Theme: British fantasy fiction in the 20th century.(J. K. Rowling) Contents: Introduction

1.2. Analysis and development of fantasy fiction in the works of British writers at the turn of the 20th century
³In Britain and the United States, the editorial polemics of Michael Moorcock (associated for many years with New Worlds and its anthologies) and Harlan Ellison (Dangerous Visions [1967] and Again, Dangerous Visions [1972]) led a rebellious New Wave movement that facilitated the genre’s move in fresh directions. Sporting a countercultural disregard of taboos (particularly with regard to morals and sexuality), a fascination with mind-altering drugs and Eastern religions, and an interest in experimental literary styles, the movement pushed the boundaries of traditional science fiction until the genre was almost unrecognizable. Most avant-garde experimentalism had vanished by the late 1970s, but by then the New Wave had vastly expanded the subgenre of “soft” science fiction. (“Soft” SF is typically more concerned with exploring social aspects of the near future and of “inner space,” while “hard” science fiction features technology-for-technology’s-sake.)

In contrast to earlier decades, traditional science fiction of the late 1960s and early ’70s reached unprecedented popularity on television and in film. American SF television series, such as Star Trek (1966–69; founded by Gene Roddenberry), may have primed film producers and audiences alike for cinema adaptations of “serious” science fiction. Fahrenheit 451 (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Charly (1968)—based on works by Bradbury, Clarke, and Daniel Keyes, respectively—earned critical praise and attracted a growing number of directors and actors to the genre. If any doubt remained about the commercial viability of SF cinema, the blockbuster movies Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) proved that science fiction had finally moved beyond its drive-in B-film status. In fact, U.S. box-office receipts for science fiction, fantasy, and horror films jumped from 5 percent in 1971 to nearly 50 percent by 1982; although the share fell somewhat in subsequent years, science fiction continued to be one of the most important Hollywood movie formats.

The spectacular nature of science fiction’s thematics played very strongly to Hollywood’s technical advantages over rival cinemas in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, and Mumbai (then Bombay). After the 1970s, the American SF film with its state-of-the-art special effects became science fiction’s public face. Science fiction films such as the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009, 2015), the Alien series (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997), and the Jurassic Park series (1993, 1997, 2001, 2015) became major money earners worldwide.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Heroic fantasy, which had remained a minority taste in Britain and elsewhere for many decades, captivated a new generation and emerged in the 1990s as a dominant subgenre known to devotees as “sword and sorcery.” One indication of the changing commercial reality was the 1992 reorganization of SF’s largest professional association, the Science Fiction Writers of America, into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. Undreamed-of book sales of such fantasy works as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997; U.S. title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) and succeeding volumes brought wildly successful film adaptations of the Harry Potter books (2001–11) as well as of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (2001–03).

Sir Thomas More’s learned satire Utopia (1516)—the title is based on a pun of the Greek words eutopia (“good place”) and outopia (“no place”)—shed an analytic light on 16th-century England along rational, humanistic lines. Utopia portrayed an ideal society in a hypothetical “no-place” so that More would be perceived as undertaking a thought experiment, giving no direct offense to established interests.

Since More’s time, utopias have been attractive primarily to fringe political thinkers who have little practical redress within the power structures of the day. Under these conditions, a published thought experiment that airs hidden discontents can strike with revelatory force and find a broad popular response.

Utopias can be extravagant castles-in-the-air, nostalgic Shangri-Las, provocative satires, and rank political tracks thinly disguised as novels. Society’s esteem for utopian thinking has fluctuated with the times. The failure of Soviet communism caused an immense archive of utopian work to shift catastrophically in value from sober social engineering to dusty irrelevancy. The line between reforming insight and political crankdom is often thin.

Utopias thrived amid the 19th century’s infatuation with scientific progress. Many philosophers—Karl Marx included—thought that historical forces and the steady accumulation of rational knowledge would someday yield an “end state” for history. According to this way of thinking, the thoughtful futurist needed only to spot and nurture tomorrow’s dominant progressive trends and kill off the feudal superstitions of false consciousness; then social perfection would arrive as surely as the ticking of a clock.

Fictional successes along this line included Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), in which a Bostonian awakes from a mystical sleep in the year 2000 to find industry nationalized, equal distribution of wealth to all citizens, and class divisions eradicated—a process that Bellamy called Nationalism. Bellamy Nationalist clubs sprang up nationwide to discuss his ideals, and the Nationalists were represented at the 1891 Populist Party convention; socialist leader Eugene V. Debs adopted many of the tenets of the Nationalist program. William Morris, who was appalled by Bellamy’s depiction of a rational, bureaucratized industrial state, countered with News from Nowhere, a British vision of a pastoral utopia.

German politician Walther Rathenau wrote technological utopias, Von Kommenden Dingen (1917; In Days to Come) and Der neue Staat (1919; The New Society), in which he rejected nationalized industries in favour of greater worker participation in management; in the turbulence of Weimar society, he was assassinated by anti-Semitic nationalists.

H.G. Wells became a particularly ardent and tireless socialist campaigner. In works such as A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928), and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), he foresaw a rationalized, technocratic society. Yet Wells lived long enough to see the atomic bomb, and his last essay, “Mind at the End of Its Tether” (1945), darkly prophesied extinction for the human race, which, in his later opinion, lacked the creative flexibility to control its own affairs.

In B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), rewards and punishments are employed to condition the members of a small communal society. In Walden Two Revisited (1976), Skinner was more explicit: “Russia after fifty years is not a model we wish to emulate. China may be closer to the solutions I have been talking about, but a communist revolution in America is hard to imagine.”

Technocratic utopias like those envisioned by Wells and Skinner have a serious conceptual difficulty: where, how, and why is the process of “improvement” to stop? It is hard to champion “progress” by depicting a world in which further progress is impossible. This paradox does not apply to the pastoral utopia, which turns its back on technology to seek a timeless world of stability and peace. The pastoral utopia generally functions as an imaginary refuge from the technological forces that are so visibly warping the author’s real-world landscape. Pastorals tend to be quiet, thoughtful village retreats devoid of smokestacks, newspapers, bank loans, and annoying traffic jams. Major works in this vein include Morris’s News from Nowhere, Samuel Butler’s satiric Erewhon (1872), James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933; films 1937 and 1973), Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic Island (1962), and Ernest Callenbach’s green postindustrial Ecotopia (1975).

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) depicts an anarchist state striving to fulfill its own ideals, but like most modern SF utopias, it emphasizes ambiguity rather than claiming that history is on the author’s side. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian Trilogy—Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996)—describes planetary settlers creating an idealist pioneer society under Martian physical conditions.

A central difficulty of utopian fiction is the lack of dramatic conflict; a state of perfection is inherently uneventful. The counter to utopia is dystopia, in which hopes for betterment are replaced by electrifying fears of the ugly consequences of present-day behaviour. Utopias tended to have a placid gloss of phony benevolence, while dystopias displayed a somewhat satanic thunder.

Utopias commonly featured “moderns” undergoing a conversion experience to the utopian mind-set—after which, all action stopped. In dystopias, a character representing moderns is excitingly chased down, persecuted, degraded, and commonly killed. In Huxley’s Brave New World, an intellectual dissident is singled out and exiled by fatuous world rulers anxious to preserve their numbing status quo. George Orwell’s hellish Nineteen Eighty-four stopped the march of history in its tracks with its famous image of the future as “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Terry Gilliam’s satiric film Brazil (1985) veers between pathos and absurdity with its bizarre blend of Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future and Kafkaesque elements.

E.M. Forster’s much-anthologized story The Machine Stops (1909) was written as a counterblast to Wellsian technical optimism. The story depicts a soulless push-button, heavily networked world. The sudden collapse of Forster’s dystopia supplies motive force to the plot—a scheme so common in science fiction that it is known as the “house-of-cards” plot.

