TIME October 9, 2017
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human connection by magnifying them
to a greater degree, even while hoping
that that magnification doesn’t play
out in real life. “Through stories, you
can come to know loss without having
to lose anything and therefore more
highly prize what you have,” says Adam
Johnson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
ofThe Orphan Master’s Son. “Still, I bet
Dante wondered why theInferno was
the big hit, rather thanParadiso!”
One obvious roadblock to writing
good utopian fiction is that perfect
societies are, well, perfect—meaning
they don’t leave much room for
narrative tension. While, as Mandel
observes, “if you write a story set in
a dystopian setting, there’s kind of
automatic, built-in drama.”
One author who has chosen toIN THE PAST 100 YEARS, TECHNOLOGY HAS MADE OUR
lives easier, safer, healthier and longer. So why does most
of our science fiction spell doom and gloom instead of hope
and cheer?
Pessimistic fiction has thrived in recent years. Emily
St. John Mandel was a National Book Award finalist for 2014’s
Station Eleven, about a theater troupe in a postapocalyptic
America. And dystopian novels like Lidia Yuknavitch’s
The Book of Joan and Omar El Akkad’sAmerican War—not
to mention classics like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret
Atwood’sThe Handmaid’s Tale—have recently graced
best-seller lists. In August, N.K. Jemisin won her second
Hugo Award, forThe Obelisk Gate; its level of optimism can
be gauged by the name of the series it belongs to, the Broken
Earth. One finalist for the prize, Becky Chambers’ space
operaA Closed and Common Orbit, did depict an intergalactic
society living in relative peace. But the earthlings in the story
are very much the negative example, having fled to outer
space after destroying their home planet. As yet, we’re still
awaiting a standout, literary version ofThe Jetsons, serene in
its technological speculation.
THOMAS MORE COINEDthe wordutopia in the book of
the same name in 1516. Utopianism peaked 300 years
later, according to Chris Jennings, author ofParadise
Now: The Story of American Utopianism. “The surge of
technology that we call the Industrial Revolution produced
this optimism, partly because they just simply hadn’t seen
it play out very far,” he says.
Edward Bellamy’sLooking
Backward (1888), for instance,
imagined a future with short
workweeks, full retirement
at age 45 and instantaneous
delivery of goods. As machines
arrived that could do the
work of 100 people in the
same amount of time, it was
reasonable to conclude that
in the near future, people would labor less and reap more
abundance. Yet a century and a half later, we’ve seen a sharp
spike in productivity “without a commensurate drop in labor
and poverty,” Jennings says. As a result, “we no longer see
technology as this magic panacea for the world’s ills.”
In fact, many have come to see it as pernicious.
“Technology has made life easier,” Mandel concedes, “but
I think it’s also made life more ghostly. There’s a sense of
disconnection and distractedness that’s come alongside
the incredible benefits that we’ve gained from technology.”
Some writers may want to examine those small cracks in
Paradise lost: The
mysterious case of the
missing utopian novels
By Sarah Begley
‘Still, I bet Dante
wondered why
theInferno was
the big hit, rather
thanParadiso!’
ADAM JOHNSON,
Pulitzer Prize–winning author
ofThe Orphan Master’s SonILLUSTRATION BY REBEKKA DUNLAP FOR TIME