Wesleyan University
The Honors College
The Endless Revolution: New Patterns in Dystopian
Science Fiction
by
Kristen N. Salustro
Class of 2013
A thesis submitted to the
faculty of Wesleyan University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts
with Departmental Honors in English
Middletown, Connecticut
April, 2013
Contents
Acknowledgements
2
Preface: A Brief Note on the Texts
3
Introduction: The Good, the Bad, and the No Place
4
Chapter 1: New Worlds, Old Problems
14
Chapter 2: Shattering and Surviving the Static
37
Chapter 3: Power to the Readers
59
Conclusion: Away from Idealism
76
Works Cited
83
2
Acknowledgements:
First and foremost, I wish to thank my advisor, Professor William Stowe, who not
only provided invaluable advice and guidance throughout this project, but also
willingly took part in discussions about exoplanets and aliens. Thanks for seeing me
through the high and low points of this experience, and for all the wonderful
conversations.
Next, I wish to thank my parents and my sister for their love and support. Not only
did you all help me reach this point in my life, you also sat through my ramblings
about futuristic societies and weird theories. Thanks for letting my imagination and
me run wild.
Finally, I wish to thank all of my friends for all the laughs, the (mis)adventures, and
even the arguments. Most of all, thanks for the memories.
3
Preface:
A Brief Note on the Texts
Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are
two standalone novels. Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites is the middle installment of
her Xenogenesis trilogy. Unlike the other two Xenogenesis novels, however,
Adulthood Rites presents two coexisting but clashing worlds, which is an integral part
of this thesis.
4
“There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite.
The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once,
whereas a book explodes a thousand times.”
- Yvengy Zamiatin
Introduction:
The Good, the Bad, and the No Place
In the summer of 2012, millions of people flooded movie theaters and sat
riveted as the latest Batman movie trilogy came to an end, and as the first installment
of the film version of Katniss Everdeen’s story played out. The Dark Knight Rises
and The Hunger Games are only two of the many movies that premiered that summer,
but they are part of incredibly popular franchises, especially among teens and young
adults. These films stayed true to their sources, accurately portraying the bleak worlds
of Batman’s Gotham City and Katniss’s Panem. With the popularity explosion of The
Hunger Games trilogy and the continuing longevity of Batman as a vigilante both in
graphic novels and on the movie screen, the magnetism between these dystopian
worlds and their audience is incredibly strong, but why? What makes the
unwelcoming landscapes in not only these series, but in the dystopian genre as a
whole, so appealing?
Dystopian societies tend to be difficult to pin down and define under an
umbrella term. They vary widely, exploring issues from overly powerful governments
to complete anarchy and everything in between. One common theme is the role of the
individual within a dystopia, but what really unifies the dystopian genre is a call for
change within the society of the author’s intended audience. Dystopian literature
5
often reflects the real world and magnifies a flaw in a society in order to reveal the
need for—and in some cases, facilitate—revolution.1 Even this, however, has begun
to shift as the genre evolves. Some older dystopian works continue to catch the
interest of today’s readers, but a new trend in dystopian literature allows the genre to
continue to connect strongly with today’s audiences. These new dystopias, however,
owe a great debt to their roots, which reach far beyond the first dystopian novels,
back to the beginnings of utopia.
Utopian thinking stretches as far back as Plato, with his Republic regarded as
one of the first utopian works ever written.2 Plato’s Republic sets up a blueprint for an
ideal society and thinks through the pros and cons of various forms of government,
but it was not until the 1500s that the concept of utopia truly came into being. When
Sir Thomas More published his fictional account of a harmonious nation on a far-off
island in 1516, he created not only an idyllic place, but also a paradox. As coined by
More, “utopia” translates from its Greek roots to “no place”, but is also an exact
homonym for “eutopia,” the good place. Unlike the ravaged connotations of
“dystopia”, the word “utopia” conjures up visions of an ideal place, a land where
people live in harmony and want for nothing, and yet this place cannot exist. More
was the first to imagine a true utopia by establishing what Fátima Vieira calls in her
1
Peter Fitting, “Utopia, dystopia and science fiction,” The Cambridge Companion to
Utopian Literature (2010): 135-153.
2
Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy, (New York: Routledge,
2005), 111-21, http://books.google.com/ebooks.
6
history of the utopian genre a “tension between the affirmation of a possibility and the
negation of its fulfillment”.3 Utopia is a desirable goal, but simply does not exist.
