Dictatorships, climate disasters, AI, epidemics, famines, cloning… Dystopian stories have invaded the imagination. And with anxiety-inducing news, we have the impression that reality is going to catch up with fiction. For example, if you had the bad idea of looking Contagiona 2011 SF film where a pandemic explodes, on the evening of March 16, 2020… Or while facing the horror of the war in Ukraine, which has revived the fear of a nuclear apocalypse (one of the favorite themes of SF in the 1960s and 70s).
Do you feel like the state of the world is getting worse? That disasters and death await us around the corner? What if the opening to thinking about the world differently came through positive science fiction? “We have more and more of this kind of demand,” recognizes Julien Chapert, bookseller specializing in science fiction at La Croisée des mondes, in Paris. The prevailing social and political climate means that people need to read titles that give a little hope. » A literature whose origins can go back to the 16th century, with Utopia by Thomas Moore or Jules Verne-style exploration in the 19th century, which is arousing more and more interest.
Becky Chambers, the one who unites
In recent years, the furrow has been plowed by writers, the most celebrated of whom is Becky Chambers. The American author of feminist science fiction has made a breakthrough since 2014 with her space opera in several volumes The travellers and his newsMonk and robot stories. The first follows life aboard a spaceship where humans and various extraterrestrial species coexist. The second series imagines a world where robots have seceded from humans as they transitioned to a more responsible and sustainable world.
“Becky Chambers manages to bring people together: she first got all the SF people to agree, which is not so common,” salutes Mireille Rivalland, editor at L’Atalante, the Nantes publishing house that created it. published in France. And it even got the agreement of many general literature booksellers who took hold of it. » The psalm for the recycled wild, the first volume of the Monks and Robot series translated in 2022, sold more than 15,000 copies in one year in France, a very good figure for SF. This craze for positive SF is also reported by Yann Olivier, from the organization of the Utopiales science fiction festival in Nantes, who adds that the genre arouses curiosity.
“Very often, SF relies on our anxieties”
“Science fiction explores imaginary worlds, projects us into the future and, very often, SF relies on our anxieties, our concerns about the future,” analyzes Ugo Bellagamba, legal historian at the University of Côte d’ Azur, specialist in utopias and SF writer. So, it depicts dark, dystopian or totalitarian worlds. » We can think here of 1984 by George Orwell, The best of worlds by Aldous Huxley or Hunger Games by Susan Collins.
“But there is also a more positive science fiction, more confident in the future and which sometimes describes better worlds, where we have solved problems of inequality, money, racism, sexism,” he continues. . The author of Utopian Dictionary of Science Fiction, published in October 2023 (ed. Belial), establishes a direct link between the utopias of the past, like that of Moore, and science fiction. The mechanism is almost the same, he notes: “In utopia, we project ourselves into an elsewhere, which can be spatial or temporal. And in this elsewhere, we explore the possibilities of improving the world. And science fiction does it too. »
“Cynics and realists offer nothing”
It is also this idea which pushed The salty sea, another Nantes publishing house, to bring together authors to tell the story of 2043. In Utopians, news from 2043, around thirty people like the disabled basketball player Ryadh Sallem or the Franco-Palestinian activist Rima Hassan, project themselves into a world undergoing global warming and imagine how humanity adapts. For Yannick Roudaut, former financial journalist turned editor and co-founder of La mer salée, utopia responds to a dystopian future.
“There is a confiscation of imagination,” he believes. We don’t allow ourselves to imagine something really different. When I ask people what is the future? They take 2023 and they make it better. » Does he see a world of care bears in the future? “It’s a bit easy to treat people who dream of something else as care bears. I want us to stop ourselves from dreaming. But the cynics and the realists, and I meet some, what do they propose? Nothing. Lots of clichés prevent people from projecting themselves as if they were afraid to believe in something luminous. It’s incredible. »
Making utopia desirable again
Positive science fiction as a field for opening up possibilities, Yann Olivier, from Les Utopiales, also defends it. His reference book is the Archeologies of the future by Fredric Jameson. In this essay and plea for utopia and science fiction, the professor of comparative literature at Duke University in the United States recalls that utopia is a revolt against injustice and an aspiration for radical transformation. One of the successes of capitalist ideology is to have made utopia undesirable, he criticizes.
“If all of our imaginations of the future are only negative, we will tend to respond to problems in the same way or to think fatalistically,” argues Yann Olivier, who is also an editor at L’Atalante. Less than a manual in my eyes, positive science fiction opens up a possible answer. It is not necessarily the right one, but on the other hand, it is different from cynicism and fatalism. » This is why writing a dystopia is “easier” according to him, because imagining a better future requires one more step.
Imagination, “a bulwark against certainty”
For the legal historian, utopia and dystopia constitute two phases of the same play, which would be our way of thinking about the world. “In every dystopia, there is a utopia that has not been understood,” notes Ugo Bellagamba. And in any utopia, there is a dystopian risk if it is applied literally. » Cyberpunk illustrates this very well: in these dark worlds of violent and technophile urban megacities, elements of utopia have been perverted or misunderstood, he believes. “In echo and opposition”, solarpunk is developing with a new generation of authors, like Becky Chambers. “Solarpunk rejects the specter of the apocalypse and its survivalist logic to reseed the field of hope,” he writes in his Utopian Dictionarythe subgenre imagining the end of fossil fuels with resilient, local or communal economies.
“I am saddened by the despondency of people who say that it is collapse and that there is no other way out,” he continues. Why these certainties? Our imagination is a bulwark against certainty. Utopia reminds us that nothing is ever certain and that we can imagine things even if others think it is naive or not credible. The important thing is to exercise our imagination to think about the future. » Doctor of Philosophy Alice Carébedian pushes the reasoning further by supporting the “urgency” of thinking about radical utopias in science fiction. She calls, in Radical utopia (ed. Seuil), to “develop our imaginations of emancipation, constitute political communities, deploy worlds in excess in the face of unjust, violent and oppressive systems”. See you in utopia. Or in 2044.