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Cory Doctorow on Utopias in Fiction

966 views · Published 2 January 2014 · 4:40 · Indexed 24 October 2026

Channel: Science, Technology & the Future · 2014 · Science & Technology

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"It's not how well the system works, it's what happens when it fails that distinguishes a Utopia from a Dystopia"

00:11 Kim Stanley Robinson is absolutely my favorite utopian because he depicts in his utopias not worlds where all problems have been solved, but worlds in which the collective and action problem – of how we get along while we solve problems – has been in large part solved. He writes worlds in not where there has been no disaster, but in which disaster has been attended by kindness, conscientiousness and a sense of shared human destiny as opposed to greed and fear and a sense of individual destiny – that kind of Mad Max future where the only way to survive is at the expense of everyone else. And that to me is the genuinely optimistic prediction – because we live in a dynamic universe right? Whatever works today will no longer work tomorrow because something will have changed by tomorrow – and so the important thing isn’t whether all the circumstances are good – the important thing is what happens when the circumstances are poor – it’s not how well the system works, it’s what happens when it fails that distinguishes a utopia from a dystopia.

01:21 So you take Stan Robinson and a book like 2312 – that’s a book that has futures that are every bit as grim as ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy – but the reason that Stan’s book is a utopia and McCarthy’s book is a dystopia is that McCarthy visits upon the human race the slander that when the lights go out people go over to their neighbours house and kill them and eat them – literally in the case of McCarthy – and Robinson aspires to a future that when the lights go out people go over to their neighbours housea and see how they can help – you know – that when the power fails people open their freezers and barbecue everything inside them – because it’s going to thore out anyways – and share it with their neighbours.

02:06 And you know, books like ‘Paradise Made in Hell’ by Rebecca Solnit document systematically how in times of disaster we have a narrative – especially those of us at a distance – that is both racialized and tinged with class anxiety about poor people acting in a barbaric way and visiting upon the rich, you know, a kind of vengeance for inequality – but that when you actually look upon the ground, that apart from elites who are gripped in a panic of their own making about this coming vengeance – this sense, I guess, of a kind of retributive guilt, you know, they having lived so high off the hog for so many years in the midst of people with nothing, that surely vengeance must be soon. But actual normal people just kind of help each other out – and that where you see horrific violence, it is almost always the fault of an anticipatory pre-emptive violence against everyday people on the grounds that they must be on the verge of breaking loose into barbarism – the pre-emptive shooting of looters, that sort of thing.

03:26 Looting in times of existential disaster is really just liberating of supplies. And literally in the case of Hurricane Katrina CNN aired footage of white people breaking into chemist shops and taking medicine, water and food – and describing it as ‘commandeering’ – and black people doing the same things and describing it as ‘looting’. So that elite panic is one of the most horrific narratives we have, and is itself a source of unimaginable suffering in times of crisis. And so utopianism is not just important as a way of thinking about the human race but as countervailing force to that narrative as a way of keeping people from assuming that their neighbours are going to come over and eat them so going over and preemptively shooting their neighbours before it happens.


http://boingboing.net/2012/10/30/kim-stanley-robinsons-23.html
http://boingboing.net

Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.

Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17 years old and sold several stories followed by publication of his story "Craphound" in 1998.



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