Babel Clash

Hi Morgan,

You say:

“At the heart of storytelling is drama, tension and struggle.  In a world lacking scarcity issues, much of the tension is removed, and it becomes more difficult to tell a traditional story.  Unless the Utopia is an illusion or secretly corrupt, and that makes for good stories, too.  Assuming that the Utopia is real, is it still possible to infuse that story with danger and suspense without creating an outside source to threaten it?”

I think you’re conflating two very different types of story. One is Utopian storytelling.  The other is telling a story set in a society that functions sustainably.  These are two very different beasts.

While I agree that storytelling requires drama, tension and struggle, I’m not certain that I can think of all that many “traditional” plots which actually depend on questions of scarcity to function.  Most conflict plotlines I can think of actually tend to revolve around human struggles–politics, relationships, power, obsessions etc.–I’m thinking Shakespeare here–none of which are precluded by a society which handles its day-to-day affairs in a sustainable way. A Romeo and Juliet story isn’t off the table just because both families recycle.  A society that burns very little carbon, reuses its waste efficiently, and recognizes its interdependence with its resources isn’t necessarily Utopian in the perfected sense, it’s just a less stupid society.

Being a smarter society doesn’t preclude power struggles, feuds, and though you take it off the table– outside threats.  In many ways, 21st-century America is Utopian. Compared to earlier points in history (and to many countries around the world today) we live in an astonishingly luxurious society. We live longer, are better educated, eat better, have more toys, have more leisure options than at any point in human history.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t intensely human stories going on within it. Wealth does not end conflict and human drama, nor do I think does sustainability equal the death of story.

The question of writing a genuine Utopian story is a different thing.  Utopian world-building not only assumes that you’ve solved resource problems, you’ve also solved human conflict problems, social and health problems, education problems….  This sort of world is more an exercise in political theory, an exploration of how societies might organize themselves in more rational or positive ways than we do spontaneously, and often based on the assumption that people at root could also be radically different in behavior and outlook than they are in reality. They’re deliberately stories of perfected worlds, where all children are above average.

To the extent that a Utopian story has conflict, I think that it’s contained in the tension between how *readers* react to this very differently ordered world, and how they then consider their own world with the new lens that a Utopian theory provides.  My sense is that Utopian novels tend to focus on ideas rather than plot, and that’s okay because they’re a conceptual exercise rather than a story per se. They’re just a different beast and provide different satisfactions.

But even then, I suspect a clever writer could find a thread of conflict if they were motivated. Certainly looking at past Utopian novels, I can see ways of rewriting everything from Bellamy’s Looking Backward to Callenbach’s Ecotopia that might provide a better thread of story than the one that was chosen by the authors.