In an age of the hydrogen bomb, industrial pollution and global warming, most readers find utopias naïve. Still, a deep yearning runs among science fiction readers and people in general for a better world: one with no war, no disease, ho hunger and no poverty. The United Federation of Planets of “Star Trek” fame appeals to many science fiction fans for this very reason.
Despite this, many science fiction stories today are more likely to be dystopias than utopias. A dystopia is the opposite of a utopia: it’s an example of a bad society in which all has gone wrong. There are many famous dystopias in science fiction, including George Orwell's “1984”, Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World”, Ray Bradbury's “Fahrenheit 451” and Anthony Burgess's “A Clockwork Orange.”
A couple of other ideas closely related to the utopia and dystopia also appear in science fiction.
One kind is the “outopia,” which is a utopia that could not unrealistically exist. “Outopia” literally means “no place.” The perfect Earth of “Star Trek” arguably is an outopia, as a world without personal conflict seems unlikely, even if war, disease, hunger and poverty were ended.
Another is the “heterotopia,” which literally means the "other place” or a world of imagined possibilities. An example is Samuel R. Delany's novel “Trouble on Triton,” in which the independent society of the human colony on Triton is compared to the culture of Earth and of colonized Mars.
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(c) 2008 Rob Bignell
Tags:
dystopia, heterotopia, outopia, types of science fiction, utopia
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