Utopia, Dystopia, Speculative Fiction and Extinction

Hello. My name is Nicole Poll.

I'm Professor in English at Oxford Brookes University.

Since I has been a student in school,

but also later at the university have been

really interested and fascinated by thinking about the future

in different ways.

Conceptualising, different societies, different models of societies as well.

But why? In order to change and improve it

so as a literature student, but also now, as a scholar of literature,

I really paid attention to how literature can inform

political thought political activism and also shaped the world,

um, and and think about and shape our thoughts about how we think about the world.

So utopias utopian thought in its relations dystopias and speculative fiction

are perhaps one of the most important literary genres To do this

and a scholar of utopias called

utopias and dystopias

literature for living

literature for living is really important because it makes us think

about what kind of society do we want to live in?

How do we encourage equality, equity sustainability as well?

So this is what I want to focus on in these modules.

So this first section will be an introduction to

different definitions and debates around dystopia and utopia.

So let's start with the Utopia, and then I will move on to dystopia.

The question alone

opens really Pandora's box

debate.

The debate around dystopias and utopias in terms

of definition is really complex and money fold.

And certainly before we define dystopia, we need to think about what utopia is.

And the word utopia simply means no or not place.

It's kind of like a weird definition, isn't it?

Topples Smith's place and you, as an OU means no, we're not So Thomas More who coined

this term in 15 16, pungent

No Place with the Utopia. Good place. So it's no place and a good place,

and since then, since 15 16,

other times have joined this kind of subject or literary mode.

So we've got dystopia, anti utopia, negative utopia and so on.

Now Lyman Tower sergeant,

who is a prominent biographer and scholar of utopias and dystopias,

has defined utopianism as social dreaming.

Remember,

I said earlier that utopias and dystopias are about literature for living,

So this is about social dreaming, social dreaming,

our utopias that think about our society, how we can improve society for all of us.

It's not about the dreams that we all have when we sit on the bus or

train and think about what we do when we want a million in the lottery,

it's about the community.

It's about society in general. Social dreaming

and utopia,

Sergeant says, is a non existent society.

So that's really important,

non existent society described in considerable detail and normally located

in time and space that the author intended

reader

to view as better

then the society in which that reader lived.

So let's pause here for a moment.

Sergeant does not say that utopia is about being ideal or perfect,

and that's often a misconception made when you hear people talk about Oh,

Utopias is all about ideals and blueprints and blue sky thinking.

It's not about that at all.

It is about portraying societies, thinking about societies,

that they're better

than the here and now, better than the times when they were written.

So utopias are not blueprints as such,

or instruction manuals about how to build a better society at all.

So that's one aspect to really consider.

Then

I like to quote Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde is always important in this context, he says.

A map of the world that does not include utopia

is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out

the one country

at which humanity is always landing

and when humanity lands there, he says. It looks out

and seeing a better country set sail

progress. At the end, he says, it's the realisation of utopia.

So Oscar Wilde implies quite a lot of thoughts here. Number one, he says. Utopia.

Social dreaming isn't a central part of human culture and human nature.

And indeed,

what's important to consider is that utopias

and utopian thinking appear nearly in all cultures

might. And society is also in different ways. So the universal in some ways.

But what he also talks about is that

it's about progress that will work towards utopia.

Might never attain it. But we certainly want to strive towards it.

Okay, so these are the kind of thoughts around what utopias are

now, what are dystopias?

If utopias are descriptions of societies that are better

than the one written from what our dystopias,

dystopia or negative utopias sometimes have,

that term as well is a non existent society.

So we go back to this element

described in a considerable,

considerable detail

and normally located in time and space that the author intended to view as worse

than the society in which the reader lived

at first sight. It looks at utopian dystopia are basically opposites, aren't they?

One is better. One is worse.

But actually

that's not quite the case. You could argue that dystopia

is part of Utopia,

and it it really depends on how you interpret utopian utopian progress.

So some would say that even with Thomas More's

Utopia, published in 15 16,

the man who coined the term,

you find some elements of dystopia

in it.

What utopia does It privileges the rights of

the community over the rights of the individual,

some wood and have interpreted this

as forms of totalitarianism? There's no privacy.

There's no private property at all.

