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correspondents abroad

The Persistence of
Hope in Dystopian
Science Fiction
IT IS WIDELY ACCEPTED TODAY THAT, WHENEVER WE RECEIVE OR
PRODUCE CULTURE, WE DO SO FROM A CERTAIN POSITION AND
raffaella baccolini
that such location influences how we theorize about and read the world.
Because I am an Italian trained in the United States (specializing in
American modernism) in the 1980s, my reading of science fiction has
been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by
my geography. It is a hybrid approach, combining these circumstances
primarily with an interest in feminist theory and in writing by women.
From the very beginning I have foregrounded issues of genre writing as
they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low cul-
ture. Such an approach, however, must also come to terms with the polit-
ical and cultural circumstances that characterize this turn of the century.
I consider myself a “child of conflict,” to borrow the words the Eku-
menical Envoy uses to describe the Terran Observer Sutty in Ursula K.
Le Guin’s The Telling (26). Born in 1960, I have no direct recollection
of 1968; rather, I belong to the generation of the 1970s, which like the
rest of Italy was marked by the “years of lead” (anni di piombo) of ter-
rorism—the attacks by the Red Brigades that between 1976 and 1980
killed almost a hundred people as well as the bombings by extreme-right
terrorists together with state apparatuses that, from 1969 on, killed many
more people. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the recent produc-
tion of dystopian science fiction speaks to me more than do the utopias
of the 1960s and early 1970s. And, to a certain extent, the years of lead
also have shaped my approach to science fiction. I find in the recent
Raffaella Baccolini is professor of En- works of the genre, in their themes and in their formal features, a new
glish at the University of Bologna, Forlì. oppositional and resisting form of writing, one that maintains a utopian
She is the author of Tradition, Identity, horizon in the pages of dystopian science fiction and in these anti-
Desire: Revisionist Strategies in H.D.’s utopian times.
Late Poetry (Patron, 1995) and coeditor,
Since the conservative reaction of the 1980s and the triumph of free-
with Tom Moylan, of Dark Horizons:
Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagi-
market liberalism of the 1990s, utopia has been both attacked and co-opted.
nation (Routledge, 2003). She is cur- It has been conflated with materialist satisfaction and thus commodified
rently working on memory, nostalgia, and devalued. In a society where consumerism has come to represent the
and deferral in utopia. contemporary modality of happiness, utopia has become an outmoded

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119.3 ] Raffaella Baccolini 519

value. The pursuit of individual happiness, which Genres, with their set rules, conventions,

correspondents abroad
is none other than material success, corresponds and expectations, have been traditionally one of
to what Darko Suvin has called the “Disneyfica- the measures against which to judge a work’s,
tion strategy” (194)—a notion and a practice our and a writer’s, greatness. Genres are “essen-
Italian prime minister has fully embraced. In my tially literary institutions, or social contracts be-
approach to science fiction I try to find ways to tween a writer and a specific public, whose
highlight the transgressive and radical nature of function is to specify the proper use of a partic-
some of its works being written today, because ular cultural artifact” (Jameson 106; emphasis
we need to develop a critical perspective that can added). Far from being mere aesthetic markers,
point us toward action and change. however, genres are “drenched in ideologies”
I need stories that speak to me. We are, in a (Schenck 282), and an analysis of a single work
sense, what we write. There’s a statement by in relation to the genre it belongs to also allows
Marge Piercy that I find striking for its simplic- us to understand that work as a product of the
ity and lucidity at once: historical and literary times in which it was
written. Genres are then culturally constructed
When I was a child, I first noticed that neither
and rest on the binary between what is normal
history as I was taught it nor the stories I was
told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them. I
and what is deviant—a notion that feminist criti-
have been at it ever since. To me it is an impor- cism has deconstructed as it consigns feminine
tant task to situate ourselves in the time line so practice to the pole of deviation and inferiority.
that we may be active in history. We require a Feminist reappropriations of generic fiction can
past that leads to us. After any revolution, his- therefore become a radical and oppositional
tory is rewritten, not just out of partisan zeal, strategy. The use of generic fiction as a form of
but because the past has changed. Similarly, political resistance by women has been studied,
what we imagine we are working toward does a among others, by Anne Cranny-Francis, and
lot to define what we will consider doable ac-
much science fiction research by women schol-
tion aimed at producing the future we want and
ars (Joanna Russ, Marleen Barr, Sarah Lefanu,
preventing the future we fear. (“Telling” 1–2)
Lee Cullen Khanna, Carol Farley Kessler, to
Women’s science fiction today speaks to our cite only a few) has investigated the ways in
concerns and through a series of strategies and which gender informs science fiction.
features has renovated the traditionally opposi- The intersection of gender and genre has
tional nature of the genre. opened up the creation of new, subversive, and
In particular, I am interested in the dis- oppositional literary forms. Science fiction is al-
course of genre and its deconstruction and ap- ready regarded as a potentially subversive genre,
propriation. An analysis of women’s take on as it “occupies the space outside the literary en-
science fiction allows us to recognize a subver- closure, as a forbidden, taboo, and perhaps de-
sive and oppositional strategy against hege- graded product—held at bay, and yet rich in
monic ideology. As feminist scholars, we may themes and obsessions which are repressed in
want to question the notion of genre, boundaries, high culture” (Marc Angenot qtd. in Parrinder
and exclusionary politics—notions and prac- 46). In its developments, it has come to repre-
tices that have proved detrimental for women— sent a form of counternarrative to hegemonic
and investigate instead the intersection of discourse. In its extrapolation of the present, it
gender and generic fiction. The ways in which has the potential to envision different worlds
gender enters into and is constructed by the that can work as a purely imaginative (at worst)
form of genre have some bearing on, in turn, the or a critical (at best) exploration of our society.
creation of new critical texts. Science fiction has then the potential, through
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estrangement and cognitive mapping, to move sure, allow readers and protagonists to hope: the
correspondents abroad

