REVIEW-ESSAYS
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Peter Fitting
Impulse or Genre or Neither?
M. Keith Booker.The
Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism.
Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 58. Greenwood Press
(800-225-5800), 1994. vii+197. $49.95.
M. Keith Booker. Dystopian
Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Greenwood Press
(800-225-5800), 1994. xiii+408. $75.00.
These two books are facets of an interesting and ambitious project with major problems
and shortcomings. At first glance, they seem to develop different but overlapping aspects
of the same concern: the one to study the dystopian "impulse" and the other to
serve as a reference book and research guide. In the Introduction to Dystopian
Literature the author argues that
dystopian literature is not so much a specific genre as a particular kind of
oppositional and critical energy or spirit. Indeed, any number of literary works
(especially modern ones) can be seen to contain dystopian energies, and readings that
emphasize these energies can reveal dystopian impulses in works that might not otherwise
be considered clear examples of dystopian literature. Virtually any literary work that
contains an element of social of political criticism offers the possibility of such
readings. (3)
But in The Dystopian Impulse, he has described his purpose as "a detailed
and reasonably comprehensive study of dystopian fiction, organized by certain specific key
ideas and perceptions about the genre" (18). So the book titled The Dystopian
Impulse is about the genre of dystopian fiction, while the book titled Dystopian
Literature is "not so much about a specific genre as a particular kind of
oppositional and critical energy or spirit."
Krishan Kumar, in the opening paragraph of his very comprehensive Utopia and
Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987), writes,
This is a book about books. Worse, it is mostly about some very well-known books, such
as Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. What can
be the justification of yet another treatment of these works--and at such length? (vii).
Booker begins with the justification that "there have been no book-length studies
devoted exclusively to dystopian fiction since Hillegas's book [The Future as
Nightmare, 1967]." This seems to be a rather disingenuous attempt to stake out
new territory--"dystopian literature"--by rewriting, downgrading, and often
simply ignoring previous utopian scholarship. If Booker had taken the trouble to look at
the most extensive contemporary bibliography of utopian literature, Lyman Tower Sargent's British
and American Utopian Literature: 1516-1985 (1988), he would have found that there the
term "utopian" is taken to include anti-utopia, dystopia, utopian satire, and so
on, as well as the eu-topian or positive utopia. With respect to Booker's claim that there
is a distinctive form of dystopian fiction (separate from the utopian), it should be
mentioned that studies of the utopian genre have usually linked the two, as can be seen
from the title of Kumar's Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Other books
come to mind which challenge Booker's claim, including Harold Berger's study of the
"anti-utopias of modern science fiction," Science Fiction and the New Dark
Age, published in 1976. That there have been few studies devoted exclusively to
dystopian literature since Hillegas's 1967 book is not surprising inasmuch as the
publication of that book was soon followed by a revival of utopian themes in science
fiction, which renders moot the issue of the dystopian in recent years. Moreover, Booker's
own study reviews yet again (and with much less insight and attention to scholarship) many
of the 20th-century dystopian classics studied by Kumar and many others before him. In
fact, two-thirds of The Dystopian Impulse deals with works written before 1967,
while 65 of the book's 197 pages are devoted to the three anti-utopias of Zamyatin,
Huxley, and Orwell. Furthermore, Booker's definition of the dystopian is so broad as to
include a number of works usually classed as utopias (e.g. Walden Two, Triton).
1. Let me turn now to his two overlapping uses of the term
"dystopian," beginning with his description of the dystopian as an "energy
or spirit." The thesis of a "modern turn to dystopia" sounds at first like
the familiar characterization of the 20th century as pessimistic put forth in numerous
books and essays in the period 1950-1975.1 Booker adds a new twist to this
argument with the sub-title to DI, "Fiction as Social Criticism":
In the same way, literary works that critically examine both existing conditions and
the potential abuses that might result from the institution of supposedly utopian
alternatives can be seen as the epitome of literature in its role as social criticism. For
the purposes of the current volume, it is precisely such literature that is encompassed by
the term "dystopian." Briefly, dystopian literature is specifically that
literature which situates itself in direct opposition to utopian thought, warning against
the potential negative consequences of arrant utopianism. At the same time, dystopian
literature generally also constitutes a critique of existing social conditions or
political systems, either through the critical examination of the utopian premise upon
which those conditions and systems are based or through the imaginative extension of those
conditions and systems into different contexts that more clearly reveal their flaws and contradictions. (DL 3)
I have a number of problems with this description, beginning with the initial
"both...and." The critical examination of "existing conditions" is
clearly not the same thing as the critical examination of "the potential abuses that
might result from the institution of supposedly utopian alternatives." I would be
tempted to call the first category "social criticism" and the second
"anti-Utopia," and I would seriously question whether the majority of the almost
one hundred dystopian works listed in the DL Research Guide do both.
