The Relative Utopia

[naomikritzer]

I read John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades last week. I initially read Old Man's War when he posted it up on his blog in segments, then again when it was published by Tor.

I thought both books were good reads. Fun setting, interesting characters, plenty of explosions. OMW is also hilariously funny in places.

Via John's blog, I found an LJ review of OMW from someone who really hated it. (Warning: that link contains spoilers for OMW.)

I'll try to avoid spoilers but provide an overview. In Old Man's War, the protagonist joins a group called the Colonial Defense Forces, which runs around slaughtering aliens (and being slaughtered) in the defense of the Colonial Union. The old people who join the CDF don't know much about the situation away from earth; they join because rumor has it that if they do, they'll get some sort of age-reversing treatment. Over the course of the book, the protagonist doesn't have much of an opportunity to explore alternatives to war or the political situation -- mostly he tries not to get shot, blown up, or eaten. He mostly takes the CDF at its word that what he does is necessary. The peace-making characters don't find much success.

I thought, after reading OMW, that the Colonial Union was a lot creepier than the protagonist was in a position to be aware of. After reading TGB, I concluded that the Colonial Union was actively evil and engaged in a wide range of morally despicable acts, and that (contrary to what the voice of the CU tells you) its actions couldn't even be justified by ends achieved -- that there probably were better alternatives that they were ignoring out of expediency.

Nonetheless, having read nhw's analysis I can certainly understand why he read it the way he did; my own interpretation was undoubtedly influenced by having read John's blog since 1997, and being familiar with his (fairly liberal) politics. Part of what makes OMW and TGB interesting is the ambiguity of the situation presented.

This got me thinking again about the issue of relative utopias.

Have you ever read an SF or fantasy novel where you found the society just ghastly to contemplate -- and yet the author seemed to think it was great and you thought that he or she would relocate there in a minute if the opportunity presented itself? Worse, the author seemed to view the coolness of this society as totally self-evident even as you were thinking, wait -- that ship's computer knows where everyone is ALL THE TIME and is filming them when they're alone in their bedrooms? Didn't Orwell have a book about this, only that was a BAD thing? (Okay, so Star Trek was a TV series and not a book, but you get the general idea.)

I have a really hard time with books like this. This was my big issue with Sherri S. Tepper's Gate to Women's Country. I thought it was a dystopic world, and yet there were places where I thought Tepper thought she was writing a utopia. I tried to push that thought away because you can't always tell a writer's politics from their novels. But then I heard Tepper speak at WisCon when she was Guest of Honor; she was very pro-some-of-the-stuff-that-creeped-me-right-the-hell-out. (This creeped the heck out of everyone else at WisCon, too. On the bright side, it made for really interesting conversations at the parties after her speech. If you take a vehement pro-eugenics stance at a convention full of feminist liberals, it's going to freak a lot of people out.)

I recently saw a fake (it was presented as real but it has to be fake) review of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, supposedly written by Samuel Alito in 2003:

Reviewer: Sam Alito (Philly, PA)
The Handmaid's Tale - by Margaret Atwood

THE HANDMAID'S TALE is a jarring look at a not too distant future where sterility is the norm, yet some fertile women still refuse to willingly submit to the absolute control of their patriarch. Margaret Atwood's tale of feminism gone awry, follows the self-inflicted travails of Offred, a vessel of God who refuses to fully reject her liberal indoctrination, even when offered a life of privilege in the idealized nation of Gilead.

It goes on in that vein. I saw it re-posted a couple of places, mostly by people who apparently wouldn't know parody if it snuck up behind them and gave them a wedgie. I thought it was hilarious and immediately started trying to come up with a comparable review of 1984 on behalf of Alberto Gonzales.

My point here is that utopias are relative, and there ARE people out there who would write Old Man's War (or something very similar) and intend to present the CDF as good guys doing a hard job. It's hard to write from certain viewpoints without people (some of them, anyway) thinking that you're promoting fascism.

(There are a few people who read the first half of Fires of the Faithful and concluded I was a Christian Fundamentalist who thought that Pagans were bad, bad people. FWIW, inasmuch as Fires and Turning had a message, it was that putting the power of the state in the hands of the church is a really bad idea no matter what the church's doctrine or god/goddess of choice is. Most of my readers picked up on this, fortunately.)

(And yes. On occasion, Star Trek has freaked me right the hell out almost as much as Sherri S. Tepper. There was this lovely bit in the first season of Voyager where Harry Kim is chased through the streets of Earth by Security offices with drawn phasers and no one so much as turns around to stare. Just think about the hair-raising things that implies about the way life is lived in the Federation. There's a somewhat obscure British series called Blake's 7 which also has an organization called the Federation, except that Federation is a fascist military dictatorship run by a psychopath. I had a college friend who hypothesized that Star Trek was the military propaganda made by the Federation in the Blake's 7 universe.)

