Friday 4 March 2022

From The Lowlevel

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part one, Robin Hood's Barn, pp. 7-41.

In the Lowlevel, Svoboda was sold as a child to a thiefmaster. When he was twelve, an explosive slug from a guard's pistol smashed his left foot. He was reapprenticed to a fence and therefore learned to read and write. He has read Alice but wonders how many others have. At age thirty seven, he was an upper-level Guardian and Commissioner for Astronautics although we read unhappily that the Astronautical Department is a dead end. At sixty, he is Commissioner of Psychologics and has not found time to prosthetize the broken foot which pains him from inside a special shoe.

A hard life in a hard future and an unpromising start to a future history series. Why can't we read about some utopian futures just for a change?

5 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

Utopia is much, much harder to do interestingly that dystopia. Conflict drives story, and a utopia would have less.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

But a utopia would have interesting explorations, discoveries, learning experiences and character developments. I think it can be done.

S.M. Stirling said...

It's not that a Utopia would be less pleasant to -experience-, it's just that generally speaking it's far less interesting to -describe- in a story.

That's why stories traditionally -end- with "and they lived happily ever after".

As Tolstoy's character put it, all happy families are alike, but each unhappy one is unhappy in a unique way.

This leaves aside the question of whether utopia is a worthy objective for human action, and of course the verdict on that is that it isn't. If you try for heaven, you get hell.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

James Blish and Norman L. Knight had a story about an inter-species marriage that ended "And they lived happily ever after but it wasn't easy."

I think that, if we get anything that we might now regard as a utopia, then it will not have been directly aimed at but will instead be a by-product of getting a lot of other things right.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I agree more with Stirling's comments than with your own. An alleged Utopia will be hard to DO convincingly. A society with no conflicts and problems simply would not be interesting.

To say nothing of being IMPLAUSIBLE.

Ad astra! Sean