The Wright Perspective: The Utopias of SF – The Crazy Years
My latest is up at Every Joe: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/09/17/lifestyle/utopias-science-fiction-best-world-raise-family/
Most imaginary worlds are interesting places to read about, but few are places one would like to live. We continue our look at the Utopias of Science Fiction with an eye to which perfect world is the best place to live and raise a family.
In our last episode, we saw two utopias where the laws of economics were just ignored. The writers, LeGuin and Holland, simply assumed that stores and shops and factories would somehow run, even without policemen to prevent theft, the militia to prevent riots, or slavedrivers and taskmasters to prevent malingering, goldbricking and featherbedding.
The writers of the next era, or at least some of them, attempted at least some explanation of how corruption of their nearly perfect societies would be prevented: L. Neil Smith outlaws Congress, a prime source of corruption, and Iain M. Banks outlaws human ownership of the means of production, by having artificial intelligences control and distribute all property, so that mankind need no more work for a living than a housecat needs hunt for rats to earn her keep. But unless the artificial intelligences are as incorruptible as archangels, this just shifts the problem one remove. In Ken MacLeod’s world, the suggestion seems to be that if troublemakers are given powerful military hardware to play with, and told to mug a gas giant filled with post-singularity superintelligences, everything will somehow work out.