Guest post
by K. P. Ambroziak
In 1516, Sir Thomas More coined the term utopia. I can’t actually prove this—none of the people who knew him are around today—but the claim is based on the notion that the name first appeared in his most renowned work, Utopia. The work was written in Latin, but the word itself is borrowed from the Greek—a marriage of ou meaning no, and topos meaning place. It seems only natural More went to the Greeks for his no-place; they had been discussing utopian premises since Plato’s Republic (c. 380 BCE), and maybe even before.
A utopia is a perfect society, a place where class and station don’t exist, money and poverty are irrelevant, all people are free and equal, education is meant for everyone, and the collective makes decisions in a fair and democratic manner. Simply put, utopia is fantasy.
I may be considered a cynic here, but I don’t believe the human race will ever experience utopia. Our very nature, what it is to be human, denies us a life without power, corruption, greed, inequality, and ignorance. To date, all attempts at building a utopian society have failed because there is a fine—if not invisible—line between utopian paradise and dystopian hell. Which is my point. The closest we may ever get to witnessing utopia is the world depicted in our dystopian fictions.
The current trend of dystopian novels, films and theories is thriving. Just looking at the most popular entertainment of the last decade, we see society’s stamp of approval on the post-apocalyptic world. Short stories like Wool (2011) explode with a frenzy of attention, cable shows like The Walking Dead (2010) claim top ratings slots, and books like World War Z (2006), The Road (2006), The Hunger Games (2008), and Divergent (2012) are made into movies shortly after they fly off the shelves. We should have predicted this dystopian craze when the new millennium opened with our being inducted into The Matrix (1999). But why have hyperbolical depictions of our world become such mainstream fare?
Perhaps it is because, in 2013, we are living in a futuristic world. Our cell phones are monitored by the NSA, our computer content can be tracked and used against us, our satellites venture into deep space on a regular basis, at any time anyone can pinpoint our exact location, genes are successfully cloned, blood and organs are readily shared, mood medication is rampant, and we are hooked-up to some sort of device every waking hour of the day. We have become a product of our own science fiction, and yet the world continues to spin on its axis just as it always has.
Is it possible technology has made us long for days gone by, so much so that we invent a world where plague-ridden corpses attack, diseases wipe out water supplies, the earth is scorched by a black sun, and machines have risen to take over our minds? Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where we no longer have to go to the office? Pay our bills? Worry about bank balances? Debts we owe? Perhaps we have a fascination with plagues, environmental apocalypse, downed electronics, cyborgs taking over, and even rogue cloning because we long for a simpler world. Perhaps we long to know the truth of Darwin’s theory of evolution; we want to experience what it is to be one of the chosen ones, a survivor of the fittest. Perhaps we need a dystopian future to imagine a utopian community, for only in apocalyptic times will we become equals again.
But thank goodness fantasy is better imagined than materialized. I, for one, am not interested in experiencing a real life utopia in my lifetime. What about you?
K. P. Ambroziak is a writer and freelance editor. She has spent the last decade studying literature and the art of prose. She holds a M.A. and M.Phil. in Comparative Literature and is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on repentance and redemption in Early Modern secular works. Learn more about K.P. and from her Amazon author page.
Really thoughtful post.
I don’t think utopia can exist. Human nature and societies are such that needs for dominance and control and the need to rebel against that control eventually emerge.
Dystopians are more prevalent in literature because every good story needs conflict and a utopia just isn’t going to provide it.
Thank you for your comment RJ. My thoughts exactly… I think that’s why it hits me that the dystopian world is sort of our utopia. It is this weird equalizer that gives us utopian dreams, utopian vision.
Good post, K.P.
I tend to think of dystopian stories as cautionary tales. It’s not so much that we long for simpler times; instead, I think the authors are looking at where things are headed if we proceed down the current track without deviation. Although they probably also have a smidgen of hope that a rebooted world would give us the chance to get it right this time. That seems to be the impetus behind many space exploration stories, too — to start fresh, with a chance to make better decisions and a better world.
Of course, being human, we still screw things up. But that’s okay. Otherwise we’d have nothing to write about. 🙂
Thank you Lynne. So true, so true. That clean slate is a great utopian ideal that works so well in sic-fi. But it does tend to go awry, which is the fun part!
