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In Defense of Dystopia

November 12, 2009 Sharable.net has an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson in which he described dystopia as something "Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we’re trying for as a civilization. "

While I agree that writing compelling utopias can be a chore, I don't agree with the implication that creating a dystopia is easier than creating a utopia.   One factor in the equation that Robinson left out of is quality.  A quality dystopia is never just disaster porn, because that's not interesting.  What a compelling dystopia tells us about is not how things fell apart, it's how we (usually western, usually white, usually male) think we might cope with a real catastrophe.  A dystopia can be the equivalent of any westerner imagining ourselves plunked down into something like the third world, and having to cope.  But a dystopia can also tell us about what our current flaws are, and the damage we might be doing right now in the world, or what life is like in  war zones, under a dictatorship, or in a disintigrating economy.

And that's a really interesting thing about dystopias.  They exist already in a way that what Robinson thinks is a utopia does not.  But our western world can be a utopia for someone living in, say the hills of Myanmar (formerly Burma), caught between a despotic military government and a bunch of opium dealing warlords.  Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, East Timor Indonesia, and other places are real dystopias today. 

Writing a real dystopia is a challenge I'm seeing a bit more from time to time in that some science fiction authors, and some fantasy authors are taking a hard look at how to reflect the real world's current day problems.  Cory Doctorow, in an interview for the Tin House Books blog, talks about his enjoyment of science fiction being elevated not by predictions of the future, but about a dialog about the present day.  I suspect he means more about how technology effects our culture and ourselves, but this can be applied to how western culture interacts with other cultures, and how a dystpoia can tell us about our own world.

Mike Resnick's work has been some of the first science fiction to talk about colonialism as reflected by human interaction with aliens while humans are the dominant culture.  I'm not sure Resnick can be classed as dystopian, but his work can certainly be grim.  But what about books that can tell us about real world dystopias?  It's arguable that Slaughterhouse Five and The Forever War are reactions to dystopian elements of war, but what are books that reflect the dystopian elements of life in postcolonial settings?  Ian McDonald's Brasyl and Paolo Bacigalupi's Windup Girl both fit the bill, and are to my mind a differnt sort of novel than Resnick's Kirinyaga, Ivory or Paradise.  Resnick has a degree of distance in that his colonial creatures are alien, whereas McDonald and Bacigalupi talk about humans colonizing humans, and in the case of Windup Girl, creating a servitor race, not discovering aliens and colonizing them.

These dystopian visions of the future are dificult to write well, but are rewarding because they provide an uncomfortable mirror image of who we are right now.  It's important that speculative literature not only provide us a picture of who we could be if we embraced nobility, but also of who we might be if we embraced less noble traits.  Social criticism is just as important as social cheerleading.

Posted by Josh Jasper on November 12, 2009 | Comments (2)