As was the case with More’s work, utopias can be impractically ideal as a
means of satirizing the author’s society. More set his utopia on an unreachable island,
but made the society contemporary with his own. Utopia therefore became a way of
showing the real world what is perfect (or nearly so), but also told More’s readers that
they could not achieve that level of harmony; utopia was out of reach. Other authors
followed suit, and utopian novels such as The City of the Sun by Tommaso
Campanella and The Commonwealth of Oceania by James Harrington set up idyllic
but inaccessible societies.
Perhaps because utopia was untouchable, anti-utopianism managed to find
footholds alongside utopianism, most notably in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Anti-utopianism rejects the utopian spirit as an unrealistic and impractical pursuit of a
better future, but also fears that making such efforts could doom the population and
destroy what is decent about the present. Peter Fitting notes in his essay on utopian
and anti-utopian thinking that anti-utopianism is “explicitly or implicitly a defense of
the status quo”.4 In the case of Swift’s novel, the hero visits far-off lands that have
reached for utopia, but fallen far short of the mark and doomed themselves to pitiful
ridiculousness. As a result, Swift’s work validates the real world and condemns
reaching for a better one. Early anti-utopian fiction ridiculed “the utopian spirit…
3
Fatima Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” The Cambridge Companion to Utopian
Literature (2010): 3-27.
4
Fitting, Utopia.
7
[its] only aim was to denounce the irrelevance and inconsistency of utopian dreaming
and the ruin of society [that dreaming] might entail”.5
As the Enlightenment took hold, however, mankind’s destiny was reevaluated
and “man discovered that reason could enable him not only to have a happy life, but
also to reach human perfection”,6 according to Vieira. The pessimism of anti-utopian
thinking was, for a time, overshadowed by 18th and 19th century optimism and the
untapped but now-recognized potential of mankind. Utopias were launched into the
future in works such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and William Morris’ News from
Nowhere, turning utopias into potential fates of the author’s own country.7 Utopias
became possibilities for humanity, goals to strive towards and hopes to hold on to. An
age of staggering scientific advancement and political revolution, the 19th century set
high hopes for the coming years. Mankind was taking hold of its own destiny and
actively shaping the future, but not everyone was optimistic about the advancements.
Anti-utopian thinking threaded its way into the fears of those who felt that mankind
was setting itself up to fall. By the end of the 19th century, anti-utopian writers like
H.G. Wells strongly cautioned against utopian pursuits and paved the way for the 20th
century writers Yvengy Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell.8
Zamiatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984 are the most
renowned works of 20th century dystopian literature. Portraying societies ruled by
oppressive and nearly-omnipresent governments that stamp out human individuality,
5
Vieira, Concept.
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 15.
6
8
these three novels grew out of the anti-utopian writings of Wells and others,9 but the
events of the 1900s fanned the spark and gave the new dystopian genre a blazing life
of its own. If the 1800s were an age of hope and expectation, then the 1900s were an
age of anxiety and disappointment. The 20th century held two world wars, the Stock
Market Crash and a worldwide depression, power-hungry dictators in Russia and
Germany, the Holocaust, development of atomic bombs, and the Cold War, to touch
on some of history’s more terrifying moments.
All of this and more created the launching point for contemporary dystopian
literature. Even today, the “big three” dystopian novels—all written in the first half of
the 20th century—remain powerful and disturbing as they continue to speak to
individuals and societies around the globe. We, Brave New World, and 1984 gained
this longevity not only by focusing on still-relevant dystopian themes such as
oppressive governments and the loss of individuality, but also by projecting their
fictional societies into the future. This keeps the horrifying potentials of these visions
alive; the “big three” may contain elements that date them—not the least of which is
the title of Orwell’s novel—but their depictions continue to ring true today.
Additionally, by placing their societies in the future, the big three established
a link between dystopian literature and science fiction, creating a natural pairing for
the two genres. Science fiction and dystopian literature are not two sides of the same
coin, nor does one imply the other. Science fiction can easily exist without addressing
the societal concerns of dystopian literature, just as the latter could ignore the
former’s dealings with technological advancements or contact with extraterrestrial
9
Ibid., 5.
9
life. What forges such a strong bond between these genres, however, is their shared
ability to project new worlds while simultaneously holding up lenses to our own
societies.10 Dystopian science fiction allows authors to stretch their imaginations and
create fantastical worlds that readers can look at from a comfortable distance, but still
recognize as parallels to reality.
As a genre, science fiction can explore alien planets with very human
societies, as is seen in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed; bring the human race
into contact with alien beings, as in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy; or remain
exclusively on Earth and explore the social and/or physical development of the
human race in the future, as in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. LeGuin, Butler,
and Atwood go a step further in their novels and portray not one but two worlds that
are fully aware of each other. These two-world novels contain cultures that seem like
polar opposites, but are much more comparable beneath the surface.
In LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed, brilliant physicist Shevek is born and
raised on the desert world Anarres. His society was founded by revolutionaries, but is
now cut off from Urras, the paradise home world of Anarres’s parent civilization.
Anarresti society is based on cooperation and equality, and teaches its citizens to
scorn the excess luxury and self-serving attitudes that dominate Urrasti culture.
Shevek grows disillusioned with Anarres, however, when his mentor Sabul steals
Shevek’s work and blocks his attempts to initiate contact with an Urrasti scientist.
Determined to bring about another revolution by breaking the barriers between the
two worlds, Shevek travels to Urras, but discovers that even paradise has its
10
Fitting, Utopia.
10
problems. Shevek must learn to embrace the flaws of human nature before he can
bring about the revolution he desires.
Adulthood Rites by Octavia Butler is the second novel of her Xenogenesis
trilogy. The overarching plot of the series involves an alien race called the Oankali
rescuing the last few humans from Earth after a nuclear holocaust, and trading DNA
with humans in order to create a new hybrid race. The Oankali are able to extend
longevity and correct fatal genetic problems, but do so at the cost of humans’ capacity
to reproduce without an ooloi—the third gender of the Oankali species that is able to
map out the genes of the human-Oankali offspring. The second novel of the trilogy
follows the childhood and early adult life of Akin, the first human-born male since
the inception of Oankali contact with the human race. Akin is kidnapped from his
Oankali village at a young age and is sold at a high price to the resisters, a group of
humans that have refused to pair with the Oankali and have been made infertile as a
result. Initially terrified at the prospect of never seeing his family again, Akin is
forced to reevaluate his situation as he spends more time with the resisters, and he
eventually comes to see the resisters as flawed but worthy of deciding for themselves
if they should merge with the Oankali or regain their fertility and keep their human
genes pure.
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, like Butler’s novel, depicts the rise of a new race
based on humans in a post-apocalyptic world, but one that has been created by a
scientist named Crake rather than through alien intervention. Called the Crakers by
Jimmy a.k.a. Snowman—the novel’s protagonist—the new race is meant to be a more
perfect breed of human. Crake gives the race every feature that he believes should
11
enable the Crakers to live completely free of the thoughts and behaviors that have
driven mankind towards self-destruction. As a result, the Crakers’ mating habits,
diets, and capacities for complex thought have been restricted and controlled. The
novel jumps around in time and intersperses Jimmy’s days as Snowman with
memories of his earlier life, revealing all of the gritty details that drove Crake to
eliminate mankind and allow his creations to inherit a fresh world. As Jimmy
discovers, however, the Crakers still desire knowledge and ultimately begin to form
their own mythology and culture, even with Crake’s attempts to eliminate all creative
drives.
These three novels are not particularly hopeful. Even when the protagonists
succeed, the narratives remain bleak and readers may not come away with a sense of
improvement. In spite of this, the novels are engaging and appealing, much like the
dystopian genre as a whole. The question still remains, however, as to why dystopias
are so captivating. LeGuin, Butler and Atwood all deal with major values that have
saturated the genre since the beginnings of dystopia—such as threatened
individuality—but go a step further in the treatment of these values by making use of
two-world systems, which “[juxtapose] two worlds that share personalities… but
which are radically different”.11 LeGuin’s novel depicts the binary planets Urras and
Anarres and their societies. Butler follows the Oankali and the resister humans.
Atwood switches between the natural Compound world and the manufactured Craker
world. All three authors present two worlds where the protagonist must struggle to
11
John Huntington, “Utopian and Anti-Utopian Logic: H.G. Wells and his
Successors.” Science Fiction Studies,
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/27/huntington.html (accessed 23 Oct. 2012).
12
succeed, or survive in some cases. Readers are shown not one but two instances
where the protagonist’s efforts may be all for naught, and so are hit twice by the
dystopian tradition of presenting a desolate and terrible future of the real world.
The two-world system is not unique to these three novels, but a traditional
approach to the system involves juxtaposing a dystopia and a utopia.12 LeGuin, Butler
and Atwood all seem to do this at first, but they then blur the lines between their
worlds until classifying either as utopian or dystopian is impossible. This results in
something that earlier dystopian works—including We, Brave New World, and
1984—do not deal with: unclear choices and reasoning. Each of the protagonists in
The Dispossessed, Adulthood Rites and Oryx and Crake makes important decisions
that have a tremendous impact on the entire universe around him, and yet his motives
seem contradictory at times. Each of the worlds is deeply flawed, but they all also
contain elements that seem desirable and worth preserving. To change these worlds
would be to risk losing the positive aspects along with the negative, and yet the need
for change still exists.
