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Fire on the Mountain and utopian AH

OHC

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I recently came across Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain in the local anarchist bookstore, and I thought I'd recommend you all check it out if you haven't already. I've admitted before that most published alternate history doesn't interest me, but I really enjoyed this one.

The POD is a successful raid on Harper's Ferry, made possible by Harriet Tubman's involvement; this world's Civil War unfolds as a war of liberation rather than reunification and ends with an independent black state in the Deep South. The story is told through the memoirs of a boy who becomes one of John Brown's medics and through the perspective of his great-granddaughter in an Afrofuturist 1959. In her time, the rump USA is rebuilding after a successful socialist revolution, while Nova Africa is about to land the first mission on Mars.

I'm not going to do a whole SLP-blog review here, but I thought this would be a good starting point for discussing utopian AH in general and whether it can be done well. Bisson's focus on human relationships in the "present day" sections really sold the less plausible points of the narrative for me; alongside the explicitly revolutionary adventure of the 1859 storyline it worked well as a reminder that a better world is possible.
 
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I have a sample copy of Alternate Peace, the new anthology from Zombies Need Brains! which focuses on utopian AH tales. I've only read the first story - O-Rings - but it definitely works. The Challenger disaster doesn't occur after someone delays the launch in order to check the O-Rings. Challenger is successful, and leads to a mini-revival of NASA with greater funding. However, the cost is the complete disintegration of an astronauts marriage and neglect of her children, all told through press cuttings and letters home
 
But is that a utopia? Some things better, some things worse.

An interesting question. I'd see it as a Utopia because the World is in a better place - NASA is funded, more interest in science and exploration. Surely even in a Utopia people can have relationship struggles?

Can a Utopia be a Utopia if things are generally better for society? Or only if everything and everyone is contented?

Intriguing debate
 
Then, of course, you can have a story based on atrophy in a utopia. If it's a utopia, why bother working to change things? There's no challenge for people there, just boredom, and if there is one thing that human history teaches us, it is that people are restless.

I'm suddenly reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars which in many ways deals with exactly that.
 
Utopian AH - and indeed utopian anything - seems more difficult than dystopian AH because while everyone can agree on what's a bad government/world to live in, they might not agree on what's a good one beyond "we all have food, people aren't murdered by the state in their beds". And that's going to lead to argy-bargy.

For example, an independent black nation in 19th century America and socialism wins worldwide. That's a utopian idea for a bunch of people. But what if you're an American who isn't a socialist, or who thinks it's better that the Union stayed unified, or you're a right-of-centre African-American from Alabama & this world means you wouldn't be American? It's not just that "utopia for some is dystopia for others" but also "utopia for some sounds very, very silly to others". You have to be good to get around sounding very, very silly. (See also: lots of good TNG-era Star Treks but boy does everyone laugh at the time Picard solemnly said We Have Evolved Beyond Money)

Surely even in a Utopia people can have relationship struggles?

Good point. Even in utopian worlds from our POV, there'd be personal problems- "Richard Corey went home last night and put a bullet through his head" and all that. There's also bound to be some sort of exciting crime/disaster related problem. Thunderbirds is a utopian ice place but planes keep crashing & that Hood fella is a right bastard.
 
It's not just that "utopia for some is dystopia for others" but also "utopia for some sounds very, very silly to others". You have to be good to get around sounding very, very silly. (See also: lots of good TNG-era Star Treks but boy does everyone laugh at the time Picard solemnly said We Have Evolved Beyond Money)

This is a decent point. I've never read The Probability Brooch but I'm sure it would make me roll my eyes even if the ultralibertarian America is convincingly presented as a good place to live within the story's context - because I'd find the underlying assumptions silly. Likewise, no matter how stirringly Bisson describes the green, black, and red flag rippling behind John Brown's horsemen (and it is stirring!), a conservative is likely to go in skeptical. And if they're skeptical, it becomes easy to say hey, wait, it's too convergent for a Pan-African flag like OTL's to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century, and the suspension of disbelief comes crashing down.

