I decided to do a little follow- up on my last post about Ivan Efremov and Soviet SF. It comes in three parts.
The first is a response to the question I was asked about other utopian SF novels, especially obscure ones. So, here are three additional titles I recommend.
The Strugatsky Brothers. Hard to Be a God (1964). It is a novel about the clash between utopia and history, and what happens when you try to straighten “the crooked timber of humanity” by force.
2. Samuel Delany, Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976). Not Soviet SF, of course, but a great, if unintentional, commentary on it. The novel show why utopia does not equal happiness for all, or even for most, and why human nature rebels against goodness, sweetness, and light (not to mention universal prosperity and sex change on demand).
Andrew Hunter Murray, The Sanctuary (2024). It is surprising and gratifying to read a contemporary novel that is acutely aware of the legacy of failed utopias, especially in relation to climate change. Solarpunk, green futures, and cli-fi pastorals have popped up in the vacant space of socialist and communist utopias. Without revealing anything about the ending (the novel is a thriller as much as it is an anti-utopia), let’s just say that you would not want to live on the sustainable island presided over by a benevolent visionary. And even if you did, your life would not be long enough for regrets.
And now for two quotes. These come from a highly recommended book by John Gray called Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007). At some point I will write an extensive review of this book, but here let me just outline its basic premise. Utopia and utopian ideologies are a secularization of the apocalyptic narrative common to most religions. This narrative presupposes that a millennium will ensue after a period of tribulations, in which humanity is purified by violence and suffering. Communism, Nazism, Islamism and any number of lesser “isms” are eager to bring about their own version of an End-Times. They are not concerned with creating a functioning, and thus necessarily imperfect, society that accommodates human nature but only with punishing “sinners”, “evil-doers”, “enemies of the people”, etc. Violence is not an incidental by-product of utopia. Violence IS utopia.
“The very idea of revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion. Modern revolutionary movements are a continuation of religion by other means” (Gray 2)
“A conflict-free existence is impossible for humans, and wherever it is attempted the result is intolerable to them. If human dreams were achieved, the result would be worse than any aborted Utopia…Utopias are dreams of collective deliverance that in waking life are found to be nightmares”(Gray 17).
And finally, a question. In 1976, an Air France Flight 139 was hijacked by two Palestinian and two German terrorists. The hostages were sorted out into Jews and non-Jews. One of the Jewish hostages, a Holocaust survivor, showed the German terrorist Wilfried Böse a camp tattoo on his arm. Böse protested "I'm no Nazi! ... I am an idealist.”1
What’s the difference?
The story of the hijacking and the Entebbe raid that freed the hostages is told in many books, movies and even video games. The quote is taken from the Wikipedia article on the subject.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid