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Why are there no true Utopian stories
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Lawrence
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Dec 31, 2018 09:16AM
I think it's harder to imagine a utopia than it is a dystopia. And perhaps not nearly as interesting. Conflict is needed.
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If you actually succeed in creating A utopia you have created a world without conflict, in which everything is perfect. And if there's no conflict ,there are no stories worth telling or reading. It would be all "Hazel thought she might not be able to attain her lifelong dream of marshmallow taste tester for a little while... But she did!" and "Jason's dad said he couldn't go to the movies , so Jason asked really nicely and his dad changed his mind." I am bored already !!! Hence I think true utopian stories are not really possible.
My answer would be yes. Witnessing the way our world is today I'm pretty sure our world is gonna turn into one of the YA fictional worlds. And I am not exaggerating. We won't be alive to see that day ourselves but lets just say we have already experienced it through books...
Blame our genes. 4.5 billion years of life struggling to survive on this planet was bound to produce something that, at the very least, relishes a challenge. Living in peace and harmony would soon frustrate the majority. Which might explain why the most successful dystopian novels are about being forced to accept a utopian ideology.
On goodreads it says 1984 is a dystopia, and a utopia. 😂
It's the getting to the Utopia part that tends to cause the most dystopian aspects. Killing all the enemies so that peace can break out.Some real political movements have thought that they were introducing a new Utopia. There was just the problem of all those that disagreed or weren't included in the vision for the future
Agree with Phil. Building a utopia without a clean slate requires coercion - strategies or tactics for overcoming dissent. The giver series by Lois Lowry explains this.
why write about Utopia? It would be boring.
The 20th century man grew suspicious of utopias and literary utopias are no longer profitable. You can find plenty in the 18th and 19th centuries though. That being said, as of late, utopia as a motif has captivated other arts, such as visual arts and performance.
I agree with others in that utopias are not interesting to read, therefore there are no popular or wildly successful utopian novels. In keeping with the idea that you can't make everyone happy, I believe utopias are in a sense unattainable in reality without some manipulation or coercion happening, therefore dystopic. Utopias are more of a symbolic ideal to strive for than a concrete way of life.
Utopian worlds can not exist when humans are involved. Many dystopian stories start out as “utopian societies “ as they break down or when people start to figure out what is really happening things become interesting. So many books start out with a utopian premise but it never works out because one persons utopia is another person’s dystopia.
I'm not sure I agree with all the utopia-scepticism here. Isn't the point of utopian fiction that we are exploring a supposedly ideal society, and exploring its flaws? It's not like anyone expects utopias to be depicted as problem-free, that would be boring
Margaret Atwood once said, “One man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia.” And if you’ve read her books, you can clearly see the utopia that was attempted actually revealed a dystopian nightmare. I have to say I agree with her. There is no such thing as a utopia. We merely slide the bar for an acceptable level of suffering and along the way we forget how to persevere. Could any of us last a month if plucked from the here and now and transported to a time before refrigeration? Our bodies have lost the ability to cope with that level of contamination? So now we can mostly count on the fact that all of our children will live to adulthood, utopia, instead of losing more than half within the first year. But now our bodies aren’t very resilient and we’re rife with allergies and other auto-immunes, many of which are deadly; dystopia.
There is no such thing as utopia.
I’m going to put this as simply as I canUtopia=no conflict
No conflict=no plot
No plot=no book
