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Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.26.2.0419

2154-9648

Darren Jorgensen,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

An expanded new edition of Tom Moylan's Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination includes a heated if polite debate over the “critical utopia.” This takes place in a new introduction and additional chapter to the book, as well as in a series of reflections on Demand written by some of the more influential scholars in the field. The new introduction reminds us of the political context of the critical utopia, this being the feminist and New Left underpinnings of four novels in particular: Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Samuel Delany's Triton (1976). There are others too: Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971), Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975), Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines (1979), and Sally Gearhart's Wanderground (1979), all American novels published in the 1970s; but Moylan's definition of the critical utopia is not American. As he makes clear in a new, polemical introduction, these narratives are tied to the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s and 1970s and crucially to the experience of this time and its politics, refracted in these speculative time-traveling and multiworld fictions. As Lyman Tower Sargent writes, Moylan is interested in a politics not only of form but of content. These novels are tied to a generational experience of “equality for minorities and women, the growth of feminism, the drug culture, the changes in sexual behaviour, the intentional community movement, and the civil rights and antiwar movements” (245).The test of Moylan's ideas lies in a new chapter of Demand on Aldous Huxley's Island (1962). This is a novel that scholars such as Ruth Levitas have argued is an early critical utopia, but for Moylan, the hero or antihero of Island is not self-critical enough, nor is its heterosexist utopia equal enough, for it to really contain the kind of political punch that the later 1960s will demand. It is, like Le Guin's Dispossessed, a failed critical utopia because it plays out a heroic rather than a revolutionary narrative amid utopian and dystopian worlds. Revolutionary narratives will instead transform the experience of the 1960s and 1970s into novels that are about personal transformation. Moylan's argument against Island also has the effect of excluding this English novel from the critical utopian canon, tying this canon once again to the national, American experience of the long 1960s, its politics, successes, and failures. Yet, from the antiwar movement to demands for gendered, racial, and sexual equality, the cultural revolution was hardly an American phenomenon. Much of its impetus came from European ideas, as well as decolonization movements in Africa, Asia, and South America. The contradiction is captured by Moylan's choice of cover photograph for the new Demand. This is the famous photograph of U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos doing the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics. Yet beside them stands the Australian Peter Norman, and as Andrew Milner reminds us here, his support of the two winners on that day would cost him in future Olympic selections in Australia. So a utopian image for an American who is sympathetic to civil rights is for Australian viewers a dystopian reminder of their own country's conservatism.It may be that the critical utopia is also bound to this particularity, bringing up questions about the relationship of the utopian imagination to internationalism and to comparative utopianism, as well as to American social history. This, especially as the very notion of revolution upon which Moylan stakes the critical utopia, becomes something very different toward the end of the twentieth century, as it responds to a world politics of economic globalization and looming environmental disaster. In this sense, the absence of Kim Stanley Robinson from the new introductions, chapters, and afterwords of this edition is mysterious and makes the focus on Huxley appear arcane. As a writer with the generational experience of the 1970s, and a writer of American critical utopias in the 1990s and 2000s, Robinson appears to be carrying the flame for the subgenre. Moylan recognized this as long ago as 1995, when in this journal he argued not only that Pacific Edge (1990) is a critical utopia but that Robinson “contribute[s] to the new political momentum by way of an engaged utopian imagination, working as an artistic/intellectual stimulus for grasping the social relations and processes of the emerging postnational series of linkages” (1995, 19). Here the American critical utopia not only is possible past the 1970s but also assumes a postnational character. Robinson has published many more novels since Moylan's essay on Pacific Edge, and I for one take immense comfort from seeing the latest Robinson novels alongside dystopian post-cyberpunk and space opera fictions in my local chain bookstore. Yet his absence in this revised volume of Demand speaks, I suspect, to his problematic place as a writer who carries on the critical utopia into the twenty-first century but in doing so shifts some of its radical roots. For his fiction does have different qualities than Moylan's original batch of novels. He is probably less of a feminist and is certainly more of a technophile. Robinson is definitely an American writer, both in his choice of setting and in his political ideas, which are grounded in the settler colonialism of North America.So it is that this edition of Demand comes with provocative if problematic new material, as Moylan insists that the critical utopia be so many things: revolutionary, self-reflexive, feminist, and politically driven as well as politically transformative for the reader. The survival of the concept brings to light its national character, its dependence upon feminist and New Left politics, and ultimately its periodization. For if the critical utopia only came into being with the historical experience of the 1960s and 1970s, it must at some point come to an end or transform as this experience no longer plays itself out among the aging population of baby boomers. The demand that Moylan insists upon in this new edition of Demand is that the concept not be formalized, that the subject of the critical utopia remain true to this historical experience of revolutionary praxis. Yet the praxis of revolution has itself transformed, leaving the critical utopia stranded within its generation. In this sense, Moylan's new introduction to Demand sets up a problem for the life of the concept, a problem that has to do with just how much the radical consciousness of the 1960s and its political forms relate to postnational strategies for bringing about revolutionary change in the present.