You'll find no such romanticized defeatism in the books of Kim Stanley Robinson. Although dystopias are supposed to be hellish, these days they’re played for kicks-darkly glamorous worlds filled with nourish cops, skateboarding hackers, and sexy-cute Japanese chicks offering designer drugs. Even glimpses of utopianism, such as the giddiness unleashed by the election of Barack Obama, now feel destined to end in disappointment if not crushing defeat.Īvatar not withstanding, pop energy swung decades ago to the side of dystopia, which, rather than asking us to explore political possibilities, urges us to revel in the thrills of oppression-the balefully beautiful neon-lashed high-rises of Blade Runner, the sinister doppelgangers enforcing the illusions of The Matrix, teenagers fighting to the death in The Hunger Games.
Merely to mention such hopes nowadays is to call up ghastly images of failure, not merely censors sharpening their scissors and babushkas queuing for bread but Checkpoint Charlie, the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Leap Forward toward the Killing Fields. How far we've fallen from those lofty 19 th-century dreams-the classless society, the withering away of the state, the happy news from Nowhere.
If any political ideal has taken a drubbing over the past hundred years, it's surely the left's vision of utopia.
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