Comments

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

It's sort of the opposite case, but I read Brave New World in HS and actually couldn't understand why it was a dystopia for a while. It wasn't that I thought it was a utopia--I could see the bad parts like being made to stay in a place that you didn't want to be, I guess, but I just didn't understand why it would automatically be so bad to have a society in which you knew your place in life so precisely. I suspect it says an awful lot about my HS and how I didn't fit into it, but I spent a lot of time wishing that there was an easy way to know where I belonged when I was in HS.

[naomikritzer]

Yeah, I can actually understand finding Brave New World appealing as a high school kid.

Especially since the Alphas were at the top, and wouldn't almost all of us have been Alphas?

(Okay, so the "I do like flying..." stuff was creepy. Funny how as a society we have found all sorts of ways to condition kids to prefer expensive hobbies and activities that didn't even require playing them tapes as they slept...)

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Well, and even the people who weren't at the top were happy where they were. Sure, it was an artificial happiness, but they thought they were happy, and ultimately, what more can you ask for? THat might have been the other appeal in HS--at least in BNW if I was going to be at the bottom of the food chain I would *like* being at the bottom of the food chain.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

"...I just didn't understand why it would automatically be so bad to have a society in which you know your place in life so precisely..."

But what if your "place" isn't your "you"? My "place" in American society is to be married with a couple of kids (probably college aged or older by now), and consuming more than I should. Instead my "me" is an unmarried gay man, without kids other than nephews, and strong repulsion to over consumption.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

But that's a specific example, just as there were specific examples in the book. Even in HS, I could see that in specific examples, it could be bad. It's just the general that seemed so comfortable and well defined. Rationally I knew there was no reason I wouldn't be as unhappy in that world as I was in this one. It was just that a lot of my unhappiness in HS came from not knowing where I should fit in and where I should be happy. It wasn't even that I wanted to be an Alpha, it was more that in BNW even people who weren't Alphas were happy. I wasn't really an Alpha in HS, but I wanted permission to be happy being what I was.

Even now, while I can see more clearly the things about the society which make it a dystopia, and I know it was a dystopia, I still don't completely *believe* the society was wrong. I think I have a hard time automatically believing a situation is bad if the people in the situation are happy with it. Even if I wouldn't be happy in that situation, even if I think the situation is faked, that doesn't make their happiness invalid. (And yes, this doesn't always work in specifics, I *know*, I think I was just unhappy enough in my formative years that I really see happiness as the ultimate achievement.)

[liret.livejournal.com]

I did this with the Giver. I first read it in about fourth grade. I was going through a very painful, chaotic time in my childhood, and Jonas' well organized, pain-free world seemed lovely. I couldn't quite forgive him for leaving and forcing all those peole to deal with their lives again.

When I reread it in middle school I was horrified at my first reaction. I think that's why it's still one of my favorite books.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I find most utopias in fiction either dystopian or dull, dull, dull.

The exceptions are ambiguous utopias; a term Ursula K. Le Guin came up with for The Dispossessed, if my memory is correct. I found her near-ideal society too politically corrupt to be an effective dystopia.

[naomikritzer]

Well, I use the term utopia loosely. I think Valdemar (the country the good guys come from in Mercedes Lackey's novels) is utopian in the eyes of the author, and Luna in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I don't think either of these would meet the strict definitions of utopia.

Valdemar actually sounds rather pleasant to me (so long as I don't think too hard about the "benevolent autocracy where the monarch is always benevolent because s/he was chosen by the gods" issue, and where THAT could go...) but it's easy to imagine that it would not sound nearly as appealing to your average libertarian (who would probably be a lot more interested in living on Heinlein's lunar colony than I would).

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

Well, when the gods actually exist and actually want the best for the country, having them choose a benevolent ruler probably wouldn't be so bad.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Maybe my memory is fuzzy here, but toward the end of Turning, didn't putting the powers of the state into the hands of the state also turn out to be a bad idea?

[naomikritzer]

Yeah, that went along with my basic conviction that autocratic political structures are always going to be oppressive, it's just a matter of degree.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I liked that part, really -- how the protagonist wasn't perfect, was in fact very naive about what was going to happen when this whole revolution thing was over, and abruptly had to realize, well crap, winning the war is one thing, but then you have to win the peace, and I so don't have the right skillset for this. Seemed very realistic :).

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

This was my big issue with Sherri S. Tepper's Gate to Women's Country. I thought it was a dystopic world, and yet there were places where I thought Tepper thought she was writing a utopia.

I had the same feeling -- though I was more fascinated than creeped out, because I love reading books in which a foreign (to me) viewpoint is presented so thoroughly. It did make me read Tepper's other books more closely when I happened upon them, though.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Gate to Women's Country bothered me most because what the older women were doing to the younger women (in coopting their choice of breeding partners) seemed as abusive as anything men have ever done.

[naomikritzer]

There were a lot of things to be bothered by in Gate. It's part of why it makes such interesting fodder for discussion.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Yes; I'm sorry to have missed the discussion at the convention.

