At 01:43 PM 8/28/97 +0400, Emrah Goker wrote:
> SF utopias, to be good fiction, to have literary value -though "literary
>value" is dangerous waters- must not be in _stasis_. They must not lose
>their dynamism. Take Orwell's _1984_: The time seems stopped at 1984,
>nothing moves, nothing changes. Even for a so-called "totalitarian"
>communist society, be it in 20th century or in 24th, stasis is improbable.
_1984_ was a dystopia, not a utopia. The extreme rigidity of the future
society was part of what made it so frightful. It's not likely that such a
society could exist, but the book nevertheless points out possible end
results of certain trends by exaggerating reality.
>Or take the wonderful _The Dispossessed_, Le Guin's masterpiece (by the
>way, is she still an anarchist, or an utopian socialist?): A most
>essential part of an organized society, social control, is mostly ignored.
I'm not sure what you mean by social control. If you mean coercion by means
of a police force, no, Anarres does not have social control. But if you
mean peer pressure and communal expectations, Anarres does have social
control. I recall that children from very early on are taught to share and
are criticised harshly for being materialistic. In all of her works, Le
Guin emphasizes the power of other people's approval or disapproval to
shape an individual's behavior. She takes pains to show the downside of
this means of social control -- simple-minded conventionality and
suppression of difference -- but I do think she prefers it to hierarchical
styles of governing.
>Why do not the masses revolt during the periods of hunger? What prevents
>them from crime? In Anarres, it seems that some mystified virtues of the
>human nature, like "freedom", "sharing" has been turned into a kind of
>religion. Anarres's fate seems to rot in stasis.
As far as revolt -- who would they revolt against? There is no government!
Crime in general is a more vexing question. I can't remember if Le Guin
really took the issue on, as did Marge Piercy in _Woman on the Edge of
Time_ or Slonczewski in _A Door Into Ocean_. In both of those books, people
who are violent or antisocial are encouraged to seek healing and if
behavior does not improve are shunned. When it comes to murder, the authors
diverge -- murderers on Shora are exiled to distant rafts, but in
Mattapoisett they are simply killed. This approach takes for granted a
society based on small villages where people's behavior can be fairly
closely monitored by those around them -- for an industrialized economy
based in cities, it obviously has its drawbacks. But for both of these
authors, cities in themselves are an invitation to social collapse.
Finally, I think one of the major concerns of _The Dispossessed_ is whether
a society like the one on Anarres could survive, given human nature. There
are signs of change (for the worse) in the book, so I did not perceive that
the society was in stasis. It certainly is an "ambiguous utopia."
-- Janice
-----
Janice E. Dawley ............. Burlington, VT
http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/jedhome.htm
Listening to: Songs of Faith and Devotion, Depeche Mode
"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." - Lily Tomlin
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