Anyone following my blog should realize I have a strong libertarian streak, which may in fact confuse some people who’ve read my Hostile Takeover books and/or Prophets. The planet Bakunin plays a central role throughout, and while it has a functioning anarcho-capitalist society, its not portrayed as a shining Heinleinesque utopia of the competent man, I’ve described it more a Somalia with venture capital.
So why would I take a world embodying some of my deeply held ideals and portray it in an, at best, ambiguous light?
There are two reasons.
First reason, utopias are boring places to write about. We have the perfect society, now what? In order to have any conflict the story has to turn into soap opera dealing with nothing larger than the character’s personal interrelationships, or you have to pull elements from outside the story into the “perfection,” or throw your characters outside their perfect world (see: Star Trek TOS). In all three cases, the “utopia” is relegated into the background.
Second reason, a utopia requires one of two prerequisites. The first possibility is the idea that human society is somehow perfectible and everyone will realize the perfection once its glory is made manifest, a belief I find naive and somewhat creepy. The second possibility is much more sinister; that those forming the utopian order insure that everyone realizes and accepts the perfect order. Human history is painted red with the blood of those who didn’t accept the latest vision of the perfect society. Utopia, in practice, is synonymous with totalitarianism.
Every time I see a perfect society in SF; orderly, clean, free of acrimony or dissent, I have to wonder what happened to the oddballs, the assholes, and the people that didn’t fit in to this perfect realm. Where are the asylums, the prisons, the re-education camps, the mass graves. . .
(And in a truly amazing coincidence, after I wrote this, I ran across a video that perfectly encapsulates this thought, and ties it into our beliefs about the nature of man.)
