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:
Utopia is much, much harder to do interestingly that dystopia. Conflict drives story, and a utopia would have less.
But a utopia would have interesting explorations, discoveries, learning experiences and character developments. I think it can be done.
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.
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.
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
Post a Comment