
- wtracy 8y agoI would argue that the main reason Star Trek has had such enduring popularity in spite of its failings is that it is a rare example of utopian science fiction in television. (Deep Space 9 took a dystopian detour by focusing on several alien societies that were held up as "bad" examples. I'm also withholding judgement on Star Trek Discovery.) As for written science fiction, I really can't think of anything recent other than the already mentioned Banks novels. There's plenty from the fifties and sixties, but not all of it holds up well today.
- nreilly 8y agoThanks. I think this might be the motivation to give watching Star Trek a go.
- krapp 8y agoThe thing to remember about Star Trek is that it was never that Utopian except on paper. The original series wasn't much at all, it was basically the US Navy in space. It does have a lot of moralizing and positivity, but the future depicted is also very much a product of its time. I wouldn't describe it as Utopian because the Federation as depicted is still clearly not intended to be seen as ideal. TNG was a constant struggle between Gene Roddenberry to showcase his Utopian ideals and the writers to actually have some human drama (which he forbade, because humans were supposed to have evolved beyond that,) so it's the most optimistic of the series, most of the time, sometimes (IMHO) to its own detriment. One of the most hated characters in Star Trek, Wesley Crusher, was Gene Roddenberry's vision of the Ubermensch, but he came across as an insufferably perfect Gary Stu. Further series deviate from the Utopian vision with... mixed results. I personally think DS9 is the best of them because, being an arc-driven series, it gets to flesh out its characters and cultures to a degree other series couldn't. However it's also a series about how a self-described Utopian society can abandon its ideals and morals when faced with a brutal adversary. I think it's best to approach Star Trek as sci-fi (light on science more often than not) drama first and morality play second.
- mirimir 8y agoGreg Egan is pretty upbeat too.
- EliRivers 8y agoThere's Doctorow's "Walkaway".