This does not necessarily imply a step forward. In fact, “change” can refer to a
reversion back to an earlier state of being, one that is arguably worse than what a
revolution has already brought about. What LeGuin, Butler, and Atwood suggest in
their novels, however, is that there are certain values that must not be forfeited.
Where traditional dystopian literature may call for a sacrifice in order to overturn a
terribly flawed society and move towards a better future, the new patterns in
dystopian science fiction of open endings and change for the sake of change support a
12
Ibid.
13
straight rejection of what can be viewed as ideal but inhuman in favor of a flawed
society that preserves values and rights. LeGuin, Butler and Atwood may not depict
improvement within their two-world systems, but their novels engage and challenge
their readers, revealing more about our own reality than nonfiction ever could.
14
“Those who build walls are their own prisoners.”
- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Chapter 1:
New Worlds, Old Problems
Dystopian science fiction is often concerned with two values: individuality
and deep human connections. Individuality refers to the capacity and desire of a
person to think and behave uniquely. Deep human connections are the ability of
human beings to bond intimately with others. These connections are what drive
human empathy and encourage moral choices, and they usually occur between two or
three individuals, not among a large group of people. Being accepted as part of a
community or a society can be fulfilling on some levels, but is often impersonal and
lacks the depth of a connection between two people. As a result, individuality and
deep connections are often interlinked and come under mutual threat in dystopias,
either intentionally via a powerful force or unintentionally via conformity to accepted
societal norms. In the latter case, individuals willingly act in the best interest of their
society as a whole, often neglecting their own personal needs and desires.
Selflessness may not seem inherently dystopian, but when taken to extremes, the
individual loses his or her will to be unique, and thus sacrifices agency. Deep
connections are also lost in this instance, for when a society becomes so focused on
the physical, mental, and/or cultural improvement of its entire population, any small
flaw within a person or a group (possibly even the desire to be loved) becomes a
violation of some unwritten law.
15
Whatever the approach, these two values continue to remain prominent in
dystopian science fiction. LeGuin’s, Butler’s, and Atwood’s novels are not
exceptions, but they do take advantage of several tactics in handling these issues,
especially within their established two-world systems. In Atwood’s and Butler’s
novels, there is a division between the worlds that sets one apart as human, and one as
distinctly not human. Oryx and Crake portrays the decaying human world of the
Compounds, and the newly-established Craker world. Adulthood Rites places the
infertile but pure world of the resisters next to the flourishing Oankali world. Both of
these books externalize their concern with deep connections, and take a much more
explicit approach to this issue than LeGuin does. LeGuin instead internalizes her
approach to human connections by setting up two populations that share a common
origin, but view each other as alien. These two populations are aware of their
differences, but also their shared heritage. Their concerns are not with physical
dissimilarities, but with cultural ones. Intimate bonds between persons therefore play
a much subtler role in LeGuin’s work and tend to be fully tied to individuality more
often than not.
In The Dispossessed, both Anarres and Urras can be seen as dystopias,
although on the surface level, Anarres looks more utopian. Anarresti society is built
around the philosophy of Odo—a woman who stressed equality and cooperation in
anarchy—and though the Anarresti sometimes struggle in the harsh environment,
they all believe in the goodness of their way of life. As Christine Nadir notes in her
analysis of The Dispossessed, however,
16
This sociopolitical structure produces both the possibility and the
impossibility of freedom. Odo’s philosophy and the PDC [Production
and Distribution Coordination] provide a precarious community with
the ideological concepts and the material resources necessary for
ecological emancipation. However, these same forces simultaneously
obstruct freedom because people, their aspirations, and their habits
must be managed according to nature’s limits.13
Nadir places great emphasis on the role the bleak Anarresti landscape plays in the
society the protagonist Shevek is born and raised in, claiming that “Every political,
aesthetic, and personal decision [the Anarresti make] seems to be guided by… a
constant negotiation between, on the one hand, freedoms of thought, expression, and
desire and, on the other, the programmed sacrifices necessary for ecological
survival”.14 While true that the Anarresti environment demands much more effort and
cooperation in order to support life than the landscape of Urras, there are dystopian
elements in Anarresti society that evolved independently of the terrain. The system of
naming newborns is one such element.
Names on Anarres are computer-generated, and
being unique to each living individual, took the place of the numbers
which a computer-using society must otherwise attach to its members.
An Anarresti needed no identification but his name. The name,
13
Christine Nadir, “Utopian Studies, Environmental Literature, and the Legacy of an
Idea: Educating Desire in Miguel Abensour and Ursula K. LeGuin,” Utopian Studies,
21, no. 1 (2010): 33.
