Though H.G. Wells first articulated it for modern times, and the Bomb made it a real possibility, apocalypse as a story is at least as old as the Bible. But so, too, is its opposite:the story of paradise. The western Bible begins with the Creation and the Garden of Eden, and ends with the Earthly Heaven after the Last Judgment.
As a literary form (as a tale in writing), the story of paradise on Earth is the older, at least in the form we call utopias, after the prototype with that title by Thomas Moore in the 16th century.
The form which utopias take has changed. From an isolated and separated but nearly ideal society--usually on an undiscovered island or hidden land--it became a society of the future, or on another planet, or in a parallel reality. These were all locations in 20th century utopian novels by, once again, H.G. Wells.
Utopian tales led to stories in which societies became far worse: a story form called "anti-utopia" or more often now, a dystopia.
For stories of apparent opposite extremes, utopias and dystopias are closely related. Most utopias were motivated by what their writers saw was wrong with existing societies, the dystopias of the times. Utopias were veiled criticisms of existing societies, especially when opposing one's own government and society was too dangerous to do overtly.
Some dystopian stories were in fact critiques of actual societies purporting to be utopias-in-the-making, at least partially. Probably the best example of this is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, critiquing features of the Soviet state. (Not coincidentally perhaps, Zamyatin also wrote one of the most perceptive appreciations of H.G. Wells.) Dystopian stories may even describe a future that already exists somewhere, though unfamiliar to most readers.
Underlying many utopias and dystopias alike is the question of equity and inequities, which is a conspicuous factor in an even deeper question: what does it mean to be human, and how does a human society express that?
Dystopias based on techologies are the most familiar. Either technologies are too dominant in a wealthy society (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World) or technologies are used by the powerful few to dominate a society of the many deprived (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Whether uniformly prosperous or a mix of elite and relative poor, technological dystopias institutionalize too much control, either by the machines themselves, or of the many by the few. In all cases they lead to soulless lives, while ruining (or simply abandoning) the natural world. A variation of this story is dominance by a particular technology, like computers or robots.
Things To Come is also a classic example of another relationship: the utopia that comes after apocalypse and dystopia. In fact, this movie contains three alternatives in its three parts. In the first part, set at Christmas 1940, a modern city is bombed from the air, starting a mechanized war that goes on for decades. No large cities had yet been bombed in this way in 1936, and these scenes eerily presage the London Blitz. The film's second section presents a post-apocalyptic dystopia, devastated and plague-ridden, ruled by a warlord called the Boss. The third section depicts the building of a technological utopia.
Apocalyptic and dystopian stories can function as cautionary tales: they tell us what to avoid. Apart from our frequent failure to avoid doing in the real world what such stories in the past warned us against, the dystopian mode is insufficient. It suggests what could go wrong. But it does not offer a vision to emulate, that may serve as motivation in making a better future. That's the job of utopias.
For our time there is, as far as I know, only one major example of a utopian future enabled by technologies: the Star Trek saga. It is known around the world, and goes far beyond technology itself, or any other such utopian story, to model and embody the process of making a better future.
Though the utopia based on rejection of technologies has its most famous origins in England, in its forms most relevant to the actual future it is characteristically American. Even actual utopian communities (such as the New England Brooks Farm experiment in the time of Emerson and Hawthorne) were established based at least partly on this rejection.
But in a larger sense this utopian idea can be said to have arisen from the essence of America, beginning in the Elizabethan Age when the New World of the Americas was, to Europeans, the embodiment of utopia.
But perhaps the most potent myth for the actual human future arose in America at a peculiar historical time. In the late 19th century, just as H.G. Wells was imagining his Time Machine in England, the United States was at the point of finally and tragically ending its uneasy balance between the land of natural bounty with the cultures that lived within that context, and the machine-dominated urban civilization largely imported from England and Europe.
It is my belief, and the main thesis of this project, that both of these utopian visions are crucial to envisioning and enacting a hopeful future in our real world. That a synthesis of their best elements must be achieved to even have a human future.
For with the nuclear age, and now even more clearly in the climate crisis age, the alternate if interpenetrating extremes of possible futures have become a binary choice. We will have utopia (a much better and more just society) or we will have apocalypse. Or as Buckminster Fuller said in the 1960s: utopia or oblivion. For not to go in one direction is to go in the other.
Our leading utopian storyteller today, Kim Stanley Robinson, has recently taken to commenting that our future prospects are so dire that survival without a major extinction event constitutes a utopian vision. In other words, utopia is defined as simply avoiding apocalypse.
So next time, we start with Star Trek.