Another way of explaining my reservations about his use of "dystopian
impulse" is to compare it to the notion of the "utopian impulse." Booker
quotes the following passage from Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious:
all class consciousness--or in other words, all ideology in the strongest sense,
including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class consciousness just as much as that of
oppositional or oppressed classes--is in its very nature Utopian. (DL 34)
This passage is from Jameson's concluding chapter, "The Dialectic of Ideology and
Utopia," which continues:
any Marxist analysis of culture...can no longer be content with its demystifying
vocation to unmask and to demonstrate the ways in which a cultural artifact fulfills a
specific ideological mission...but must also seek...to project its simultaneously Utopian
power as the symbolic affirmation of a specific historical and class form of collective
unity. (291)
While I agree that many literary works contain elements of "social or political
criticism," I am not convinced that Booker's "dystopian impulse" has the
same status or condition as Jameson's "utopian," for Jameson's utopian is shown
to be at work in all cultural artifacts, in a constant struggle or dialectic with the
ideological, with examples of the utopian drawn from works which are explicitly not
utopias (e.g., Jaws and the Godfather films ["Reification and
Utopia"]). Although Booker states that the dystopian impulse manifests itself in
"virtually any literary work that contains an element of social or political
criticism" (DL 3), many of his examples are drawn from the familiar ranks of
the utopia and the anti-utopia. If the dystopian were truly an energy or spirit common to
much of the literature of the 20th century, one would expect to be shown this impulse at
work in texts other than the same familiar dystopias and anti-utopias.
Let us now turn from the dystopian as an impulse to Booker's other possibility, the
dystopian as a literary genre, a claim which raises a different set of problems.
In a footnote the author explains his decision to use the term dystopia:
Various terms have been employed to indicate the range of skeptical treatments of
utopianism depicted in modern fiction and film. Designations like "dystopia,"
"negative utopia," "anti-utopia," "heterotopia," and
"cacatopia" have variously been used to describe this phenomenon, though the
terms have not always been employed interchangeably. However, rather than quibble over
terminology, in this study I use the term "dystopia" throughout to subsume all
of the others with the understanding that I consider "dystopia" as a general
term encompassing any imaginative view of a society this is oriented toward highlighting
in a critical way negative or problematic features of that society's vision of the ideal. (DL 22 n5)
Key terms which could be added to the above list include "utopian satire" and
"cautionary tale" (he uses the second but not the first), and they point to one
of the difficulties that he has created for himself. The term "anti-utopia" is
often used to designate "skeptical treatments" of the utopian project itself, as
illustrated by the first three chapters of his book which deal with the well-known trio of
masterpieces of the anti-utopian genre: We, Brave New World, and Nineteen
Eighty-four. Dystopian works, along with cautionary tales, usually depict bleak
visions of the future, as in some of the five texts studied in his sixth chapter
"Skepticism Squared: Western Postmodernist Dystopias": Woody Allen's film Sleeper,
Samuel Delany's Triton, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, William Gibson's
"cyberpunk" science fiction, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.2
There are other problems here, most notably the classification of Delany's Triton
as a dystopia, for despite the author's own designation of the work as a
"heterotopia," it is usually considered one of the key works of the utopian
revival of the 1970s. Although these works might all be said to contain dystopian
elements, perhaps only the Atwood should be seen as an example of the "if this goes
on" or dystopian cautionary tale.
The problem with venturing into what Darko Suvin has called the "genological
jungle," the shifting ground of definitions, is that the attempt to define utopia, or
science fiction for that matter, often becomes a full-fledged task in itself which drains
away time and energy from the central argument, in this case the predominance of
pessimistic visions of the future in the 20th century. For this reason I am sympathetic to
the author's wish for a single term under which to group a number of different works from
different countries and literary traditions which share this common suspicion or fear of
the future. But it seems to me that such an inclusive term already exists, namely
"utopia," for as mentioned above, it is usually used as a generic term to
include not only positive eu-topian works but also the negative utopias Booker is
discussing.
