Forks in the Road: Why do We Write So Many More Dystopias than Utopias?

Still from THX-1138, directed by George Lucas. This film described the visual vocabulary of dystopian fiction for ages.

This bends the subject of the column I put up two weeks back into the arts, without completely abandoning the political tone that I’ve more and more adopted as this website has gone on. Today, I want to talk about Utopia.

Utopia is a funny thing, and I don’t know about anyone else, but whenever I hear the word “utopia” I immediately feel my hackles rise: not because I don’t want the world to get better, but because it always seems to me that it’s used to mean its inverse. Whether we call that a dystopia or an anti-utopia is really an open question (there is also, of course, the idea of the anti-anti-Utopia, which is a term I’ve heard used to describe The Ministry for the Future by Fredric Jameson’s most pop-culturally successful student, Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s also a book I still have yet to get through. I think the audiobook I got through Audible might be intentionally bad. More on that some other time.)

I think that this is perhaps a common reaction, though maybe I’m just unable to think past myself. But it seems to me that, taking Utopia-Dystopia as the standard pair, there’s a fairly common problem: readers want more utopias, but the publishing industry seems to only put out dystopias. It’s shocking, really, that this sort of demand exists and there’s no supply, and that this has proceeded for several years.

Now, granted, there are fewer dystopias than years prior – we all remember the late-aughts/early-tens teen dystopia boom, with The Hunger Games as its flagship – but still, the most popular fictional universes are hardly utopian. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is only fun for the superhumans (see David Graeber’s Essay “Batman and the problem of constituent power”, also called “Super-Position,” which includes the mic-drop quote that “They [Super-heroes] aren’t fascists. They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility”), Star Wars – based on the title – is predicated upon the idea of eternal war being inevitable, the various Jurassic movies have Chris Pratt in them (I admittedly haven’t watched them; I have no interest), and The Expanse seems unable to go twenty minutes without one of its three major political blocs committing a crime against humanity (and sometimes the heroes do, too).

It’s possible that Brave New Worlds, the new series starring Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, and Rebecca Romijn, will return to form here, but who knows?

The only major pop-cultural touchstone that maintains an attempt at a utopian tone is Star Trek, and ever since the death of Gene Roddenberry that one got darker and less Utopian (see, the introduction of Section 31 or, as I think of them, the “Starfleet War Crimes Division”). While it started from a more utopian place and has continued on from there, it’s still far less so in its current version. More on that later.

This brings us to our primary question: Why are Utopias so much more rare than the alternative?

The Hobbesian Argument

The most basic argument is that people are just bad. We’ll never create a utopia, but we’ve managed to create any number of genocidal settler-colonialist empires, repressive fascist police states, and hyper-Stalinist backwaters. Clearly, when it comes to imagination, we’re just much more likely to come up with a dystopia, because there’s something in us that wants to see people get a boot stamped on their face.

Let’s stick with the boot-face assemblage. In its least nuanced form, the line of thinking is that people assume that if they tolerate a boot stamping on a human face forever, maybe one day the person wearing the boot will get tired and they’ll give you a turn to put on the jackboot: the idea is that everyone wants to exercise power and will tolerate being subject to it if they get to exercise it at some point.

Of course, this describes some people, but I think there’s another layer to it, one with far more nuance to it. In this assemblage, there’s got to be some people that would reject the boot and opt to be the face in this arrangement. While I could make an extended reference to the whole “hang on tight and spit on me” thing, I still have yet to read Libidinal Economy, but I have noticed that in some situations there are people – including myself – that opt to consume artwork that is, to them, upsetting. That’s why the artistic theory I put forward a long time ago was about “complex pleasures” instead of just pleasures. There’s a certain amount of jouissance to be had from being saddened or upset: after all, tears can operate as a pressure valve for neurotransmitters, and it might be easier to just push slightly up higher so that the safety trips, instead of trying to push it down further.

I cannot comment further, because, despite prior references to BDSM culture, I don’t know enough to bring in the appropriate resources to talk about this. So let me steer around the issue a bit.

