Why Does Sci-Fi Hate Utopia?
Find me a sci-fi movie where there is a Utopia, and I will point out the worm in the apple. Every single time we are presented with a Utopian society on film, there is also a corrupt diplomat that's running the show, or it's a dream world, or it's built on a city of good-hearted underground dwellers... You know what I'm saying because you've all seen such movies before.
So I'm going to make a broad statement and say: There is no such thing as Utopia in science fiction.
The prototypical example of this, and perhaps the genesis of this whole meme, is H.G. Wells' classic The Time Machine. In it, the Utopian race of the Eloi lives in blissful harmony, at least on the surface. In fact, their society is completely dependent on the bestial Morlocks. Both races depend on each other for survival, and neither is complete as a species.
Pretty much every tale of a sci-fi Utopia from there out embraced the idea that no Utopia could work without someone pushing the gears. Whether it's robots, humans, or some combo of the two, every Utopian society has a dark, disturbing secret behind it.
There are other approaches to the Utopian/Dystopian dichotomy, like Logan's Run, and Soylent Green, both of which depend on murder to keep their "perfect" societies going. There's also the Big Brother/1984 approach, which has been used time and again: A perfect society enforced by a totalitarian regime that needs to be taken down (usually by one man or woman). In fact, there's no science fiction (excepting, possibly, a short story here and there) that presents any sort of actually perfect future world.
There's a big, glaring reason for this, of course, and it's the second word in the term -- fiction. Sci-Fi is, of course, fiction, and fiction relies on drama. There is, inherently, no drama, no conflict in a perfect Utopia. Storytelling is an act of moving the characters forward in some way. So if they're standing still the entire time, you haven't done your job as a storyteller.
So what do you think, readers: Is there a way to tell a story about Utopia without it having a secret Dystopia behind it? Has there been one that I'm just ignoring?
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You're ignoring Miracleman. It's as close to a fictional utopia that actually is a utopia as you can get.
Miracleman is a great point to bring up, if you're only talking about the comics that were published.
If you want to bring into the discussion where Gaiman was going with the book before it got canceled, that's a different story. Not to ruin anything for those who haven't read it, but Gaiman was going to essentially introduce the worm in the apple of Utopia, and bring it all down around their heads.
I can't recall a movie, book, etc where a utopia existed without the worm. And I don't think you could really have a utopian society as long as there are people that are willing to satisfy their desires at the expense of other people.
To answer your first question though, I do think it is possible to tell an interesting and engaging story about an unblemished and free utopia, as long as there is an outside force that wants to destroy it. As you implied, without some conflict to move the characters the story becomes solely about the perfect society/civilization and that sounds like the ultimate snooze-fest.
M2C
SciFi Utopia=There Will Come Soft Rains
;)
Not to continue to be a negative nelly, but "There Will Come Soft Rains" is more apocalyptic than Utopic (sp?)... Though maybe the way to have a Utopia story is one where all the humans have died? Does that even count as Utopia?
As nerd-spore said, you can include an actual utopia and still have conflict, either by having it threatened by outside forces, or by having characters from the utopian society venturing outside of it for some reason. In television, Star Trek: The Next Generation would be an example of both approaches, for instance. The portrayal of the Federation got “dirtied up” a bit by Deep Space Nine, and perhaps even a few of the later Next Generation episodes, but it was pretty explicitly utopian early on.
Venturing into written science fiction, John C. Wright’s “Golden Age” trilogy is an example of the “outside threat” method, while several of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books use the latter method.
You started out by talking about movies, though, and it’s possible that this method is poorly suited to feature films. It requires a lot of world-building, and that takes time: you need time to establish the utopia, and you need time to set up the non-utopian outside, and then you need time for the actual conflict, and if you want to actually explore the idea of the utopia in detail and still have a good conflict you end up with a movie that’s six hours long. The lack of actual utopias in cinema may be more a limitation of the medium than anything else.
How about Robert Silverberg's "Sailing to Byzantium"?
Here is my two cents on the relationship between sf and utopia:
"How Far Science Fiction Is Intrinsically Utopian?"