Essentially, describing a utopia usually involves taking a political stand, and that will necessarily alienate some of the audience.
 
First of all let's clear up a confusion--when we're talking about utopian AH, we mean TLs in which things generally turn out better than OTL, not TLs in which every last thing is perfect. Even in a better world than our own, there's plenty of room for dramatic tension, if only in the depiction on how it got there. I haven't read Fire On The Mountain but I assume that starting out with chattel slavery means that things will take a while to get to a point where we consider that they're decent, never mind ideal.

Also, I think that in the current context, there's a market for fiction that depicts the world as a better place than it is. "At least we aren't ruled by the Nazis" gets old after a while.
 
From my point of view, a Utopia is a difficult place to set interesting stories. If it's Utopia, there's nothing to drive the story. Why bother to try and change things if nothing needs changing? There's no reason to struggle, and it's all a bit "Nice day again."

That's an over-simplification, obviously. There are stories in a Utopia. For example, what is a Utopia for some might be a dystopia for others. The utopia may be founded on the exploitation of one group for the benefit of another group. The Edwardian class system springs to mind, and all those vile Downton Abbey type depictions. Utopia (after a fashion) for them Upstairs, and when you start looking at life Downstairs, a rather different picture emerges. A story looking at this contrast has legs.

Then, of course, you can have a story based on atrophy in a utopia. If it's a utopia, why bother working to change things? There's no challenge for people there, just boredom, and if there is one thing that human history teaches us, it is that people are restless.

And, of course, there are countless stories in the attempt to create Utopia. Building Jerusalem, to adapt Blake.

best example of this is Iain Banks Culture series. There is no better utopia than Culture, and Banks, to his amusement, realized he could only make it interesting to the reader by exploring the few dark places there. that is, Culture relationship with lower/barbarian civilizations... like us !
Talk about an idiotic paradox !

Also Arthur C. Clarke in 2001 (the novel)

There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic
headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more
trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes,
natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials - these
still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into
the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the
newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
 
This feels in line with a certain trend of utopian / afrofuturist AH that forums tend to avoid (I suspect the “no see actually when you count the number of divisions mcclellan had” crowd has to do with this) but is becoming refreshingly common in the published stuff - I’m all for it, especially considering it arguably offers a more pointed commentary on modern-day race relations than a surviving Confederacy does.

In general, I think it also depends how you define “utopic” - does a utopia have to be literal perfection and devoid of flaws or can it just be pretty nice like, say, Male Rising? If the latter, I’d say there’s plenty of space for more of those[1], especially considering every third vignette ends in “and then Stalin but made of spiders”.

[1] I will caveat that pop-culture timelines are the obvious exception to this, since virtually every timeline to make it the focal point will go “right I think Nathan Fillion is underrated so he is Batman now”. It gets old but it is understandable considering you have to be fairly masochistic to write page after page of solely “and then this movie that I love never got made and all the actors starved to death”.
 
This is a decent point. I've never read The Probability Broach but I'm sure it would make me roll my eyes even if the ultralibertarian America is convincingly presented as a good place to live within the story's context - because I'd find the underlying assumptions silly. Likewise, no matter how stirringly Bisson describes the green, black, and red flag rippling behind John Brown's horsemen (and it is stirring!), a conservative is likely to go in skeptical. And if they're skeptical, it becomes easy to say hey, wait, it's too convergent for a Pan-African flag like OTL's to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century, and the suspension of disbelief comes crashing down.

Essentially, describing a utopia usually involves taking a political stand, and that will necessarily alienate some of the audience.

I think you can judge something like this, to an extent, by how much it can bring you onboard with the story it wants to tell even if you are mightily suspending your disbelief to engage with it, and that the story is the most important part. Classically speaking, a lot of utopian literature falls into being a story without a story, or the thinnest excuse of a plot to drag us through an essay about how much better the world would be if we just all agreed with the author. A journalist or some kind of outside observer visits Paradise, receives lectures on the nature of Paradise, potentially has personally transformative love/sex with a citizen of Paradise, and converts to the way of Paradise.

