| Article: 408
From: [email protected] (Michael Orth)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: Utopia Reviews
Organization: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Date: 23 Oct 93 01:21:54 GMT
Here are the first of a series of reviews of contemporary utopian novels
which I will put on the net. I propose the following standards for other
reviews in this series--a proposal which you are free to ignore:
1. 500 word maximum, and reports more than reviews, written to be of use to
scholars rather than primarily to encourage new readers, though they should
include basic elements of fiction (plot, characters, theme),
2. the short reviews should be written to inform scholars of the sort of
utopia presented in the story and special problems or possibilities each
utopia offers,
3. the reviews should focus on issues (what we mean by "utopia," how this
fiction fits with earlier utopias, and how it affects prior scholarship in
utopian studies),
4. the reviews should arouse interest (perhaps encouraging brief--100
word--rebuttal reviews from readers would help; skywriting)
=======================================================
Rush, Norman. Mating (Knopf, 1991)
This is a fine novel, with lovely language, full of wit and recondite
allusion. Despite the fuzzy spots in the story, the utopian community of
Tsau is splendid. Hudson keeps it firmly in the background of his love
story, and its unobstrusiveness makes it more believable. We do not need
the usual tedious lectures by a series of native guides because the features
of the utopia appear as the setting for the action. How do the women of
Tsau deal with the issues of power (political and electrical), pollution,
and population? What happens to criminals, how is technology received and
developed, what drugs challenge social order, how can new citizens join the
community, what do people eat and drink? These and other typical utopian
issues are clearly explained in the narrator's journal without the tedious
exposition so crucial--and so deadly--to the genre of utopian fiction.
Point of view is an issue; it's hard to tell how reliable the narrator is,
especially as the story goes on and she gets more and more obsessed with her
need to re-shape emotions and episodes as she wants them to be rather than
as other characters seem to understand them. The author is too fond of his
narrator, and the narrator too obsessed the the guru hero. There is too
much of her speculations about his motives, and too little about his
actions. As a result, the story grows tedious in the middle, as the
narrator loses interest in Tsau and focuses intently on her need to
completely possess the hero in an intense romance, which he seems unready to
enter This delays the climax of the novel, with the usual result of delayed
climaxes: retrograde ejaculation and post-coital recriminations.
=====================================================
Livia, Anna. Bulldozer Rising (Onlywomen Press, n.d. [1990?]).
This is a small book bearing a big grudge against Men and the Patriarchy.
It was published in England, and bears some of the marks of its class
origins. It is a frank dystopia, in the familiar cautionary pattern. The
author rounds up all the usual suspects in the oppression of women:
technology, urban life, government, capitalism, and MEN--part of the
PC-generation's wowser woofing against sex and Apollo. Among the villains
of the piece, fat haters are prominant. Most of the characters think with
lubricious sexual and political pleasure of fat women, and with resentment
of the men they imagine expect them to be slender. A fringe feminist author.
The plot is familiar. The speaking characters are entirely female. There
are Youngmen on the streets and in some of the spaces, but they are scenery,
not characters. The focus figures represent three ages of women. Schimitel
is a teenager, barely breaking free of the conventions of her culture, but
in some ways the wisest and strongest of the three. The young woman is
represented by Zay, an athletic skater who rebels against her world and
tries to kill Ithaca. Ithaca is the mature woman, man-size and strong,
playing an active role as ideologist for the patriarchy.
The language is patterned and ceremonial rather than realistic or vivid.
There is no wit or play, but we get a fair dose of neologisms--new languages
for new world. In the middle of the story Ithaca explains her apparent role
as apologist for the patriarchal regime "outrage is the most effective
short-term opinion-maker going. It wipes history from your head and fills
you with horror of the present evil, purified of wider context which might
moderate action." Amen sisters.
=======================================================================
Kilian, Crawford. Brother Jonathan. Ace Science Fiction, 1985. 183 pp.
This short sf novel might easily get ignored as "adolescent fiction." It is
that--simple in story, characters, and technique, focused on an adolescent
protagonist, sentimental and predictable in its mild rebellion against adult
authority--but it is a nicely told story too, with a familiar but moving
utopian conclusion.
Briefly, the story is set a century or so from now in a dystopian world
divided into disenfranchised proles living in endless shopping malls and
corporate professionals in serf to heartless big corporations (who's read
that before?). The hero Jonathan has his spastic paralysis repaired by a
Frankenstein doctor working for a giant company's goals, but the hero and
his friends break loose from corporate/adult control, join the adolescent
underground movement (very simple gang motif), and then take over the world
by their ability to interface with computer "Turings" or virtual persons.
