Deconstructing Utopia in science fiction: irony and the resituation of the subject in Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games. - Free Online Library
Via Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future
Utopian formulations, in some form or another, formed the basis of science fiction (SF) at its inception (1) and can be said to still lie at the root of most SF texts. Thomas More’s initial conception of an ideal society that exists in a space and time that is both ou topos (no place) and eu topos (happy place) is frequently played out in these texts in various poses of either thesis (where utopia proposes some positive ideal) or antithesis (where dystopia, or anti-utopia, warns of destruction), all in the interest of creating what Edward James (2003: 222), in his deliberations on utopias and anti-utopias, refers to as “alternate possibilities” for “a better world”. Nevertheless, as Carl Freedman (2000: 62) points out when he discusses the relationship between science fiction and utopia, “today the dominant Anglo-American colloquial meaning of the word is mildly pejorative: to describe an idea or plan as utopian usually connotes that it is naive and wildly impractical, though perhaps well-intended”. In the words of Michel Foucault, as he explains his conception of heterotopias, utopias now are generally seen to “afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold” (Foucault in Brown 1996: 57). In a postmodern climate, where the general inclination is to “deconstruct our unexamined assumptions about basic things” (Hutcheon 2006:115), such placidity hints at obsolescence; there is a pervasive sense that utopias are currently “producing a risibly impractical blueprint for a future society rather than (in most cases) a trenchant critique of contemporary institutions in fictional form” (James 2003: 220).
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