One could also point out the old saw in online discourse: dystopia is when the things happening to marginalized people begin to happen to white people (in short, it’s a recognition of the phenomenon of Foucault’s Boomerang, and a fear of what happens when it comes back around). Or, to borrow from William Gibson and rewrite his words a bit: Dystopia is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Easy enough to just conclude that humanity is just shit, isn’t it?

This is of course, an argument that raises more questions than answers. There’s got to be some explanation of the dynamics.

The Structural Argument

Diagram of the Hero’s Journey. I really have to take a swing at Joseph Campbell at some point. This is a story, not the story, and claiming different is just idiocy.

Okay, so maybe there are good narratological reasons that dystopias are more common. I think they’re fairly obvious: the stories we tend to tell are stories about conflict. Someone wants something, they have to do something to get it. Ideally, something in their journey is going to be relatable and interesting to the audience, but if you don’t have that, you can lean on spectacle.

Not only that, but American – and many other – audiences love an underdog story (even if they hate actual underdogs). In a dystopian story, the plot is one person or a small group of people against the whole world. There’s no way to be more of an underdog than that. Consider, also, the genre’s affinity with teenage girls, who are often subjected to more hatred and difficulty than other demographics. For them, it’s just naturalistic depiction of the world shading in to power fantasy.

I don’t think anyone would be out of line in saying that the adages, rules, best-practices, and common sense of our storytelling is fundamentally designed to produce dystopia. What’s amazing is that we manage to make anything else.

In this read of things, it is not that people are necessarily bad – that is, fundamentally, beyond the argument, despite the first section – but the tools that we have at hand lead almost inevitably to one result over and before all others.

Look, there are some great things in Next Generation, but none of it really matches Ricardo Montalban doing his best Captain Ahab impression while claiming — but not pretending — to be Indian. Screenshot from Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan.|

Look at Star Trek: the original series was a compromise between Roddenberry and the networks, and he was given Next Generation to play with so they could make profitable movies from his intellectual property, anticipating that they would quietly cancel it and make bank on the originals. Consider the difference between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan – the original, while high-grossing, had a tumultuous production and the characters were underwhelming and wooden; the latter, while not grossing as high, was a classic that ensured there would be more Star Trek in the future.

Likewise, from a writing perspective, Next Generation vastly improved after Roddenberry passed (not immediately; the second season was a train wreck for a variety of reasons), and I personally think that this was largely due to Roddenberry’s unflinching utopianism getting in the way of telling a good story: he forbade writers from creating conflicts between the central characters, for example. A rule that went out the window soon enough after he stepped back.

In short: while post-Roddenberry Star Trek was not uniformly good – it was wildly uneven – it generally got much better after he left. Usually, there was a period of adjustment, but there’s a clear trend.

This might suggest that there’s an opposition between utopianism and good writing. I don’t think this is a terribly controversial position, but I don’t believe it to be correct.

The Kierkegaardian Argument

What we think of as “80s hair” was apparently originated much earlier. Sketch from the 1840s.

Søren Kierkegaard laid out three stages of development for people. These stages are the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. In the aesthetic stage, people want to enjoy things: there’s a preference for stories with happy endings because these are more pleasurable. In the ethical stage, people want things that are right: there’s a preference for stories with sad endings, because it’s good to see the guilty punished and, perhaps, there’s a belief in the purifying power of suffering. In the religious stage – which, for Kierkegaard was an explicitly Christian stage, but which later philosophers could articulate without dependence upon Christianity – there is a move away from subservience to an ideal of the good and more in to a relationship with the figure of the good. In this stage, there is a preference – not a solid, hard preference, but a tendency – again for happy endings, because redemption is better than punishment.

One could see the arc of imaginative literature following from this. Until the start of the New Wave, there was a preference for what we can think of as gee whiz, isn’t the future amazing? type stories. There were certainly some writers that brought in greater complexity, but the popular tendency was towards stories with bright, happy endings.

