Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

Among the earliest types of science fiction stories are utopias, or stories that describe ideal societies. Such tales are a perfect match for science fiction, which extols the benefits of science and technology. If reason and new inventions can make our lives better (as they have done by reducing disease, increasing food production and distribution and offering material prosperity), then there may be no limit to what such progress may yield.

An example of a science fiction utopia is Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” In his society, people only do work that they enjoy and that supports the common good. This leaves them time for cultivating the arts and sciences.

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. Indeed, utopias often aren’t practical blueprints for human society, but they are extremely inspirational.

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.

If tempted to write a utopia, keep in mind that the society will face several problems among readers:

n It will stretch plausibility - No society can be so perfect that it all problems disappear, for often what matters most to us are personal problems, not larger economic/political/philosophical issues. Even if every one of us is fed, medically cared for and materially prosperous, there still will be the plagues of love gone wrong, of office politics and of death.

n It will read more like a description than a story - That’s bad news because usually the descriptions of a perfect society are downright dull. Consider Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” The journey through Hell (the dystopia) is far more interesting than the journey through Heaven.

n It will run against the cynical bias of our times against utopias - Even if you address the personal psychological problems and human interaction and provide beautiful descriptions, the world will seem more like a suffocating dystopia to some readers. Indeed, some blog sites are even dedicated to showing why Star Trek’s “socialist” society would never work.

Even for those readers willing to entertain the notion of a utopia, this type of story often possesss one fatal flaw: It is about the mature society rather than the growing pains taken to get from our culture to the utopia. While each of us dreams of a perfect society, exactly how we will get there interests many readers - and offers a lot more intriguing dramatic action as well!