“Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped "the company." I've never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that's the way it will be. That's the way it always is.”
Octavia Butler's novel, "Parable of the Sower" offers both a dystopian future for the Los Angeles area and through its protagonist shows utopian dreaming of another possible way of life- a way of life that will have very un-utopian consequences in her subsequent novel, parable of the talents. This quote functions as a bit of meta-commentary on how this science fiction novel we are reading tries to subvert genre conventions and look beyond simple dichotomies of dystopia vs. utopia, while still showing how those dichotomies structure the thoughts and dreams of the main character and of people in this society.
The narrator laments as unrealistic the typical plot of science fiction novels where the "hero" through their ingenuity defeats or escapes the antagonistic "company", and compares that to the real world where individuals struggle merely to be exploited by corporations. This shows how both the main character and author are trying to get away from stereotypical genre conventions of science fiction, and from easy good/bad comparisons. However, as much as Lauren, the narrator, disdains these utopian narratives of overthrow and escape, she is guided by the same sort of impulses in her journey to found a new utopian "Earthseed" community, and to eventually escape from the Los Angeles area.
This quote shows us a dividing line between utopianism and dystopianism, and with something like a depressing realistic pragmatism in the middle. It reinforces the themes of the novel in how people seeking to escape or transcend dystopian conditions often carry the seeds of reinforcing and recreating those same conditions and systems of oppression in their efforts to create a different form of society, as Lauren's Earthseed colony eventually will, transforming into the violent zealots of her next novel, parable of the talents. While I partially agree with this view, I think that there is something cynical and limiting about it as well. It is true that the main character's struggle is very much predicated on escaping the walled city of Robelo only to end up making a new community with its own walls that will seek to violently enforce its will on other communities. However there is someting self defeating about drawing conclusions that any new sort of social organization will be just as bad or worse than the current one. I think its telling that once the narrative leaves Los Angeles it becomes a narrative of flight or escape. Many of the narratives that we have read about Los Angeles seem to preclude any possibility of positive social change or transformation from within and are in a way kind of nihilistic. They seem to say, that the only way a better world could be created is upon the ashes of the currently existing one.
Kiyo Ouchida
is this the wrong blog fuck
ReplyDelete