Moreover, the utopian evocation of a better society always includes such a critical
dimension, whether implicit or explicit, as can be seen in the two sections of More's Utopia.
Interestingly enough, Booker himself seems aware of this positive/negative structure of
the utopia:
Literalizing the dual emphasis of almost all utopian fiction, More's book includes two
parts, the first of which describes the social ills of early-sixteenth-century
Europe...and the second of which outlines an alternative society in which the problems of
Part One have been solved. Indeed, the book's satirical and critical effect derived
largely from the contrast between these two societies, which in essence casts More's
England as a sort of dystopia. (DL 53-54.)
Given this "dual emphasis," why do we need a new category, particularly
since, as Suvin argues, the converse also obtains: "The explicit utopian construction
is the logical obverse of any utopian satire. Utopia explicates what satire implicates,
and vice versa" (54). In DI Booker acknowledges this "dual
emphasis" even more clearly when he writes that "dystopian critiques of existing
systems would be pointless unless a better system appeared conceivable. One might, in
fact, see dystopian and utopian visions not as fundamentally opposed but as very much part
of the same project" (15). In fact, this is the fundamental organizing premise of the
political projects of some of the "social and cultural critics" reviewed in the
first part of DL, including Marx, for whom social criticism was directly linked
to a program of social transformation and the vision of a better society. On the other
hand, such a description seems diametrically opposed to the anti-utopia, which is usually
characterized by the absence of any glimpse of a "better system"; and there is
little indication in Booker's discussion of Brave New World, for instance, that
he believes such utopian designs a part of that work. (Huxley is, of course, an
interesting case since he did go on to write utopia, although this is not discussed by
Booker.) Continuing this line of thought, I would point out that many of the dystopias
listed in DL are by no stretch of the imagination "in direct opposition to
utopian thought" (his definition of the dystopian cited above).
My second reason for saying that the category of the utopian includes what Booker calls
the dystopian stems from the fact that DL includes in its listings of dystopian
fiction the four central utopian texts from the 1970s which Tom Moylan and others have
used in their exposition of the idea of the "critical utopia": Delany's Triton,
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of
Time, and Joanna Russ's Female Man. While Booker's discussion of Triton
is useful in its attempt to show how it "surmount[s] the polar opposition between
[utopia and dystopia]" (DI 145), the failure to engage the concept of the
critical utopia and the dismissal of the utopian revival of the 1970s as simply another
facet of the dystopia seriously weakens his argument. There is potentially an interesting
argument to be made here about the relationship between the critical utopia and dystopian
visions, but it remains unexamined in Booker's study.3
Of course, other critics might argue that Booker's "dystopian literature"
should simply be labeled "science fiction," particularly in terms of the
subtitle to DI--"Fiction as Social Criticism." After writing that
"the principal technique of dystopian fiction is defamiliarization: by focusing their
critiques of society on spatially or temporally distant settings," Booker
acknowledges Suvin's definition of science fiction as "cognitive estrangement"
and admits that there is "a great deal of overlap" between the two genres, while
maintaining that there is nonetheless an important distinction: "in general,
dystopian fiction differs from science fiction in the specificity of its attention to
social and political critique" (DI 19). While I have sometimes been critical
of the high standards Suvin set for sf, it is worthwhile to mention them here since they
are so similar to Booker's claims for the new genre:
Significant modern SF, with deeper and more lasting sources of enjoyment, also
presupposes more complex and wider cognitions: it discusses primarily the political,
psychological, and anthropological use and effect of knowledge, of philosophy of
science, and the becoming or failure of new realities as a result of
it. (15)
Again in a later chapter, "Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia," Suvin
writes: "Strictly and precisely speaking, utopia is not a genre but the
sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction" (61).
