io9 has an article entitled “Charles Stross Explains Why UK Scif Is More Hopeful Than US Scifi.” The title left me baffled, as if I had seen an article entitled “Stephen Hawking Explains Why Siberia Is Hotter Than the Photosphere of the Sun.”

My impression has long been that British science fiction is darker and more depressing than what’s produced in America. Stephen Baxter is generally quite downbeat, as (to a lesser extent) is Alastair Reynolds. If I had to describe the mood of either author’s works in a single word, it would probably be “bleak.” Peter F. Hamilton is more upbeat, but I still don’t think I’d call him optimistic.

Even more positively portrayed futures usually seem to be used as setting for dark stories. Neal Asher’s Polity universe is very optimistic in most respects-life is very good for the great majority of humanity- but the plots and events are usually pretty dark. Iain M. Bank’s Culture is perhaps the most utopian society in science fiction, but it’s largely there as a backdrop for some of the most depressing stories in science fiction.

I haven’t read Ken MacLeod, but my understanding is that a number of his books portray an anarchosocialist future society in a pretty positive way, so there’s that. Still, darkness seems to be the general trend.

I’m not saying this as a criticism of these authors; I like dark. But I’m wondering: Is my assessment correct, or is there some big strain of optimistic British SF that I’ve missed?

At last week’s Mind Meld at SF Signal, the question asked was:

What are the best examples of SF/F worldbuilding?

This is a question I like to think about, since I think worldbuilding- and especially the process of extrapolating how this or that technology or social change would affect the world- is one of the core virtues of science fiction that distinguishes it from more conventional fiction. People always say- or chant- “All fiction is about people,” and in a trivial sense that’s true, but it’s often less true in science fiction than in other genres. A science fiction story certainly can be about people (that is, the psychology of specific individuals, or some alleged truth about the “human condition”), but it doesn’t have to be, and that’s one of its strengths.

(This, I think, lies at the core of why science fiction is held to be inferior to “literature:” it rejects mainstream culture’s privileging of emotion and socialization over other human faculties, such as reason. Most people- and, what’s more important, most opinion-shapers in this area – are primarily socially/emotionally/people oriented, and people often consider subjects outside their own field of interest and/or competence is to be inferior or unworthy. It’s also a common human tendency to find people who aren’t like you to be some mixture of baffling, pitiful, and repulsive, and so disdain for the stereotypical nerd spills over onto the interests and pastimes of the stereotypical nerd. There are other factors, but I think this is the heart of it.)

But I digress. So, what are some of my favorites?

The Oikumene and worlds beyond of Jack Vance’s Demon Princes series (The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love, The Face, The Book of Dreams, currently available in two omnibus collections) is the first thing that comes to mind. There are so many interesting locations, and there are few who can make places come alive like Vance: Dar Sai and it’s bizarre mating customs and strange sports (someone ought to get a real hadual league going), the cruel and morbid people of Sarkovy, the diverse worlds of the vast Rigel Concourse, and many more. Vance is also the unsurpassed master of the fictional epigraph as world-building device.

The old BattleTech universe was tremendously detailed and interesting, especially if you have some of the old House sourcebooks that came out in 80s. It’s actually pretty remarkable how much background material they created for a tabletop war game, and I love that sort of thing. Granted, there’s no real reason anyone needs to know what the legal status of Lutheranism is in the Rasalhague District of the Draconis Combine in order to adjudicate battles between giant robots, but it’s fun to have information like that if you like to immerse yourself.

Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise is a good one, and my favorite post-apocalyptic setting. There’s lots of interesting stuff – Skyholm, a pre-war aerostat whose inhabitants rule parts of Western Europe, the well-intentioned but oppressive Maurai nation that rules the Pacific, the near-anarchic and rapidly industrializing Northwest Union, held together by its Lodges. There are lots of little things that made it feel more real to me- for instance, the fact that the nuclear war that shattered civilization centuries ago is called different things (the Doom, the Judgment, etc.) in different cultures, or how pre-Doom religions have evolved in subtly different ways in different parts of the world.

I love the setting for John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy, the Golden Oecumene. I can’t really do justice to it, because it’s it probably more densely packed with ideas than just about anything I’ve ever read; I sometimes felt as if every page had enough imagination to support whole novels. It also manages the feat- a difficult one, I’ve argued- of being an exciting story within a utopian society, without even the expedient of venturing into some hostile realm outside the utopia being portrayed. I love Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, for instance, but the Culture itself is really the least interesting thing about the books it appears in. Not so the Oecumene.

I’ve become increasingly fond of Neal Asher’s Polity universe. My favorite location in it is probably the world of Spatterjay from his book The Skinner, with its relentlessly nasty ecosystem. Spatterjay has some interesting social speculation, too: The bite of the Spatterjay leech transmits a virus that gradually changes the human body, making the host stronger, tougher, and faster-healing until he is almost unkillable. The human settlers thus have a rather casual attitude towards violence- they have prize-fights where disemboweling someone is merely the equivalent of a boxing TKO. He’ll be fine, just stuff his intestines back in and let him walk it off…

Finally, Larry Niven’s Known Space deserves a mention. I love the juxtaposition of hard science fiction elements with the more implausible or even outrageous concepts Niven comes up with. On the one hand, you’ve got carefully thought out use of reaction drives, slower-than-light travel and civilizations, and other hard SF staples. Even the more fanciful elements are dealt with rigorously- momentum is conserved when you’re sent through a teleporter, for instance. On the other hand… A billion years ago, telepathic aliens crushed a slave revolt with a massive telepathic transmission that killed all sapient life in the galaxy! Human adults are actually just the adolescent form of a race of hyperintelligent genocidal aliens from the galactic core! Luck is genetic, and you can selectively breed for it to create nigh-invulnerable people! It’s sort of like going to a really interesting physics lecture and then taking LSD halfway through, but without those pesky dissociative fugue states and giant spider attacks.

