This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 14, 2009.
A Novel Idea: Idealizing Society
For the past couple of years, I've been working on a novel for middle school students. Right now, the novel is in the hands of an agent, whom I hope will agree to represent my work to publishers.
The novel, which follows a group of four girls, takes place in Williston. The Williston of my characters, however, is not our Williston, not exactly.
When deciding where to set the novel, the oft-used phrase "write what you know" came to mind. However, our town has many quirks that could take a lot of explanation to get across to a visitor, especially a visitor by literary means. For just one example, in the literary Williston, we have a Williston Elementary School and a Williston Middle School.
To have taken Williston's schools as a model, and have to explain why there are elementary schoolers in the middle school, would take more words than I could afford to spend pages on — so I idealized our school system.
Is there a lesson to be learned in such idealizations?
After working on the Williston Conceptual Frameworks Committee since last summer, I am keenly aware that there are divisions in our town about how our schools are structured. If our schools were structured like my idealized Williston schools, could the controversies have been avoided? As I wrote, as I edited, as I attended Committee meetings, I gave this question a lot of thought.
The reason that I idealized our schools, though, was not to teach us Willistonians a lesson of any kind. The reason is actually quite pedestrian: simple literary license.
As I thought about all this, I realized that there are actually very few novels that I've read in my lifetime that idealize society. More common, by far, are the novels that exaggerate problems with society, magnify them. These novels are typically categorized as "dystopian," a genre I've written about before.
Almost anyone could name a dystopian novel: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, The Giver, A Clockwork Orange. Some of the characters in these novels might consider that they live in utopias; but they are written for us, and we can recognize that the cost of the utopia is something we hold dear — liberty, security, democracy, or even individuality.
I'm a big fan of science fiction, and I've often heard Star Trek described as a look at a utopian future. That may be true for the people of Earth, done with war and poverty, even with greed and money, with our attention focused on the stars. But I dispute this characterization. Any Trekker knows that war, poverty, greed, and money play a big role in the Star Trek universe.
Closer to home, a good example of a true utopian novel (one that describes a society that its author wishes us to aspire to, rather than one the author wishes us to avoid), is called "Looking Backward", by Edward Bellamy.
(You can read "Looking Backward" online by going to Project Gutenberg, where Bellamy's book is available for free. Go to gutenberg.org to find out more.)
In Bellamy's work, a citizen of Boston from 1887 is put into a hypnotic trance from which he does not awake until the year 2000. Some of the advances of Boston in Bellamy's year 2000 might seem laughable to us today, but some were strangely prescient.
Bellamy did not foresee television, but he did foresee a "music room" into which music could be piped in from any one of a number of live performances, via the telephone wires. Bellamy foresaw a store with only one sample of each item on the shelves; shoppers put in their orders for goods, which were made on demand and delivered to their doorstep. All workers started out at the bottom, in the "industrial army", and worked their way up according to desire and ability; but in any case, retirement was at the ripe old age of 45.
In my case, I idealized Williston to avoid having to explain too much, to make my job easier, to make the reader's job easier.
Bellamy idealized all of the United States, and, indeed, the world, to illustrate a place we could land, something to aspire to. As I read "Looking Backward," there was much fault I found in his year 2000, a little I recognized, and also a few things to look forward to.
Do you have a favorite utopian novel? Let me know, I'd love to read it.
Showing posts with label dystopia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dystopia. Show all posts
Friday, May 15, 2009
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Shining light on our own flaws
This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 8, 2008. This version includes expanded commentary on the various books listed.
Shining light on our own flaws
A few months ago, one of my sons asked me to help him with a homework assignment by reading aloud a few chapters from a book. The book was
The Giver by Lois Lowry, and reading the back cover, I was curious and quickly agreed. After reading through two chapters, I was intrigued by the depth of a book given to a fourth grader to read, and by the memories it prompted in me, memories of stories of dystopia.
A dystopian society is one which may seem idyllic on the surface, but which has fatal flaws, at least from our perspective. I devoured science fiction novels in high school, and many have this theme. They raised deep thoughts and hard questions, and after reading some of The Giver, I wanted to ask those same questions of my son.
What would it be like in a world with no war? It could be wonderful - but what if the cost was that everyone was the same, that the state chose your profession, dictated your life down to the meals you ate and the pills you took?