its reader to see the differences of an elsewhere ambiguous, open endings maintain the utopian
and thus think critically about the reader’s own impulse within the work. In fact, by rejecting
world and possibly act on and change that world. the traditional subjugation of the individual at
Women’s science fiction novels have contributed the end of the novel, the critical dystopia opens
to the exploration and subsequent breakdown of a space of contestation and opposition for those
certainties and universalist assumptions—those groups—women and other ex-centric subjects
damaging stereotypes—about gendered identi- whose subject position is not contemplated by
ties by addressing, in a dialectical engagement hegemonic discourse—for whom subject status
with tradition, themes such as the representation has yet to be attained.
of women and their bodies, reproduction and sex- Another factor that makes these novels sites
uality, and language and its relation to identity. of resistance and oppositional texts is their
But genres change in relation to the times, blending of different genre conventions. Draw-
and our times, characterized by a general shift to ing on the feminist criticism of universalist as-
the right in the 1980s and 1990s, have produced sumptions, singularity, and neutral and objective
what a series of scholars have addressed as a knowledge and acknowledging the importance
“dystopian turn” in Anglo-American science fic- of difference, multiplicity, complexity, situated
tion (see Baccolini and Moylan). After the re- knowledges, and hybridity, recent dystopian fic-
vival of utopia in the 1960s and 1970s, the early tion by women resists genre purity in favor of a
1980s saw the appearance of the cyberpunk hybrid text that renovates dystopian science fic-
movement, whose somewhat self-indulgent cyn- tion by making it politically and formally oppo-
icism foreclosed any real subversive critique of sitional. In Kindred, for example, Butler revises
the conservative society. Science fiction’s op- the conventions of the time travel story and cre-
positional and critical potential was instead re- ates a novel that is both science fiction and neo–
covered and renovated in the production of a slave narrative. Similarly, by fragmenting her
number of writers such as Octavia E. Butler, account of a future society with a tale (itself the
Piercy, Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson, record of oral storytelling) of sixteenth-century
who turned to dystopian strategies to come to Prague in He, She, and It, Piercy creates an al-
terms with the decade’s silencing and co-opting most historical science fiction novel. While At-
of utopia. This kind of writing, critical and am- wood employs the conventions of the diary and
biguous and mainly produced by feminist writ- the epistolary novel in The Handmaid’s Tale, Le
ers, has become the preferred form for an Guin combines a political fable with storytelling
expression of struggle and resistance. for her most recent novel of cultural contact.
Utopia is maintained in dystopia, tradition- The notion of an impure genre, one with perme-
ally a bleak, depressing genre with no space for able borders that allow contamination from
hope in the story, only outside the story: only by other genres, represents resistance to a hege-
considering dystopia as a warning can we as monic ideology and renovates the resisting na-
readers hope to escape such a dark future. Both ture of science fiction.
Winston Smith and Julia, the main characters of In most of these novels the recovery of his-
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, are tory and literacy, together with the recovery of
crushed by the totalitarian society; there is no individual and collective memory, becomes an
learning, no escape for them. But recent novels instrumental tool of resistance for their protago-
such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s nists. Because it is authoritarian, hegemonic dis-
Tale, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Butler’s Kin- course shapes the narrative about the past and
dred and Parable of the Sower, by resisting clo- collective memory to the point that individual
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119.3 ] Raffaella Baccolini 521

memory has been erased; individual recollec- need to pass through the critical dystopias of

correspondents abroad
tion therefore becomes the first, necessary step today to move toward a horizon of hope.
for a collective action. In classical dystopia,
memory remains too often trapped in an indi-
vidual and regressive nostalgia, but critical
dystopias show that a culture of memory—one
that moves from the individual to the collec-
Works Cited
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ton, 1985.
presence of utopian hope does not necessarily
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mean a happy ending. Rather, awareness and re- Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. New
sponsibility are the conditions of the critical York: Routledge, 2003.
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panies the awareness and knowledge that the ———. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner, 1993.
protagonist has attained. Instead of providing Cranny-Francis, Anne. Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of
Generic Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.
some compensatory and comforting conclusion,
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
the critical dystopia’s open ending leaves its Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
characters to deal with their choices and respon- Le Guin, Ursula K. The Telling. New York: Harcourt, 2000.
sibilities. It is in the acceptance of responsibility Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt,
and accountability, often worked through mem- 1949.
Parrinder, Patrick. Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teach-
ory and the recovery of the past, that we bring
ing. London: Methuen, 1980.
the past into a living relation with the present Piercy, Marge. He, She, and It. New York: Fawcett, 1991.
and may thus begin to lay the foundations for ———. “Telling Stories about Stories.” Utopian Studies 5
utopian change. (1994): 1–3.
It is important to engage with the critical Schenck, Celeste. “All of a Piece: Women’s Poetry and Au-
dystopias of recent decades, as they are the prod- tobiography.” Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiog-
raphy. Ed. Bella Brodzki and Schenck. Ithaca: Cornell
uct of our dark times. By looking at the formal UP, 1993. 281–305.
and political features of science fiction, we can Suvin, Darko. “Theses on Dystopia 2001.” Baccolini and
see how these works point us toward change. We Moylan 187–201.