Dystopias probably started as somebody's idea of utopia...
I think this so misses the point about writing fictions about The Future (or about Futures).
[A] new book hopes to harness the power of science fiction to plot out a more optimistic path for the real world.
The trouble with that is that plenty of utopias are pretty horrendous when you think about them, or at the very least, the society that is presented as utopian turns out to have its dark and crawly side when you turn over the stone.
Ursula Le Guin pretty well tagged this forever in the subtitle of The Dispossessed - 'An Ambiguous Utopia'. Because I can think of plenty of people (probably including moi) who would be less than utterly chuffed to be living on Anarres (I'm not saying it's BAD, anymore than I was saying the Gay Brixton Squats of the 70s were BAD, just that, really not my thing, you do your thing, and I'll do my thing, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks - get me out of this flashback, quick.)
Similarly, the situation in Naomi Mitchison's Solution 3 isn't perfect, although the background is that there was close-to-apocalyptic societal breakdown not too long ago, and they are in the process of rebuilding. It's trying to do well, but even so, there are the critiques of e.g. Lilac about what becomes of the clones, and the normal human misery of unrequited love and the problems of combining motherhood and work, etc.
As for the idea that [S]cience fiction actually needed to supply ideas that scientists and engineers could actually implement
let's not even go there. That could not possibly go wrong, could it? This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2146182.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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