2. Scope. In a 22-page Introduction, Booker explains that it was the
Enlightenment which gave birth to modern versions of utopianism and then turns to a review
of 20th century critiques of this tradition, from Nietzsche and Freud through the
"culture critique" of Adorno and Horkheimer to Foucault. Consequently, in
"the imagination of the modern skeptic...it is much easier to visualize nightmares
than dreams of the future...." He continues with what I would take as a definition of
the anti-utopia: "Indeed, numerous works of modern literature have been suspicious
not only of the possibility of utopia, but of its very desirability"
(DI 16). But the literary text which he then cites to illustrate this point is a
recent Japanese novel, a shift which suddenly poses the question of the geographical
bounds of the dystopian genre, a question which is further complicated by the next
example, Salman Rushdie's Grimus. The problem of geographical limits is even more
acute in DL, for it includes brief discussions of more than 65 dystopian
fictions, as well as 13 films and 14 plays written or directed by artists (in addition to
some familiar English-language names) from Czechoslovakia (3), France (4), Germany (3),
Hungary, Japan (2), Poland, Russia (11), Somalia, and Yugoslavia. Put this way, there is
not a problem but several with the scope of the dystopian. Firstly, only works that have
been translated into English are eligible--in contrast to other comparative studies of
utopia whose primary and secondary sources are not restricted to works available in
English (like those of Kumar, the Manuels, Morson, Suvin, and so on). Booker's reliance on
translation puts into question both the validity of his arguments and the usefulness of
the research guide.4 Or does he mean to imply that every significant dystopian
work, not to mention every significant work of criticism dealing with the topic, is
available in English? This deficiency is especially glaring in the Research Guide in which
the primary and secondary bibliographies list only a single work not in English--a
Serbo-Croatian translation of a Slovenian novel, Dusan Jovanovic's Vojna Tajna.
A second problem with the range of texts lies in the absence of any reference to the
debate about whether utopian literature (and by extension utopianism) is specific to the
Western tradition.5 If the dystopian is "a critical energy or
spirit," one characterized by futuristic visions which express reservations about the
direction of society, one could perhaps argue that one was describing an (artistic) stance
found in disparate societies which were reacting, in one way or another, to the pace and
negative impact of modernization. This is not explained, however, and despite the
apparently universal dimensions of the phenomenon, Booker's theoretical references are
strictly European. In the introduction to DI Booker discusses Marx, Freud, and
Nietzsche, as well as Adorno and Horkheimer, Baudrillard and Foucault, to explain the
dystopian impulse and "to relate the literary history of dystopian fiction more
closely to the social and political history of the modern world" (20). Despite this
concern for "relating" fiction and history, non-European history is explained in
terms of European references. Nor am I sure that any of the critics he includes in his
"Guide to Selected Modern Cultural Criticism with relevance to Dystopian
Literature" would have wanted to be considered as making statements relevant to all
of the countries and cultures represented in his lists of dystopian fictions, films, and
dramas.
In these terms, the references to the dystopian as a "critical energy or
spirit," makes one think as well of utopian social theory, whose roots, as Sargent
writes, "can be found in the idea of progress and the constant but generally
unsystematic stream of thought that can be called anti-utopianism" (21). In the 20th
Century, as Sargent points out, the anti-utopian position has been developed through the
"equation of utopia and totalitarianism," something which sounds very much like
Booker's thesis, except that Booker has neglected to mention the central text in this
argument--Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
An important theoretical and methodological point in his argument follows from his
assertion "that the treatment of imaginary societies in the best dystopian
fiction is always highly relevant more or less directly to specific 'realworld' societies and
issues" (DI 19), which leads to the following statement:
To bring more sharply into focus the close connection between dystopian fiction and
contemporary political reality, I have organized this study principally according to
social and political, rather than literary criteria. In particular, I work on the
assumption that the modern turn to dystopian fiction is largely attributable to perceived
inadequacies in existing social and political systems. (DI 19-20)
First of all, this is a contestable assumption. While these "perceived
inadequacies" may certainly be seen as the major impetus for the three great
pre-Second World War anti-utopias Booker discusses, and of many of the Russian works he
cites, such "perceived inadequacies" are not the explanation for much dystopian
SF, which more often reflects fear of the bomb.
Another difficulty here lies in the ahistoricism of this allegedly historical
explanation. From the perspective of utopian scholarship, the past 100 years is often seen
as a dialectical exchange between utopia and dystopia, with two peaks of utopian
production (in English-language utopias), in the late 1880s and 1890s and again in the
1970s.6 Specifically in terms of the utopian revival of the 1970s, Booker tries
to anticipate and disarm this objection by calling it a "localized" phenomenon:
While there have been specific cases of localized resurgences in utopia literature
(especially among feminist writers and other leftist writers inspired by the political
activism of the 1960s), twentieth-century literature has generally envisioned utopia as
either impossible or undesirable.
