'A rather more orthodox Christian reader of SF might suggest that utopian and dystopian fictions reflect the human fear of Heaven and Hell.'

Science fiction author Philip Purser-Hallard looks at faith in an increasingly futuristic world

In writing about science fiction (SF) and faith I often mention utopian fiction, in which authors describe the perfect worlds which might come into existence if only we all saw sense and got rid of money / governments / religion / technology / all the men (delete according to personal taste).

The utopia is a very old literary form – dating back at least to Plato’s fourth-century-BC treatise The Republic – but has become associated with SF in the past century or so, as the idea that an ideal society might have been squirreled away anywhere in our present world has come to seem less and less likely.

I’ve talked less about the contrasting tradition of the dystopia – the worst imaginable society, depicted in morbidly creative forms by writers of diverse political persuasions. Even so, dystopias tend to capture the public imagination to an extent utopias rarely achieve.

Newspeak from Nowhere

Often this happens in ways which their authors might not have expected. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was a response to an emerging global reality of the 1940s: totalitarian states working to police the thoughts of their populaces through propaganda, slogans and a systematic apparatus of spying and betrayal.

The actual medium of oppression which Orwell envisaged – the novel’s SF element, the telescreens – was far more incidental. These days, totalitarianism seems less immediate to us, but Orwell’s story is invoked with ominous ubiquity in discussions of technological surveillance.

Conversely, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a satire on 1930s American consumer society, which imagines (and sharply criticises) a ‘utopia’ based on those values. But it, too, is mostly remembered for its SF content, being routinely mentioned in connection with attempts at human cloning or genetic tampering.

The fact that these technologies have been instrumental in constructing well-known dystopias is seen as indicating that we should be rightly suspicious of them.

By contrast, almost nobody remembers the mechanics of utopias. I’ve yet to see a newspaper article suggesting that politicians should take their cues from William Morris’s News from Nowhere, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.

Brave New Jerusalem

Where utopias ultimately fail to convince is in their portrayal of dissent. Often, the self-evident rightness of our ‘perfect’ system is assumed to have eliminated all that silly business of other people disagreeing with us. (There’s a parallel with a certain type of Christian church here, if only I could put my finger on it.)

In fact, the precise difference between a utopia and a dystopia may be that the former contains no dissidents. Pretty much any political system could give rise to a perfect society, provided everyone involved believed in it utterly.

One of the earliest dystopias – in the Book of Revelation, no less – is identifiable as such because it imposes marks of loyalty upon the populace (the Number of the Beast), and ruthlessly suppresses its dissenting minority.

A rather more orthodox Christian reader of SF might suggest that utopian and dystopian fictions reflect the human fear of Heaven and Hell.

Personally, I have serious reservations about damnation, and some sympathy with the idea found in liberation theology that the Kingdom of God must be built by human effort here on Earth. I feel that a true utopia or dystopia would be one which humanity had reached through human means, rather than the intervention of a God or Antichrist.

Someone less orthodox still might go yet further, and argue that our traditional pictures of Heaven and Hell are themselves expressions of the same universal fascinations which drive utopian and dystopian fiction.

I’m not entirely sure I’d disagree. But at least I’d be allowed to, if I wanted.

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