Then the New Wave hit, and the New Wave wasn’t an immediate turn to darkness, but it was a turn from the simplicity found earlier. Many of these stories, in my experience, have unsatisfying endings after relatively solid starts – perhaps a compromise between a publishing industry that wanted something happy, still, and writers that wanted to turn to something darker. This is the Ethical stage of science fiction, and my thinking is that it’s lasted from the mid-60s until today, tracing a course through the New Wave, all of the various iterations of Cyberpunk, the dystopia boom, the post-apocalyptic boom, and the super hero movies of today – which avoid having downer endings by refusing to end.

Star Wars wasn’t competing with 2001, it was competing with Logan’s Run. Keep that in mind.

One might point out that this era also includes Star Wars, which had a notably nostalgic, Flash Gordon-throwback tone. For people who bring that up, I’d remind them that everyone generally – and correctly – agrees that Empire was the best of the original trilogy, and also point out that the tone for the trailer for the original (referenced in this column from 2019) was more in line with popular movies of the day: the various Planet of the Apes movies, A Clockwork Orange, The Omega Man, Silent Running, Soylent Green, Westworld, Zardoz, Death Race 2000, Rollerball, and Logan’s Run – and shortly afterward would be followed by Alien and Mad Max. It attained popularity in spite of is lighter tone, and the darkness of the second movie was a calculated move to make a Star Wars that was in line with the more pessimistic tone of the era.

One could see the move from dystopian to utopian stories as another epochal shift: 80 years of the Ethical Stage is enough, let’s jump on over to the Religious Stage.

Of course, this requires you to accept the Kierkegaardian framework as valid, and one could point out that there are many divergent points within this: the Utopian Star Trek emerged right at the start of the “Ethical” period, and many great works of dystopian literature – The Machine Stops, R.U.R., 1984, Brave New World, and so on – were written during the “Aesthetic” period. More might have been written later, but one would have to prove that it was a greater proportion of what was published, not just raw numbers.

I don’t really have the time or interest to do that.

Who Cares?

The Dispossessed is my favorite of the lot.

We could argue about the reasons why forever. My inclination is towards the second answer, but I don’t ultimately see the causes as necessarily being that important. At least, the ones listed here. I’m a bit more interested in looking forward and trying to figure out what Utopian Fiction has to offer us. I suspect that it’s less than we anticipate and not exactly what we expect.

Great works of Utopian Fiction include the eponymous Utopia, Plato’s Republic (not, notably, the oft-quoted passage that everyone is familiar with – that was Plato taking the piss out of his interlocutor), portions of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells, Island by Aldous Huxley, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin, and others. Most examples of this genre are much older – and most of them would probably strike contemporary readers as straight dystopias (utopian predictions about the year 2000, written in 1900 involved not just a lot of improbable hovering, but also the intentional extermination of the horse.)

This really gets us to one of the issues with utopias: we cannot really say that utopia is here but not evenly distributed, because what counts as a utopia for one person won’t for another. Different people, quite clearly, want different things.

Image from the National Book Review.

So it’s questionable whether a true utopia could exist in the real world, and if it did, then it would be a patchwork, with different rules in different places. Some would operate on some principles, and others would operate on others. Frankly, a few of these utopias would probably look downright unpleasant to you: different people want different things out of life.

In a finite world, chances are that we wouldn’t have enough space to get the granular differences down quite pat. Which connects to another aspect of utopia – partly related to the reading of the word as “ou topos” – in that utopia is always someplace else. It’s easy enough to imagine utopia as existing in the gaps of the map, in one of those spots where a lazy map maker scrawls “HIC SUNT DRACONES,” but we don’t have those spaces anymore.

Past attempts at writing utopia have relied on some visitor from the prosaic reality we’re all familiar with being storm-tossed on to the shores of some unknown island, staggering into the nearest village of shiny, happy people, and then being given a tour while they decide what to do with him. Honestly, it would be a perfect paradigm to build a darkly comic story on if you were to reverse it: which is exactly what Aldous Huxley did in Brave New World, to tragic end for John the Savage. LeGuin does something similar in The Dispossessed to a happier conclusion.