Rather than attempt to defend this assertion (which contradicts the conclusions of
numerous articles published in SFS over the years), he continues by mentioning some of the
most "dystopian" events of the century:
Powered by the horrors of two world wars, the grisly excesses of totalitarian regimes
in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and the spectre of global nuclear holocaust,
"negative" texts like We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-four have been
far more prominent in modern literature than the positive utopias of earlier centuries. (DI 17)
These three texts were all written primarily as responses to the utopian experiment of
the new Soviet state, and written moreover well before the 1970s; while, on the other
hand, none of the English-language examples that follow (Walden Two, It Can't Happen
Here, and Player Piano in Chapter 4, "The Bourgeois Dystopia after
World War II," and Sleeper, Triton, the work of William Gibson, Vineland,
and The Handmaid's Tale in Chapter 6, "Skepticism Squared: Western
Postmodernist Dystopias") really could be considered "negative texts" in
the same vein as We, Brave New World, or Nineteen Eighty-four.7
Walden Two is a utopia, while Triton is, as I have mentioned, one of the
central texts in Moylan's exposition of the "critical utopia," and a frequent
reference point in contemporary discussion of utopia.
3. Readings. Having spent so much time describing the larger questions
raised by Booker's claims for and presentation of "dystopian literature," it
seems pointless to turn to a review of his specific readings of individual texts. With
respect to the better known works, neither DI nor DL has much to offer
in the way of new readings, particularly since the space devoted to each text is limited
to three or four pages. The interest or value of these two works lies, particularly for DL,
in the descriptions of lesser known works and in their juxtaposition with some of the
classics of the utopian genre.
Booker's misapplication of the term "dystopian" to a classic utopia, B.F.
Skinner's Walden Two, deliberately or inadvertently attempts to undo a generation
of scholarly attempts to explain and refine notions of literary genre. I am tempted to
state that Booker's basic approach to the utopian (or dystopian) genre simply ignores
text, authorial intentions, and historical context: if he doesn't like the society
outlined in a novel, it is a dystopia. For the record, let me repeat Darko Suvin's
definition of utopia:
the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical
institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more
perfect principle than in the author's community, this construction being based on
estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis. (49)
Booker begins innocently enough.
Walden Two, clearly intended by its author as a serious exploration of the
possibility of a utopian society, nicely demonstrates the fine line between utopia and
dystopia in the way that its ideal society strike so many reader as dystopian. (DL
246-247.)
Here is the basic confusion I have already referred to. He begins by admitting that the
work was intended as a utopia, and then argues that it "demonstrates the fine line
between utopia and dystopia" because "its ideal society strike so many readers
as dystopian." I think that it is important not to confuse the literary form or genre
(dystopia or dystopian literature) and the dystopian "energy or spirit."
Instead, Booker mixes together without distinction those works which reveal the
"dystopian impulse" and works which follow the dystopian ("if this goes
on") and/or the anti-utopian form, as well as utopias with dystopian elements. For
there to be any validity in the notion of a "dystopian impulse," it must be
clearly distinguishable from the dystopian novel.
Another criticism of Booker's reading of Skinner's classic lies in his almost total
overlooking of the debates which followed that book's publication, most prominently by
Joseph Wood Krutch in The Measure of Man: see for instance George Kateb, Utopia
and Its Enemies (1963) and Kumar. For many readers Walden Two is indeed the
representation of a thoroughly inhuman society, but this does not make it any less a
utopia, only one we do not like.8
4. Scholarship. This ignorance of or failure to mention important
discussions of Walden Two is unfortunately characteristic of the entire book,
which also fails to make any any reference to the critical and bibliographical work of
Lyman Sargent. Dystopian Literature is not a book to be relied on as a Research
Guide. There are a number of other surprising omissions.
Fredric Jameson, to whose theoretical work Booker refers on a number of occasions, has
written a number of suggestive essays on science fiction and utopia that are not mentioned
in either DI or DL. Two of these are especially relevant in that they deal with
literary works discussed by Booker. "Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the
Production of Utopian Discourse," is a long review of Louis Marin's Utopiques
(with its celebrated chapter on Disneyland as a "degenerate utopia," another
reference overlooked by Booker) that includes an analysis of Ursula Le Guin's The
Dispossessed. "Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?"
includes a discussion of the Strugatskis' Roadside Picnic, a text which Booker
discusses as a dystopia but which Jameson calls "one of the most glorious of all
contemporary Utopias" (157).
Booker also seems unaware that Theodor Adorno, one of the eight cultural critics
included in the first section of the Research Guide, wrote a lengthy essay on
Huxley's Brave New World.
