Dystopia: A Natural History by Gregory Claeys

Author:Gregory Claeys
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

Science Fiction and Dystopia

Further problems arise from describing dystopian literature as a branch of science fiction. Though lunaria, or imaginary voyages to the moon, were already common in the seventeenth century, the utopian genre precedes that of science fiction by some four centuries.42 The term ‘science fiction’ was not evidently used before 1851.43 Often dated from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the genre proliferates only in the late nineteenth century, and remains intermixed with other forms of narrative.44 By the late twentieth century, however, science fiction became so popular as to swallow up nearby genres, including, by 1950 or so, both utopia and dystopia combined; hence the tendency to back-date this process.45

Yet some authors have concluded that, leaving Wells aside, ‘there has been very little overlap between science fiction and utopia’, but considerably more between science fiction and anti-utopia (instancing Huxley, Orwell, Vonnegut, and Pohl and Kornbluth).46 W. Warren Wagar notes that much science fiction has ‘only a peripheral interest’ in those questions of social and political organization which are often central to utopia and dystopia.47 Most science fiction is not collectivist in orientation, in Patrick Parrinder’s view, Wells here being the exception rather than the rule.48 Many studies of science fiction also explicitly ignore texts we would regard as dystopian, though H. Bruce Franklin, for instance, defines The Iron Heel as science fiction and Looking Backward as a novel about time travel. From a utopian viewpoint, this seems odd; why not call More’s Utopia a travel book? (It was once read this way, in the Mandeville tradition.) Bellamy’s book is about projected alternative societies where ‘time travel’ is a literary device which enables the projection. It has no scientific import as such. Any similar device which performs the same function of distancing or estrangement, providing a critical distance from the present—a key aim of these genres—would have sufficed.49

Many commentators thus separate utopia, dystopia, and science fiction on broadly realist grounds. Kingsley Amis describes science fiction as ‘that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin’.50 This indicates a ‘realist’ criterion of genre separation, if relative to time and place. (Near-future texts are invariably more realistic.) And it remains, as Parrinder reminds us, also relative to real science itself, which, it is sometimes claimed, is rarely portrayed in the genre with any degree of accuracy.51 In both cases, the advancement of science moves themes from the domain of science fiction to that of utopia/dystopia as their possibility becomes realizable. What is crucial is that science is central to the narrative, as Darko Suvin indicates: ‘An S-F narration is a fiction in which the S-F element or aspect is hegemonic—that is, so central and significant that it determines the whole narrative logic, or at least the over-riding narrative logic, regardless of any impurities that might be present.’52

Thus there are

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