Personally,

I think that interpretation is possibly not correct. But we will come back to that.

What I like you to remember is that utopias and dystopias are

connected.

Might

and they're connected in content, but also an objective as well.

I hope that makes sense to you.

So you will be maybe studying all well, Huxley Elat words. Or you might have even

watched dystopian films. And do you see what I'm getting at that?

All these scenarios are actually quite ambivalent at times,

but I want to complicate things a little bit more so.

Margaret Atwood Handmaid's Tale But all to Oregon.

Craig, depending on what you're studying at school,

did not call her own books dystopias.

She

is often herself called the Prophet of Dystopia,

which is slightly ironic because she rejects this term.

She calls it speculative fiction,

right?

She doesn't want to have anything to do with science fiction and dystopias,

and she kind of muddled them up together because she thinks that

science fiction is nothing else than talking squids in outer space.

And I think she has a little dig here at Star

Trek and or the other science fiction films and scenarios.

So she uses the term speculative fiction. And it's a kind of super genre, really

that encompasses according to outboard loads

of different literary genres and modes,

and the underlying point that she makes is that

all of these genres are based on conjecture.

They project into the future or into another um, geographical location events,

societies that do not exist in the real world

now speculative fiction asks the questions. What if

if what if environmental disasters make women infertile and in

order to secure the survival of the human species.

Women's reproduction is regulated and surveyed.

There we have the Hunt Maid's Tale.

What if a virus outbreak threatens the survival of the human species again?

And what do we have?

Steven Soderbergh Film Contagion, which was one of the most watched film in 2019.

We have a similar scenario in Emily ST John Mandel Station 11,

which also predicts the, um,

spread of a pandemic.

But I also like to very quickly mentioned Mary Shelley,

who you might know from Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's Last Man,

written in 18 26 which probably is one of the

first extinction novels and also talks about a pandemic.

So these are all forms of speculative fiction we

might agree or not agree with with Margaret Atwood.

But the term speculative fiction is perhaps quite useful

because

it helps us also look at the purpose of what Utopias and dystopias are.

The term speculative fiction was first used in 1947 by Robert Highland,

who himself was a science fiction writer

and it describes now a form of literature that takes beyond the real world.

Now utopias and dystopias do exactly the same.

They create a tension between the real world,

the here and now and some kind of alternate world,

be it in the future or in a different geographical or vacation.

And they asked also the question that I mentioned earlier.

What if that's really important?

So what does that do to us as readers?

So we read this and we identify the gap between the here and now,

um, this other place, maybe the better place in Utopia.

And it generates this utopian desire in us that

we say we need to do something to create,

let's say, universal equality, um, to guarantee basic human rights for everyone.

So Utopia motivates us to think critically about our world, our society, and,

ideally sort of activates us to become change makers, or at least critics of society

dystopia. It is something very similar.

We identify

that were perhaps not that far removed from a totalitarian society,

a society in which we are repressed,

not given any freedoms where digital surveillance is paramount,

often under the pretext, of course, of the welfare of society and the common good.

Gregory Clay's would go as far as to argue that dystopias portray utopias are decade

and some literary texts.

We also identify utopias that contain dystopian elements.

So I come back to my point that I made earlier.

Utopias and dystopias are very tightly connected

now. Dystopia is a much younger genre, historically speaking than utopia.

And one change that has happened

in the late 20th and 21st century is that the gap

between the here and now and the future society has shrunk

right.

So writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson have

argued that we already live in dystopia.

Isn't that frightening?

We already live in dystopia, but he writes from the position from climate crisis.

So it's quite understandable why he argues, like this

now extinction narrative and the narratives and

pandemic dystopia such as severance piling model,

which came out in 2018, or the end of Men,

which is coming out soon or has already come out this year.

By Christina Sweeney. Barge

ET really foretell the outbreak of a pandemic in the not too distant future.

Isn't that ironic?

Scientists have warned us for years about the possibility of a pandemic.

So the question of what if is not at all absurd and whatever is, of course,

the questions that these fictions

am asked.

So to return to my initial point at the beginning

about the difference between the utopian dystopian the relationship,

both utopia and dystopia are forms of social critique.

They both proposed alternative visions of humanity's future.

But

what the visions look like depends very much

on the genre if their utopias or dystopias.