<
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2485985-why-adam-roberts-set-out-to-write-a-sci-fi-utopia-not-a-dystopia/>
"The starting point for this novel was that I wanted to write utopian fiction.
I hadn’t done this before: all my previous novels have been straight science
fiction. But utopia, the genre that imagines a better, or a perfect, world, is
older than science fiction: the first utopian novel, the work that coined the
term, was written by Thomas More all the way back in 1516.
I was interested in what happened to the mode: More’s
Utopia generated lots
of imitators. Through the 17th and 18th centuries, a great many utopian books,
novels, tracts and treatises were written. It was a major genre in the 19th
century and into the 20th:
Erewhon (1872) by Samuel Butler; William Morris’s
News from Nowhere (1892), H. G. Wells’s
A Modern Utopia (1905), B. F.
Skinner’s
Walden Two (1948). Consider Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
(1888), one of the most impactful novels ever published in the US: a huge
bestseller, it led to the creation of hundreds of “Bellamy Clubs” across that
country and the founding of a Nationalist Party to run for the US presidency,
with the aim of actualising Bellamy’s utopia there.
But nowadays? Nobody really does utopia. Instead we are absolutely awash with
dystopias, versions of the worst, not the best, possible future:
The Hunger
Games,
The Road,
Divergent,
The Maze Runner, various Cyberpunk
hellscapes,
Battle Royale,
Oryx and Crake, a great dismal river of books
and films and video games. It’s an interesting question as to why utopia has
gone out of fashion, and why dystopia is now so popular. Why has it gone out of
fashion?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