Booker's coverage of recent Russian works seems useful and interesting, particularly
since many readers may not be familiar with this material. His discussion would have
benefited from a description of the utopian tradition in that country and how those works
intersect with various dystopian texts, from Bogdanov (the author of the "First
Bolshevik Utopia" in 1908) to Efremov's 1958 Andromeda or the long-delayed
appearance of Platonov's Chevengur. In addition to Darko Suvin's discussion of
this tradition in Metamorphoses, there are several works in English dealing with
the utopian and dystopian aspects of Russian science fiction which Booker does not
mention, including John Glad's Extrapolations from Dystopia: A Critical Study of
Soviet Science Fiction (1982), Patrick McGuire's Red Stars: Political Aspects of
Soviet Science Fiction (1985), and McGuire's essay on Russian SF (which includes an
annotated bibliography) in the most recent edition of Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical
Guide to Science Fiction (Neil Barron, ed., 1987).
In conclusion, then, a quick search through back issues of Foundation or Extrapolation,
not to mention SFS, would quickly yield many other articles which Booker overlooks. And,
quick, who is the most important "dystopian" SF writer of the post-war period?
Would you be surprised to learn that John Brunner is missing from Booker's Research
Guide?
NOTES
1. The Manuels, for instance, entitle the last section of their Utopian Thought in
the Western World (1979), which deals with the period 1880 to the present, "The
Twilight of Utopia." Booker seems unaware as well of the political dimensions of
anti-utopianism in the United States in the 1950s, culminating in Daniel Bell's The
End of Ideology (1960), whose third section dealt with the "failure" of
socialism and was entitled "The Exhaustion of Utopia."
2. For discussions of this distinction between "dystopia" and
"anti-utopia," see John Huntington, "Utopian and Anti-Utopian Logic: H.G.
Wells and His Successors" (SFS 9:122-46, #27, July 1982), 124, and Sargent, 8-9.
3. Although Booker cites Moylan's discussion in Demand the Impossible (NY:
Methuen, 1986) of Triton (DI 144-45), he does not address the central
thesis of Moylan's influential study. Here is Moylan's definition of the "critical
Utopia":
Thus, utopian writing in the 1970s was saved by its own destruction and transformation
into the "critical utopia." ... A central concern in the critical utopia is the
awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia
as a blueprint while preserving it as dream. Furthermore, the novels dwell on the conflict
between the originary work and the utopian society opposed to it so that the process of
social change is more directly articulated. Finally, the novels focus on the continuing
presence of difference and imperfection within utopia society itself and thus render more
recognizable and dynamic alternatives. (10-11).
4. For an excellent example of what a research guide/annotated bibliography can be, one
which deals with many of the same works, see Paul Brians's Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic
War in Fiction, 1895-1984 (Kent State UP, 1987).
5. Kumar's comment that "The modern utopia--the modern western utopia invented in
the Europe of the Renaissance--is the only utopia" (3) might be seen as one position,
to which we could juxtapose Sargent's recent review of the issue of "non-western
utopianism" ("Three Faces," 19-21).
6. For a breakdown of this pattern of ebb and flow, see the Sargent bibliography, or
Carol Kessler's Introduction to her Daring to Dream (Boston: Pandora, 1984).
7. In defining dystopian fiction, Booker does not look at the question of its structure
or form. While utopian fiction is often described (or accused) of lacking a plot (except
perhaps for the guided tour), the anti-utopian is almost always follows a rebellion or
revolt. A possible distinction between dystopia and anti-utopia might lie in seeing the
former in terms of setting and the latter in terms of plot. John Carpenter's Escape
from New York (1981) for instance, is not an escape from dystopia, for the dystopian
society extends beyond New York; while similar escapes in Forster's "The Machine
Stops" (1909) or the film Logan's Run (1976) are indeed rejections of
attempted utopian societies.
8. For a discussion of the importance of understanding that the literary classification
of a work as a utopia does not depend on whether the reader likes the imaginary society,
but on certain formal and generic characteristics, see my "Utopia Beyond Our Ideals:
The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia." Utopian Studies, 2:95-109, 1991.
WORKS CITED WITH PAGE REFERENCE
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
_____."Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?" SFS 9:147-59,
#27, July 1982.
_____. "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture." Social Text
1:130-48, Winter 1979.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. London: Blackwell,
1987.
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible. NY: Methuen, 1986.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited." Utopian
Studies 5.1:1-37, 1994.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
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