What about family? Would it be worth it, for everyone to have a perfect family, if the cost was that the state not only chose your spouse, but also assigned you your children? Are the differences in people so antithetical to peace that they have to be eliminated?
Heavy questions for a ten-year-old, answered admirably. But I wanted to revisit these themes for myself, so I read all of The Giver, and then bought and reread many of my old favorites along with some new discoveries. All of them provoke questions worthy of asking and answering.
For example, in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, all humans are produced in test tubes and raised by the state to do specific jobs. Individual achievement is discouraged. Whether you're born a ruling-class Alpha or a lowly Gamma, you're conditioned from birth to love your role in society and eschew all others. Everyone is happy, because no one has any choices of consequence. And if you ever find yourself unhappy, in need of a "vacation", a dose of government-issued soma will fix that.
In The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, the government of the United States has been taken over by a fundamentalist religion in the wake of environmental disasters. Mirroring the situation of many women in Muslim societies, women are highly respected and protected - to the point where they have no freedom. Because fertility is in rapid decline, some women are assigned to roles by the government, with the few remaining fertile women parceled out to high governmental officials for use as breeders. The story is told in the first-person, by a woman who used to be free, have a husband and daughter, a life. As she write, she recounts how she learned to wear the red dress of the breeders, and how she was conflicted between the self that wanted everything back the way it was and the self that wanted to just get along with the new order.
In Make Room Make Room! by Harry Harrison, the disasters of unfettered population growth, global warming, and declining agricultural production and water supplies lead to a world of have-nots, with only a few haves who can afford electricity, fresh food, and air conditioning. A luxury for the masses is a soylent burger, made of soybeans and lentil, or meat flakes, made from plankton. The water table around the city has sunk, replaced with undrinkable sea water; upstate farmers hold the city hostage by withholding water during the hottest summer on record.
In Jennifer Government by Max Barry, capitalism has gone awry. The Police has been converted to a private agency, available for hire, and only The Government, with no product to sell, watches out for the public - but with no taxes, The Government has to charge citizens for its services, like tracking down murderers. Murder, by the way, has become a marketing tool. One shoe company, for example, increases demand for its products by hiring someone to kill purchasers in a few large cities.
While usually not thought of as a dystopian novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding fits my criteria. It involves a group of young British boys marooned on a tropical island in the confusion of a nuclear war. One group tries desperately to organize the boys into a working society, with some gathering food, others building shelters, and still another group hunting for food. Paradise disintegrates, however, when the hunters decide they should run the show. I've written about Lord of the Flies before - in the end, savagery wins out over civilization, mostly because of fear and confusion.
One last example is a classic: In The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, the Time Traveler takes his machine from urban 19th century London 800,000 years into the future, only to find that all of the buildings have been replaced by a verdant landscape inhabited by the gentle and diminutive Eloi. It doesn't take long for the Traveler to discover the horrible Darwinian secret of the Eloi - they are tended like cattle for consumption by the Morlocks, underground dwellers that tend the machinery of the planet.
And there are several other classics of the genre still on my reread list: 1984 by George Orwell, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
If movies are more to your liking, there are also many in this genre: Soylent Green, Silent Running, Logan's Run, and THX-1138 are classics. More recently, the TV series Sliders and the films Escape from New York, Blade Runner, V for Vendetta, and I Am Legend use dystopian themes.
In any case, be it a book, short story, or film, the intent of all of these works is to shine light on something in our own time or society, in a way that not only provokes thought but also entertains. Non-fiction works like An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore or The World Without Us by Alan Weisman can inform us, too, of course, but there is something about fiction that opens the topic up to a wider audience.
We all have lives to live, in the here and now. We have to worry about our jobs, the configuration of our schools, the price of gas and food, who the next president will be. These are all important concerns, and they can be all-consuming.
But what these works all tell us, fiction or non-fiction, is that we have to look beyond ourselves. Our society is not perfect, by any means. But we have a strong foundation, and if we are diligent and use some forethought, we can avoid the pitfalls all of these works show us are possible.
Shining light on our own flaws
A few months ago, one of my sons asked me to help him with a homework assignment by reading aloud a few chapters from a book. The book was
The Giver by Lois Lowry, and reading the back cover, I was curious and quickly agreed. After reading through two chapters, I was intrigued by the depth of a book given to a fourth grader to read, and by the memories it prompted in me, memories of stories of dystopia.