The new world masters make everybody live more or less peacefully together
while everyone is provided with the implants which will connect them
permanently to the world wide computer net, thus making them immortal and
altruistic. Jonathan and his pals prepare to leave Earth to colonize the
stars, leaving the adults to clean up the mess on this planet.
Not very promising material. But Kilian manages it well enough, and the
final utopian future is persuasive, given its simple adventure plot. The
real interest lies in the nanotechnology, the health-giving implant, the
development of artificial intelligence in the turings, and the pervasive
positive tone. This is a fair--though very simple--example of the
possibility of reaching utopia by changing humans rather than reforming
society.
======================================================
Preuss, Paul. Human Error (Tor, 1985), PS 3566 .R416 H8.
Some technical types in a genetic engineering/computer company make a self-
replicating organic computer nano-organism, and some people in the lab and
around the Mac type computer they make get infected. Lots of fearful things
happen at first, but after a few months we find out that the computer
organism seeks to optimize its human vectors, and so they get to be super
people, in pleasant ways. It is clear the future belongs to them, though
the story quits before they reveal themselves.
Several of the characters are OK in naive ways, like the computer engineer
protagonist and his (invevitably) scrumptious psychiatrist girl friend, and
Preuss contrives enough narrative drive to keep me reading. There isn't
anything interesting about this novel in a literary way, but it is another
good example of short-term extrapolation of a utopian sort.
==========================================================
James, P.D. The Children of Men. New York: Knopf, 1993.
This is a DDD (dime a dozen dystopia) rather than a thoughtful utopian
novel, but it is worth noting because it is by a well-known writer. The
premise is that some unidentified plague has made all men sterile. No
children have been born for thirty years, and the human race has grown older
and crankier as it has lost hope in any future. England, like other
nations, is controlled by a quasi-benign dictator, the Warden of England,
who offers security, comfort, and stability, at the familiar cost of
euthanasia, hopelessness, and occassional oppression.
But wait--all is not lost after all. A single child is born, and in his
untested but new genes lies the future of a new race. The action of the
story is a long chase sequence as the child's parents and the hero try to
escape the Warden of England, who apparently wishes to control the new baby.
Christian resonances are frequent. The central character is a middle-aged
professor who falls reluctantly into a conspiracy to overthrow the dictator,
and ends by slaying the dictator in a heroic duel and becoming himself the
new--and more humane?--ruler of England.
The novel is not interesting technically or aesthetically, except for an odd
switching of point of view between chapters supposedly reproduced from the
protagonist's diary and material from other narrative sources. The "good
society" of elderly England is as grey as it sounds. Dystopias should (a
professorial "ahem" at this point) be utopias gone wrong, and so in a way
this is. It is another of those 1984 futures which our pessimistic age
loves, and it does focus on the limitations of a comfortable, safe, and
comprehensible world without hope.
=====================================================================
Varley, John. Steel Beach (New York: Ace/Putnam, 1992).
A utopia? Well, no, but it is on the fringe. Varley sets his hero--and
this is a hero story--on the Moon a century or so from now, after impersonal
aliens have destroyed the Earth and humanity lives on in fairly small
colonies scattered among the other Solar planets. The protagonist spends
some of hsrhr time in a Robinsonade--literally on a virtual reality version
of Robinson's island, as a mental health cure. On Luna itself life is
secure and leisured (or seems so, until obligatory dangers show up to create
conflicts and derring-do action), with a central computer which takes care
of most of the practical stuff--like air, food, communication, etc., and
advanced medical techniques which allow the characters to alter their
bodies, including changing sexes whenever they wish.
The hero is a newspaper man who recounts his adventures in poorly done
hardboiled detective prose from the 1930s, and hrshe is a Tieresias
character. This book is kinda crude, and the protagonist is not very
persuasive--that is, when s/he is male she doesn't think much like a woman
(I think), and when s\he is a male he's a (deliberate) stereotype--but hey,
as a donnee the conceit is worked out well. At least as well as Virginia
Woolf managed it, anyhow.
===================================================
%A Rush, Norman
%T Mating
%I Knopf
%D 1991
%A Livia, Anna
%T Bulldozer Rising
%I Onlywomen Press
%D [1990?]
%A Kilian, Crawford
%T Brother Jonathan
%I Ace Science Fiction
%D 1985
%P 183 pp.
%A Preuss, Paul
%T Human Error
%I Tor
%D 1985
%A James, P.D.
%T The Children of Men
%I Knopf
%D 1993
%A Varley, John
%T Steel Beach
%I Ace/Putnam
%D 1992
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