There's a part of me that really wants to believe in some sort of Utopia; GTWC is definitely not it. Have you read Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time? There were things about that one that really appealed to me.

[naomikritzer]

I've read Woman on the Edge of Time but don't remember it all that well. I liked He, She & It better -- that had both a set of dystopias and a utopic kibbutz.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I haven't read 'He, She & It' - sounds interesting.

[naomikritzer]

It was published as "Body of Glass"in the UK for some reason.

It's a really good book. One of my favorites ever. I highly recommend it.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I'll have to add it to my Wish List at Amazon!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Robert Sawyer's Humans, Hominids, etc. hovered around the point of "No! That society isn't cool at all!" for me before plunging into, "Okay, suspension of disbelief has just been hung by the neck until dead" territory. The "if you're innocent you have nothing to hide" idea reared its head again: bleh.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Yep, I felt the same about Hominids.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

"if you're innocent you have nothing to hide"

That's the philosophy of closet exhibitionists; since, apparently, they'd have no problem with doing their bathroom and bedroom business in public.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have read books that seemed to be written as utopia, but read very dystopian to me. Ironically, the last I can think of is another book by Sherri S. Tepper, Raising the Stones. The future situation was one in which a mind-controlling fungus growing under ground makes people get along with each other better. I definitely got the impression that Tepper would take a one-way ticket to this world in a heartbeat. I don't remember if I felt the same way about Women's Country when I read it. I recall it as distinctly dystopian and very sad, but I was also young and not as good at reading between the lines as I am now.

[naomikritzer]

That reminds me of a John Barnes book where these viral memes have taken over people's brains and made them get along well. Barnes's books (the ones I've read, anyway) have a fairly strong focus on societal worldbuilding. Often he comes up with societies that function very well at least from some angles, but for whatever reason I never get the feeling that he thinks they're a good idea that we should pursue as a society -- he mostly just seems to be playing with cool ideas.

[joxn.livejournal.com]

Obviously I haven't read the book, but what's the difference between "viral memes" and "political ideology"?

[naomikritzer]

In this case, the difference is that the memes are more tangible. They're like a cross between a political ideology and a computer virus that can take over your brain.

[naomikritzer]

Also, the book in question is called "Candle."

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

It's sad that things like viral memes and mind-altering fungi are considered necessary to making it possible for people to get along.

I heard Scott Imes say, 'We'll have war until there are more bones than dogs.' Even that may not be enough if we don't learn better ways to deal with our own emotions, as well as conflicts with one another.

[maggiedr.livejournal.com]

My sister gave me "Gate to Women's Country" a long time ago, probably right after it was published. At the time, I couldn't finish it. I had two small sons and the idea of women giving up their sons made me react on a visceral level. (As a matter of fact, all my reading was severely hampered for at least a decade, after having babies.)

I was intrigued enough about the plot to ask my sister about it. She explained the rest of the book to me. I guess I need to read it, or risk making an ass out of myself by commenting on it. It does seem as though a Utopia will always be a Dystopia to someone else.

I think the movie "Starship Troopers" is a good example of a work that seems to raise diametrically opposed reactions from audiences. Some seem convinced that it is parody, others believe it is a glorification of military extremism. I just saw it a couple months ago for the first time. Never read the Heinlein book, so I have no idea what his intent was with the story.

I think if an author is being honest, he or she will admit that the most ideal society/government or whatever, will still have a negative impact somewhere. It's somewhat simplistic to have that negativity only occur among "evil" members/outcasts, who then deserve getting the rough end of the stick. I think what makes GRR Martin's world so interesting is that you see the consequences that result in every layer of society, that result from the decisions of the ruling class.

[naomikritzer]

I know what you mean about reading being hampered. I found it disturbing enough to contemplate handing over a five-year-old child back when I didn't have one of my own. I have two daughters and no sons, but still. Yikes.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

My sister taught a class on Utopias & Dystopias, and I'd like to get her over in this conversation. I'll be up there (Winnipeg) next week, and I'll see what I can do.

More later.

[(Anonymous)]

Heh! I beat you by a week on reading Ghost Brigades.

Just wanted to say that I came over here earlier today to read the rest of your remarks about Scalzi from nhw's livejournal discussion. Having arrived here I noticed your list of books in your right margin, followed the links to amazon, thought your stuff looked interesting, ordered two books (Freedom's Gate & Freedom's Apprentice)... ah, the magical serendipity of the Internet and yet further proof that an online presence sells books. Looking forward to getting to read your novels.

[Didn't want to be anonymous but I'm not a LiveJournal user and I'm not sure what this OpenID thing is all about... somewhere in cyberspace I'm www.jimsjournal.com]

[naomikritzer]

Cool! Thanks!

[rachel-swirsky.livejournal.com]

I just got pointed here by L. Timmel Duchamp; I found it very interesting. Thanks.