In Norman Spinrad’s black comedy The Iron Dream (1972), a frustrated Adolf Hitler immigrates and becomes an American pulp SF novelist, to weirdly convincing effect. Whether pleasant or sinister, heavenly or apocalyptic, utopias and dystopias shared a sublime sense of ahistoricality. All solutions were necessarily final solutions, and the triumph, or calamity, would surely last at least a thousand years.

Alternative societies

If one abandons the odd notion that the passage of time must make things worse or better, the spectrum of possibility expands dramatically. Science fiction writers have spent much effort conceiving societies that are neither perfect nor horrific but excitingly different, alien to human experience. Robert Heinlein’s greatest popular success, the novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), paints the fate of a prophet and social reformer who was raised by Martians. A Martian human has no earthly shibboleths, so the story’s weird hero cuts briskly through almost every pious human custom relating to sex, death, religion, and money. For obvious reasons, Heinlein’s work was a countercultural icon in the 1960s.

Many SF writers, like Heinlein, took particular pleasure in upsetting the most basic tenets of the human condition. John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977) is an archive of methods to shatter old human verities: characters die and are reborn as clones, change sex with ease and alacrity, make backup tapes of their personalities, and undergo drastic acts of surgery—all in a space-dwelling society that accepts such things as normal.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer, mentioned above, was widely noted for its intense depiction of a postnational world order ruled by feudal global corporations. Artificial intelligences, owned by the wealthy few, are hugely powerful entities, yet they pass almost unheeded over a seething, fractured society of outlaw geneticists, information criminals, colourful street gangs, and orbiting Rastafarians.

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), a future globalized society has abandoned conventional land-based government and reformed itself along the lines of electronic cults and mobile interest groups. The Mafia delivers pizza, the CIA is a for-profit organization, Hong Kong is a global franchise of capitalist Chinatowns, and life online is often of more consequence than real life.

Sex and gender

Because it is difficult to legislate relations between the sexes by conventional political reform, and because works of fiction can present a multiplicity of new arrangements, science fiction has had a particular affinity for feminism, and the attraction was mutual. In Mizora (1890), Mary Bradley Lane presented an early feminist utopia, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Herland (1915) imagined a society of women who reproduce by parthenogenesis.

The subject also interested some male authors. Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X (1960) examined the limits of gender in a world where sexuality and reproduction are surgical add-ons. One of the more thoughtful explorations of the theme was Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which posited a human society on a distant planet where humans have no sexual identity but become sexual beings for a brief period once a month; each can become either male or female during this time. Le Guin works out the consequences of this sort of arrangement in meticulous anthropological detail and creates a revelatory tour de force.

Because science fiction was by nature receptive to technical solutions to all sorts of issues, including gender, readers embraced Shulamith Firestone’s feminist tract The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution (1970); though the book was not written with a science fiction audience in mind, it nevertheless declared that women could never be free of oppression until the physical acts of childbearing and child rearing were industrialized. The influence of Firestone’s book could be seen in works such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978).

The Handmaid's Tale

Although feminist SF tended to hope for gender justice and to declare “if only” rather than to ask “what if,” a powerful dystopian school of feminist science fiction suggested that relationships between men and women might slide from poor to downright catastrophic. Nazi cults of crazed masculinity haunt Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937). Joanna Russ’s much-praised The Female Man (1975) suggests through its title that “femininity” is a weird condition forced on one by oppressors. Even Russ’s feminist classic paled by comparison to Margaret Atwood’s evocative dystopian misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985; film 1990). Drawn from dark contemporary trends, the bitter world of The Handmaid’s Tale is ruled by a repressive American religious regime. This dystopia finally collapses from its own hostility to women—to be succeeded by yet another historical epoch. In this sense, The Handmaid’s Tale makes an intellectual peace with historical process and transcends the customary limits of utopias and dystopias.