Both utopian and dystopian novels provide food for thought. Dystopian novels also provide cheap thrills–and I say that without disparagement.
S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire is a good example of “what happens when the lights go out.”
Who doesn’t love those thrills? I think there is also the idea that the dystopian world might eventually lead to a new beginning, or a utopia too. I’ll have to check “Dies the Fire.” I haven’t read Stirling. Thanks for the recommend.
Dystopias (especially in SF) tend to be lectures or sermons… analogies of something the writer thinks sucks, so he builds a world out of it to show just how sucky it would be.
It’s funny, but everybody seems to think dystopias are a twentieth century invention. I did a Google search and that’s overwhelmingly the case. Meanwhile, just off the top of my head I come up with “Gulliver’s Travels” and “The Diviine Comedy” which describe hellish or just plain goofball systems. Not to mention many dystopic countries visited in the Odyssey. Fairy tales in many countries describe dystopias, such as the reign of wickedness in “Snow White”. I’d say the idea of a hellish empire has been around for as long as the image of shining cities on hills.
Great point! It’s true they go way, way far back into the ancients. I hadn’t thought of the Odyssey. What a great example. I’d imagine the ancient Greeks were not only thinking about utopian societies but the dystopian as well.
Not to mention just about every political system described in the Bible.
In fact, according to the BIble, the WORLD is a dystopia
There have always been those who look at the world as it is, or as it was, and wonder “what if”? Some of these envision a better world, others imagine “hell on Earth”. They are two sides of a coin, heads for optimism, tails for pessimism. Either way, they look at reality and ask questions aloud that many of the rest of us either think of only fleetingly or do not pursue beyond that first impulse. Those of us that write ask the questions openly and take our readers along for the ride.
Exactly. What a better thing for a writer to be doing than tackling those what if’s, those questions that some of us are afraid to think of or imagine (I include myself in that bunch — some dystopian worlds scare the bejeezus out of me, i.e. Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”)
Great post, K.P., because it got me thinking. I was all set to make a long comment and discovered that Lynn and Lin (hmm) had already said what I was planning to say (probably better than I would have).
Thanks Big Al. Isn’t it funny how great minds think alike?
Great post, KP, and I’m with Al on this one; just about all I thought of saying has already been said above.
Thanks T.D. Again, great minds….
Enjoyed reading your post KP. My reply would be too long here, so http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/4191359-dystopian-utopian-and-cacotopyan
🙂
Thank you Massimo. I will check that out!
I don’t think longing for a simpler world is the motivation for the popularity of dystopia although many people want simpler lives. Dystopia rises from our subconscious need to examine the paths of our lives and our reality through stories. The environment is collapsing. Democracy is dysfunctional. People have no control over their worlds. (It’s not your world. You just live in it.) In general life gets harder. Stagnant wages or no wages. Higher prices for everything. And the zombies are among us. I cite the mood medication you mentioned. Staggering amounts of people are on pills and it makes them pretty useless. We have bad food that sickens many people. On and on. Dystopia is our new mythological landscape for finding our path through existence. Depressing I know, but the Matrix explains everything. Did you take the blue or the red pill? Do you see what I see?
Thanks for your comment Tracy. In a way, I think we are saying — at least trying to say — the same thing. I think the dystopia is a product of our world today because we have reached a “comfortably numb” state with all that I mention above. So I believe the destruction of all that is where the desire for utopia collides with the dystopian world. I can’t remember which pill is which, but I think I want to eat the steak…
Humanity will achieve a utopia only when it ceases to be humanity.
Oops. I meant for the comment below to be my response to your comment. “Scary thought, right? I fear this, though I believe it may very well be true.”
Scary thought, right? I fear this, though I believe it may ver well be true.
I’m a glass half full person so I was really surprised recently when someone commented that my short stories were dystopian. I saw them as precautionary, but with a strong element of hope.
I can, however, see the utopian attraction of tearing it all down and starting again from scratch. In a brave new world, individuals would have the power to control their lives, or die trying. I suspect the success to failure ratio would show a very strong bias towards failure though. And that is why I don’t enjoy truly dystopian stories. I’d far rather read, and write, about futures than can be fixed.
“The utopian attraction of tearing it all down and starting again from scratch”: A great novel that does this is A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. That novel beautifully (albeit not “prettily”) includes the world torn down with the hope of a new beginning.