A dystopian society is one which may seem idyllic on the surface, but which has fatal flaws, at least from our perspective. I devoured science fiction novels in high school, and many have this theme. They raised deep thoughts and hard questions, and after reading some of The Giver, I wanted to ask those same questions of my son.
What would it be like in a world with no war? It could be wonderful - but what if the cost was that everyone was the same, that the state chose your profession, dictated your life down to the meals you ate and the pills you took?
What about family? Would it be worth it, for everyone to have a perfect family, if the cost was that the state not only chose your spouse, but also assigned you your children? Are the differences in people so antithetical to peace that they have to be eliminated?
Heavy questions for a ten-year-old, answered admirably. But I wanted to revisit these themes for myself, so I read all of The Giver, and then bought and reread many of my old favorites along with some new discoveries. All of them provoke questions worthy of asking and answering.
For example, in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, all humans are produced in test tubes and raised by the state to do specific jobs. Individual achievement is discouraged. Whether you're born a ruling-class Alpha or a lowly Gamma, you're conditioned from birth to love your role in society and eschew all others. Everyone is happy, because no one has any choices of consequence. And if you ever find yourself unhappy, in need of a "vacation", a dose of government-issued soma will fix that.
In The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, the government of the United States has been taken over by a fundamentalist religion in the wake of environmental disasters. Mirroring the situation of many women in Muslim societies, women are highly respected and protected - to the point where they have no freedom. Because fertility is in rapid decline, some women are assigned to roles by the government, with the few remaining fertile women parceled out to high governmental officials for use as breeders. The story is told in the first-person, by a woman who used to be free, have a husband and daughter, a life. As she write, she recounts how she learned to wear the red dress of the breeders, and how she was conflicted between the self that wanted everything back the way it was and the self that wanted to just get along with the new order.
In Make Room Make Room! by Harry Harrison, the disasters of unfettered population growth, global warming, and declining agricultural production and water supplies lead to a world of have-nots, with only a few haves who can afford electricity, fresh food, and air conditioning. A luxury for the masses is a soylent burger, made of soybeans and lentil, or meat flakes, made from plankton. The water table around the city has sunk, replaced with undrinkable sea water; upstate farmers hold the city hostage by withholding water during the hottest summer on record.
In Jennifer Government by Max Barry, capitalism has gone awry. The Police has been converted to a private agency, available for hire, and only The Government, with no product to sell, watches out for the public - but with no taxes, The Government has to charge citizens for its services, like tracking down murderers. Murder, by the way, has become a marketing tool. One shoe company, for example, increases demand for its products by hiring someone to kill purchasers in a few large cities.
While usually not thought of as a dystopian novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding fits my criteria. It involves a group of young British boys marooned on a tropical island in the confusion of a nuclear war. One group tries desperately to organize the boys into a working society, with some gathering food, others building shelters, and still another group hunting for food. Paradise disintegrates, however, when the hunters decide they should run the show. I've written about Lord of the Flies before - in the end, savagery wins out over civilization, mostly because of fear and confusion.
One last example is a classic: In The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, the Time Traveler takes his machine from urban 19th century London 800,000 years into the future, only to find that all of the buildings have been replaced by a verdant landscape inhabited by the gentle and diminutive Eloi. It doesn't take long for the Traveler to discover the horrible Darwinian secret of the Eloi - they are tended like cattle for consumption by the Morlocks, underground dwellers that tend the machinery of the planet.
And there are several other classics of the genre still on my reread list: 1984 by George Orwell, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
If movies are more to your liking, there are also many in this genre: Soylent Green, Silent Running, Logan's Run, and THX-1138 are classics. More recently, the TV series Sliders and the films Escape from New York, Blade Runner, V for Vendetta, and I Am Legend use dystopian themes.
In any case, be it a book, short story, or film, the intent of all of these works is to shine light on something in our own time or society, in a way that not only provokes thought but also entertains. Non-fiction works like An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore or The World Without Us by Alan Weisman can inform us, too, of course, but there is something about fiction that opens the topic up to a wider audience.
We all have lives to live, in the here and now. We have to worry about our jobs, the configuration of our schools, the price of gas and food, who the next president will be. These are all important concerns, and they can be all-consuming.
But what these works all tell us, fiction or non-fiction, is that we have to look beyond ourselves. Our society is not perfect, by any means. But we have a strong foundation, and if we are diligent and use some forethought, we can avoid the pitfalls all of these works show us are possible.
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