Science fiction will save us! [Live long and prosper and may the force be with you.]

Back to utopia - The Boston Globe:

"In recent years, however, certain eminent contrarians... have lamented the wholesale abandonment of such utopian ideas of the left as the abolition of property, the triumph of solidarity, and the end of racism and sexism.

The question, for thinkers like these, is how to revive the spirit of utopia... without repeating the errors of what Jacoby has dubbed ''blueprint utopianism,' that is, a tendency to map out utopian society in minute detail. How to avoid, as Jameson puts it, effectively ''colonizing the future'?

Is the thought of a noncapitalist utopia even possible after Stalinism, after decades of anticommunist polemic on the part of brilliant and morally engaged intellectuals? Or are we all convinced, in a politically paralyzing way, that Margaret Thatcher had it right when she crowed that ''there is no alternative' to free-market capitalism?

...he invites us to explore an overlooked canon of anti-anti-utopian narratives that some, to echo Niebuhr, might find embarrassingly adolescent: offbeat science fiction novels of the 1960s and '70s.

Jameson, a professor of comparative literature at Duke, isn't talking about ''Star Trek' novelizations. Because of the Cold War emphasis on dystopias, Cold War writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delany had to find radical new ways to express their inexpressible hopes about the future, claims Jameson. At this moment of neoliberal triumphalism, he suggests, we should take these writers seriously - even if their ideas are packaged inside lurid paperbacks.

...Jameson, who's been writing about Dick, Le Guin, Delany, Brunner, and others in the pages of scholarly journals like Science Fiction Studies for 30 years, is reticent when it comes to the question of what makes a great anti-anti-utopian narrative. ''The talent or the greatness of science fiction writers," he said, ''lies in what individual solutions they have for a formal problem - the ban on graven images - that cannot be resolved. There's no universal recipe." But when it comes to the power of science fiction to spring us from what he claims is our current state of political paralysis, Jameson is enthusiastic. ''It's only when people come to realize that there is no alternative," he said, ''that they react against it, at least in their imaginations, and try to think of alternatives."

Can reading science fiction, I asked, help us decide between various utopian alternatives - urban vs. pastoral, statist vs. anarchistic? No, replied Jameson, insisting there are ''utopian elements" in each of these. What science fiction does afford us, he said, ''is not a synthesis of these elements but a process where the imagination begins to question itself, to move back and forth among the possibilities."

What contemporary science fiction author most inspires this ideal process? In ''Archaeologies," Jameson suggests it might be a former doctoral student of his, Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote his dissertation on Philip K. Dick and whose popular trilogy, ''Red Mars" (1992), ''Green Mars" (1993), and ''Blue Mars" (1995), explores the political, economic, and ecological crises that ensue when 21st-century colonists from Earth begin terraforming Mars. Instead of asking the reader to decide on any one of the colonists' competing utopian ideologies, Jameson said, Robinson ''goes back and forth between these various visions, [allowing us to see] it's not a matter of choosing between them but of using them to destabilize our own existence, our own social life at present.""