Any thoughts? Any favorites of your own to nominate?

I’d like to start by apologizing for the title of this post. I just had to somehow cram the Nozick reference in, no matter the cost.

A while back, Alex Zalben, writing at SciFi Scanner, posted the following:

Find me a sci-fi movie where there is a Utopia, and I will point out the worm in the apple. Every single time we are presented with a Utopian society on film, there is also a corrupt diplomat that’s running the show, or it’s a dream world, or it’s built on a city of good-hearted underground dwellers… You know what I’m saying because you’ve all seen such movies before.

So I’m going to make a broad statement and say: There is no such thing as Utopia in science fiction.

Zalben goes on to cite some examples from both film and books. He suggests that the lack of conflict inherent to a utopia makes drama effectively impossible.

You can include an actual utopia and still have conflict, either by having it threatened by outside forces, or by having characters from the utopian society venturing outside of it for some reason. In television, Star Trek: The Next Generation would be an example of both approaches, for instance. The portrayal of the Federation got “dirtied up” a bit by Deep Space Nine, and perhaps even a few of the later Next Generation episodes, but it was pretty explicitly utopian early on- all the talk about how humanity has evolved beyond this or that. Venturing into written science fiction, John C. Wright’s “Golden Age” trilogy is an example of the “outside threat” method, while several of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books use the latter method.

Zalben started out by talking about movies, though, and it’s possible that this method is poorly suited to feature films. It requires a lot of world-building, and that takes time: you need time to establish the utopia, and you need time to set up the non-utopian outside, and then you need time for the actual conflict, and if you want to actually explore the idea of the utopia in detail and still have a good conflict you end up with a movie that’s six hours long. The lack of actual utopias in cinema may be more a limitation of the medium than anything else.

It also depends on how strict your definition of “Utopia” is. If it requires absolute perfection and goodness, than conflict within the utopia is impossible. If it merely means a society that is vastly better than ours, you can still have internal conflict. There can still be bad people with bad intentions, they’re just not the ones running the show.

You can also have a utopian society where the conflict is not in the form of some sinister evil, but between good guys. For instance, much of the conflict in John C. Wright’s “Golden Age” Trilogy is not between heroes and villains, but between humane and well-intentioned people who disagree about cultural values and the future direction of their social evolution. An interesting wrinkle is that Wright’s utopia is libertarian, and both the protagonist and most of the antagonists firmly accept libertarian principles of justice, resulting in a conflict for the fate of their society where most of the combatants would never dream of using force, violence, or state coercion against each other. (Though some of the players don’t play quite so nicely…)

One problem is that if you actually portray the utopia in any detail, axe-grinding is all but impossible to avoid, which risks alienating potential readers. This can be overcome- I love Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, even though the Culture itself has a great deal of leftist wish fulfillment built into it- but it does have risks. If a society is portrayed as ideal or nearly so, everything makes a potential statement. Does religion still exist? What kind of government do they have, if any? How do they deal with criminals? (If they don’t have any, that too betrays certain assumptions.) What things are illegal, taboo, or disapproved of? How does the utopia remain in existence? Do they have a market economy and private ownership? What are their attitudes and practices regarding sex? Do they have marriage?

People differ on both what kind of society is desirable in theory (Most of the societies conceived by 19^th century utopians would be horrifying to me even if they worked as advertised) and on how societies work, and which ones are possible, in practice. Most portrayals of the future express ideological assumptions, whether or not they are explicit or even intentional, but utopia pushes the issue front and center by proclaiming what it portrays to be ideal. If you don’t think it’s ideal, or think it’s outright bad, than 1. you may enjoy the story less, and 2. you may like the author less, as a person. Different people have different limits in this regard. If John C. Wright had a radical political change of heart and decided to write about noble Communists colonizing the moon, building a perfect society there through the power of scientific socialism and mass terror, and then going to war against the plutocrats of Earth and heroically killing the entire reactionary population through man-made famine, my love of Wright’s previous work probably wouldn’t be enough to make me buy it.

One possible final problem is that so much science fiction is about change. Often the fictional changes took place between now and whenever the story happens, but quite often science fiction portrays societies in flux and transition. Most visions of utopia, on the other hand, are static- if you’ve attained the best possible society, change is degeneration. That can work fine for a story- a tale of a collapsing utopia could be very interesting- but that’s not really utopian fiction in the usual sense of the term. It’s ironic- science fiction is in one sense the only form of fiction that works for portraying a utopia, since no perfect societies exist circa 2008, and yet the idea of utopia clashes with one of science fiction’s principal themes and strong points.

I’d be curious to hear about you thoughts, or your favorite and least favorite utopian stories.