This is pretty dull reading if you are actually there for a story, as one usually is in alternate history, and not because you're interested in Edward Bellamy's particular brand of utopian socialism.

The Probability Broach, for all that it is a a polemic of the author's worldview with many pages dedicated to going on about that (the graphic novel is actually better about this, because it does better at 'show don't tell' even though it spends an awful lot of time telling anyway), but there is actually a plot. An adventure happens, there is conflict that makes sense within the rules of the world established, and you can follow it along. As much as the setting is an excuse for the author to expound on their ideal world, that's not the only thing that happens. It is certainly easy to go 'wait a minute' at virtually every page of it, but that's not the only thing happening on each page, if that makes sense.

Obviously any story might go too far, even to the sympathetic reader, but a good plot well-executed and correspondingly less lecturing will get people interested.
 
describing a utopia usually involves taking a political stand,

The space program, if run (at least partially) by private companies with deep pockets, strongly disagree with that statement :)
 
The Probability Broach, for all that it is a a polemic of the author's worldview with many pages dedicated to going on about that (the graphic novel is actually better about this, because it does better at 'show don't tell' even though it spends an awful lot of time telling anyway), but there is actually a plot. An adventure happens, there is conflict that makes sense within the rules of the world established, and you can follow it along. As much as the setting is an excuse for the author to expound on their ideal world, that's not the only thing that happens. It is certainly easy to go 'wait a minute' at virtually every page of it, but that's not the only thing happening on each page, if that makes sense.
Then again, The Probability Broach's plot is a good example of the author considering their personal utopia so perfect, any dramatic tension has to be literally imported from a different universe. Imperfection, and therefore drama, is brought by cross-time travellers who link up with evil domestic subversives, and the plot is about defeating them in order to uphold political stasis.
 
I don't know if utopian fiction is necessarily any more political than dystopic ones, it's just that standing for something is often more difficult and controversial than standing against something. At the same time I think it has the potential to be much more impactful. It's easy to write a story about how fascism bad, but much harder to put forward your own ideas on how to make things better in a way that doesn't come off as too grating. Seeing it done well is usually very rewarding.
 
The classic plot device of the Utopian novel is the traveler from outside who comes to the Utopia, after initial struggles accepts it as perfect, and then has to defend it against an invasion from outside. So in an AH Utopian novel, you have to define that outside threat as the antithesis of the idealized society. What factions in the U.S. would be seeking to resubjugate Nova Africa?

Or, more interesting, what factions within Nova Africa might be bringing it down internally? What do they say about modern black America? That's a much harder story to write if you've already set up your utopia. The discussion of Reds elsewhere on the forum made me think about how more authors should do that. Even if you're writing an idealized setting, there have to be some aspects of human nature that you're neglecting and things that aren't perfect.
 
I think you can judge something like this, to an extent, by how much it can bring you onboard with the story it wants to tell even if you are mightily suspending your disbelief to engage with it, and that the story is the most important part. Classically speaking, a lot of utopian literature falls into being a story without a story, or the thinnest excuse of a plot to drag us through an essay about how much better the world would be if we just all agreed with the author. A journalist or some kind of outside observer visits Paradise, receives lectures on the nature of Paradise, potentially has personally transformative love/sex with a citizen of Paradise, and converts to the way of Paradise.

Oddly, this reminds me of Aelita - which you could read as a deconstruction of this kind of plotline as it has the same basic course, but the society encountered is utopian for the royalty, pretty grimly dystopian for everybody else. You then have the whole communist revolution, but the story (on Mars anyway) actually ends with the Princess Aelita, now elevated into power by the masses, turning upon the people and becoming a worse totalitarian than her predecessor.
 
Then again, The Probability Broach's plot is a good example of the author considering their personal utopia so perfect, any dramatic tension has to be literally imported from a different universe. Imperfection, and therefore drama, is brought by cross-time travellers who link up with evil domestic subversives, and the plot is about defeating them in order to uphold political stasis.

Not only that, he thinks it's OK to elect "None of the Above" for eternity. Yes, he's so sure his ideology is always right he has that happen.
 
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