Jenna Wood

March 31, 2019

"Ambitopia": the Future of Utopian Fiction

          In Eleanor Tremeer's recent article, "Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever," she cites sci-fi author Redfern Jon Barrett's definition of an "ambitopia" as "storytelling that shows us better societies as well as oppressive regimes" (Tremeer). This concept seeks to reconcile the hopeful idealism of utopias with the more interesting and relatable conflict dystopias bring to readers. While utopias in fiction may be described as ideal worlds living in stasis with no conflict, they also work to bring real-life utopias closer to reality (Tremeer). Barrett claims that "no work of dystopian fiction has ever stopped the scenarios it portrays from happening," but utopian works often inspire proactive changes, such as how the utopian elements of Star Trek have inspired dozens of scientific inventions (Tremeer). An ambitopia, therefore, would be arguably more hopeful than the typical dystopian novel, probably featuring successful steps of recovery that takes place after the conflict ends.

          The term ambitopia can perhaps most accurately be applied to The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin among all the books we've read so far in our class, as the narrative depicts a man torn between two societies claiming to be utopias while hindered by varying dystopian elements. However, when comparing it to the conventions of utopian and dystopian fiction, the question arises of whether or not this term reflects an upcoming shift in genre, as well as how many recent utopian works could be considered ambitopias. My initial step was to search for the most recent utopian literature I could find, as while dystopian literature may be more common nowadays, there are usually no better societies simultaneously described in the text. Panem in The Hunger Games, for example, is never compared to countries outside the futuristic North America. I began with the list of utopian literature by century on Wikipedia and looked for entries in the twenty-first century. Aside from a manga series from 2001 that, as far as I know,  does not directly address the utopian conventions it uses, there was only one utopian novel mentioned after the year 2000.

          Marshall Brain's Manna, a short novel released in 2003 that is free to read on his website, is a short novel set in a hypothetical 2050. Manna can be classified as an ambitopia in that it explores both the dystopia of its future America and the utopia of its future Australia. The firsthand present-time account of living in America in the first chapters sets it apart from works like Herland and even Ecotopia, as the countries outside the utopias are only discussed while in a better society in order to assert that society's superiority. That being said, Manna uses the Socratic dialogue and bare-boned characterization listed as utopian conventions on our course website, and it shares more in common with utopian fiction than dystopian fiction, despite the prevalence of dystopian novels over utopian novels in the early twenty-first century.

          In order to find another example of a utopian novel written in the last nineteen years, I ended up on the Late 20th Century category page at UtopianFiction.com, which also includes the handful of texts written in our century. The only utopian novel listed from the twenty-first century in this collection was The Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer, with its last book Hybrids released in 2003. While neither Wikipedia's nor Utopian Literature's lists should be considered conclusive given the large number of novels being published every year around the globe, they are still evidence of the lack of purely-utopian fiction in the last twenty years. It isn't that utopian worlds are no longer possible to produce, as glimpses of better societies are still showcased in every media type, it is that they are no longer prompted to exist by themselves.

          Appreciation of genre is mostly subjective, but Tremeer's article proposes some pitfalls of utopian literature that prevent newcomers from reading and writing it. "Glossing over societal inequalities, ascribing to an exclusive ideology, or just straight up whitewashing the future" are some key points, as well as the fact that "the drive to create a perfect society has led to some of the worst human rights violations in history, and those responsible for many dystopias, both real and fictional, believed them to be perfect worlds" (Tremeer). In an article of similar topic, Luke Kingma theorizes that dystopias are so popular with millennials, "a demographic that will make up nearly half the workforce by 2020," because studies show they are "one of the most cynical generations in modern history" (Kingma). In her 2019 research post, "The Irony of High School Dystopias and Their Appeal," Melissa Bray points out that "the main drive for someone to pick up and persevere through a novel is that is has to be interesting, and what readers find most interesting is when the characters or situations in a novel relate to the reader’s own life." Her post expresses that since young people today believe they are living in a dystopia, they are more prone to reading dystopian fiction.

          These articles and the recorded trend of utopian fiction in the twenty-first century feed into an evolving genre of ambitopia: the current zeitgeist of cynicism has not entirely trampled out hope for the future, but literature nowadays is stunted from being purely optimistic due to real-life pressure. "Utopian thinking," as Philippe Van Parijs has written in his 2013 proposal to adopt utopian economic policies, "is not enough, but it is more indispensable than ever" (Parijs 180).  If utopias are necessary in literature in the twenty-first century, it seems to be that their place is in ambitopia fiction that contrasts the better society with the oppressive regime many readers around the world believe they are living in.

Works Cited

Brain, Marshall. Manna. BYG Publishing, Inc., 2012. http://marshallbrain.com/manna.htm

Bray, Melissa. "The Irony of High School Dystopias and Their Appeal." UHCL Coursesite. 2019. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5439utopia/models/resposts/rp19/19rp1/rp1Bray.html

Kingma, Luke. "Glimpse: Utopian Fiction Could Help Us Unlock the Bright Future We Never Imagined." Futurism, 1 Nov. 2018, https://futurism.com/glimpse-utopia-dystopia-science-fiction. Accessed 31 March 2019.

Mastin, Luke. "Late 20th Century - Utopian Literature." Utopian Literature, 2008, http://www.utopianfiction.com/late20th.html. Accessed 30 March 2019.

Tremeer, Eleanor. "Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever." Gizmodo, 7 Nov. 2018, https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-we-need-utopian-fiction-now-more-than-ever-1830260945. Accessed 30 March 2019.

Van Parijs, Philippe. "The Universal Basic Income: Why Utopian Thinking Matters, and how Sociologists can Contribute to it." Politics & Society, vol. 41, no. 2, 2013, pp. 171-182.