This suggests one of the more pervasive traits of utopian fiction: it’s always stories about the edges. Gulliver’s Travels has the titular character regularly shipwrecked on the shores of strange new lands that supposedly occupy real space. The Blazing World invents a whole new arctic continent for adventure, the cast of Star Trek are explorer-evangelists cataloging strange new worlds and regularly getting in to scraps with the natives because of mismatched values – they have a “no punching down” rule in the form of the Prime Directive, but when do they ever abide by that most important of rules? Even the relatively recent and relatively contained Pet by Akwaeke Emezi (reviewed by Edgar here and myself here,) had a time-border it lingered upon, in the form of an unexploded bomb of sorts from before the revolution.

It’s almost as if we cannot envision a story happening within a utopia. Not completely. So we have here a potential definition of a utopia from a narratological standpoint: a utopia is a world in which stories are over.

Of course, this is if we rely on the Artistotelian statement that stories are about conflict, and there are definite problems with traditional ideas of narratives. This is largely true in the Anglo-American milieu. Not so much in the Japanese one (being a bit of a weeb, I know more about the Japanese context than other East Asian societies), where slice-of-life stories are relatively popular, and it’s largely about watching people go through their day-to-day. This is positioned as something healing and restorative by those who enjoy it, and I’m not about to disagree, though perhaps my brain is too conflict-poisoned to sit through one.

But really, how viable would a genre of utopian slice-of-life stories actually be?

Anti-Anti-Utopian

Anti-Anti-Utopian fiction might be the key here. We usually think of doubling negatives as having a multiplicative effect in formal English, and it’s generally true: Anti-Antifa is very clearly just “fa(scist)” if you look at the people involved. Anti-Anti-Utopianism is the synthesis of Utopia and Dystopia (anti-Utopia), though perhaps calling it “Anti-Dystopia” would be better – I didn’t invent the term, so I’m not going to paper it over with my own terminology just yet.

The idea here is to show the journey from dystopia – or something like it – to utopia – or something like it: to look at the map of time and trace a route from where we are, or will be shortly, to where we wish to be. This makes of the utopia something of a journey, something that one can do.

There is certainly fiction that already does this – while it doesn’t closely examine how it works, Pet does show that its utopian society will grow and change and adjust to become better. Likewise, there’s Kim Stanley Robinson’s works, which are largely about establishing a better and more equitable society.

These are the classic utopian stories, viewed in the perspective of time, with society crossing that edge together and setting up shop – or community distribution hubs, because I have yet to see a convincing capitalist utopia – in the utopian space.

On the Other Hand…

Matt Groening’s preserved head, in the first episode of Futurama.

There is, perhaps, a better approach to this issue. While I would love to see more Anti-anti-Utopian fiction, I’d like to see a clever slice-of-utopian-life story, and I have no general problem with reading a well-thought-out dystopia, I think that my favorite would be to take the approach of the science fiction cartoon Futruama (previously referenced here). By this, I mean to keep in mind the aesthetic thesis of the show, which creator Matt Groening gave in an interview in 1999: "Pipes were always dripping in 'Blade Runner.' And we decided what we wanted to do was a kind of 'Jetsons' universe with dripping pipes, basically."

The idea here is to layer dystopia and utopia on top of one another and allow them to crosshatch and shade one another. Perhaps the future is going to be awful, perhaps it’s going to be great, but chances are, if it’s one in which people live, it will be somewhere in the middle. That’s because people, while we’re taught to think of them as lazy and selfish, and we hope that they’re clever and noble, are fundamentally people: they all lie between the two extremes, and they always find a way to surprise you.

Maybe, instead of worrying about whether you’re writing one or the other, you should just write the damn thing and let the reviewers worry about what box it fits in to.

Genre’s made up anyway.

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