ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
TO 1984 AND BEYOND
Paul Alkon
Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century
Abstract.--The first work of prose fiction set in a chronologically
specified future, Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733), is
satire, not SF; but nevertheless provides excellent evidence about the origins of SF.
Although Madden's satire fails, the framework of his narrative--documents transported
backwards in time from the 20th to the 18th century--is in many ways better for futuristic
fiction than the idea of transporting a narrator forward to the future, a device first
used in Louis Sébastien Mercier's more influential utopia L'An 2440 (1771). Memoirs
of the Twentieth Century suggests a formalist hypothesis to supplement the theories
of Aldiss, Suvin, and others about social conditions that made tales of the future an
accepted genre by the end of the 18th century. In addition to industrial and political
revolutions that led writers to seek novel ways of depicting (or inducing) change by
describing it from a future vantage-point, the literary scene in 18th-century England was
distinctive for its encouragement of formal experimentation, especially creation for
satiric purposes of works that parodied existing genres and in the process sometimes
created viable new forms. Just as The Beggar's Opera led to the musical comedy,
Madden's less influential attempt to parody history by writing a chronicle of the future
resulted in creation of a viable new genre, the future history, that might have spread
more quickly had Madden not suppressed his book. Even more significantly, Madden also
noted the aesthetic importance to that genre of a transformation induced by science in
accepted standards of probability: astonishing scientific discoveries had by 1733 reversed
the accepted connections between plausibility and verisimilitude when thinking about
possible future developments, thus placing a premium in futuristic fiction upon apparent
implausibility as the test of verisimilitude.
Marc Angenot
The Emergence of the Anti-Utopian Genre in France: Souvestre,
Giraudeau, Robida, et al.
Abstract.--The great anti-utopias of the 20th century can be placed in
a tradition whose thematic constants, along with the ideological preoccupations attending
them, are the creation of the previous century. Before Orwell, Huxley, Zamyatin, and
others, the anti-utopia emerged--in mid-19th-century France--as a specific and stable
ideological formula. In effect, writers like Souvestre, Giraudeau, and Robida, and later
Kolney and Jullien, resorted to a genre which looked with contempt upon emergent
technologies and social developments tending to upset the status quo. These anti-utopists
evince a conservative anarchism hostile to industrialization and socialism alike. Basing
their plea for the status quo upon a static conception of human values as something
immutable, they oppose the "natural" needs and aspirations of the individual to
the collective rationality of "progress." Their narratives typically attempt to
subject "progress" to a reductio ad absurdum reasoning which would expose it as
despotic, immoral, dehumanizing.
Peter Fitting
"So We All Became Mothers": New Roles for Men in
Recent Utopian Fiction
Abstract.--One of the most significant features of the revival of
utopian themes in US popular fiction has been the impact of feminism. Through an
examination of seven novels, I will argue both for the importance of feminist ideals in
reshaping utopian writing, especially in its portrayal of everyday life in worlds without
the present hierarchies and gender system, and for the effectiveness of such writing in
awakening and giving shape and direction to existing emancipatory hopes. I selected the
seven as being particularly representative of the range of recent utopian writing. Four
are well-known SF novels: Samuel Delany's Triton (1976), Ursula K. Le Guin's The
Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and
Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975). To these I have added three others: Suzy
McKee Charnas's "science fantasy," Motherlines (1978); an example of a
recent feminist fantasy, Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground (1978); and a popular
example of a recent utopian novel written "outside" the conventions of fantasy
and SF; Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975).
Nadia Khouri
Reaction and Nihilism: The Political Genealogy of Orwell's 1984
Abstract.--Contrary to a major trend which claims that Orwell is a
humanist and a socialist who, in 1984, produced an original and powerful critique
of totalitarianism, this article argues that Orwell's political and literary genealogy is
nihilistic and reactionary. 1984 inscribes itself within, and shares the
axiomatic traits of, the old tradition of anti-utopia, which emerged with the large-scale
transformations of bourgeois industrial society. As the polemic counterpart of utopia,
such a tradition has always posited a nostalgic yearning for an individualistic and
anti-egalitarian system of values. Like all other anti-utopias, 1984 pits its
whole textual rhetoric against rising historical forces which threaten to destroy
traditional structures and assumptions. It does this by producing a fiction based on the
presumed unchanging nature of human beings against utopian reason, the latter disfigured
by a paranoid vision of state control. In this connection, 1984 does not appear
as a plea for the group's common weal against the oppression of totalitarianism. It is
rather a claim for a distinction with a difference which would allow the individual to
dissociate her or himself from the destiny of the group, and to pursue that freedom dreamt
by the private doublethinker, a freedom which is far from reflecting a truly progressive
or socialist perspective.
Jacques Lemieux
Utopias and Social Relations in American Science Fiction,
1950-80
Abstract.--The evolution of the utopian project of American SF from
the 1950s to 1980 should be seen in relation to the vicissitudes of a certain social
category, the scientific and technical petty bourgeoisie, whose form of imaginative
expression SF constitutes. The technological and positivist utopia of the '50s gives way
during the '60s to dystopias of totalitarianism, social disintegration, or ecological
catastrophe, and these in turn are succeeded in the early '70s by a renewal of utopian
thinking. That new orientation, however, proves to be at once incomplete and ephemeral;
and the utopian project presently degenerates, around 1980, into feudal-technocratic
reveries. This ideological evolution of SF parallels that of another cultural expression
of the scientific and technical petty bourgeoisie: American sociology. Both can be
accounted for in terms of the ambiguity of class interests and of the fall from social
power of the sub-group of the petty bourgeoisie whose mentality the two reflect.
Patrick Parrinder
Utopia and Meta-Utopia in H.G. Wells
Abstract.--Wells had a lifelong but uneasy relationship to the utopian
mode. A Modern Utopia (1905) is a manifest "meta-utopia," interweaving
a fictional narrative with an essay in comparative utopography--in effect, a synthetic
résumé of the whole utopian tradition. The narrative drive of the book leads inexorably
to the narrator's meeting with his samurai "double." Through the voice of the
"double," the text is briefly transformed from the status of comparative
utopography to that of direct utopian prophecy. Yet the prophecy is cut off short, the
"bubble bursts," and Utopia vanishes. Three kinds of conflicting forces
contribute to the poetics of Wells's unstable utopianism. These are (1) nostalgia for the
Morrisian metaphor of the Earthly Paradise, which Wells rewrites in terms of idyllic
sexuality; (2) an ironic destructive element asserting the "perpetuity of
aggressions" in human life; (3) a synecdochic note of apocalyptic prophecy. All three
elements are recurrent in Wells's work, and of them it is the prophetic strain which is
most deeply at odds with the premises of the classical utopia.
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