14
Ibid., 26.
17
therefore, was felt to be an important part of the self, though one no
more chose it than one’s nose or height.15
This system is, as the novel’s narrator acknowledges, the very same system seen in
Zamiatin’s We, which assigns each citizen a letter and a number as identification. The
Anarresti approach may seem less unfeeling, but the end result is the same:
individuals have no control over their names or their children’s names, and so become
part of a system rather than part of a society. On Anarres, the irony is especially
barbed: the Anarresti think so highly of their own system that they fail to see that a
computer determines part of their very selfhood.
Anarres is full of such contradictions, and by zeroing in on Shevek’s rising
individuality, LeGuin brings all of them to the surface. As a character, Shevek does
not welcome his uniqueness. He lives and works under Odonian doctrines and
believes that society as a whole is far more important than an individual. He believes
in brotherhood and total equality, and willingly works alongside his neighbors
whenever he is called to perform manual labor for environmental projects. Shevek,
like most Anarresti citizens, accepts that he must put aside his personal interests and
take on his assigned labor tasks when called to do so, and yet he feels that there is
something wrong with him, that he is incapable of fitting into Odonian society.
Shevek is fully aware of this throughout his life, but has trouble accepting his
individuality. The narrator states,
Since [Shevek] was very young he had known that in certain ways he
was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such
15
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed, (New York: Perennial Classics, 1974), 250.
18
difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being
incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. The reliable and
affectionate presence of adults who are also, in their own way,
different, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and Shevek
had not had it. His father [Palat] had indeed been utterly reliable and
affectionate. Whatever Shevek was and whatever he did, Palat
approved and was loyal. But Palat had not had this curse of difference.
He was like the others, like all the others to whom community came so
easy. He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is,
that recognition of each person’s solitude which alone transcends it.16
Shevek’s incredible intelligence and desire to pioneer in the field of physics is
what severs him from his neighbors. Theoretically, Anarresti society should welcome
Shevek’s radical temporal theories. Anarres was founded by rebels, and was meant to
be a society of revolution with every citizen working towards a better future but still
having time to engage in his or her own interests. Shevek is allowed to pursue his
love of physics, but is constantly blocked from doing any groundbreaking work.
Judah Bierman notes in his analysis of The Dispossessed,
There is a very real ambiguity in calling a place where genius cannot
flourish an utopia. It is an ambiguity that utopists have kept hidden till
now. Utopias make good citizens, good soldiers, but when have they
shown us flourishing geniuses other than founders?… Shevek’s story
embodies with formulaic clarity the central ambiguity… a man whose
16
Ibid., 106.
19
soul rhythm does not vibrate quite synchronously with that of the ideal
social structure, however convinced he is that the organizing principle
of the society is the best.17
Anarres was meant to be a society made by revolutionaries for revolutionaries,
but, and as Christine Nadir notes, “The Dispossessed examines how the forms of
discourse, knowledge, and power that propose a sustainable, equitable society also
restrict freedoms of thought and desire—emancipating, in other words, while
dominating at the same time”.18 Anarresti society is well equipped for survival: its
citizens cooperate and help each other, and a steadfast belief in the virtue of Odo’s
philosophy keeps the values of Odonianism alive. The tradeoff is the sacrifice of
agency. This goes beyond the level of Shevek’s work needing approval before he can
publish on Anarres, let alone send his theories off-planet to the advanced physicists of
Urras; Anarresti citizens forfeit more than a few basic rights to computerized logic.
Shevek himself believes that his uniqueness is a curse, and as a young man, he
goes so far as to claim that his individuality makes him something inhuman. When
discussing his own inability to connect with others on a more intimate level, Shevek
says, “I haven’t really ever known anybody…. I’m cut off. Can’t get in. Never will. It
would be silly for me to think about a partnership. That sort of thing is for… human
beings”.19 At this point in his life, Shevek is in danger of losing not only his agency,
but also his capacity for human connections. He is so desperate to become a part of
Anarresti society that he considers partnerships (the Anarresti equivalent of marriage)
17
Judah Bierman, “Ambiguity in Utopia: “The Dispossessed”,” Science Fiction
Studies, 2, no. 3 (1975): 250-1.
18
Nadir, Educating Desire, 34.
19
LeGuin, The Dispossessed, 50.
20
to be selfish and against the Odonian principle of sharing everything and everyone
equally. His outlook changes when he meets and establishes a lasting partnership with
Takver, a woman who embraces difference and is drawn to Shevek by his uniqueness.
Shevek, however, continues to be troubled by his individuality well into his adult life.
When Shevek’s and Takver’s friend Bedap says, “There’s a point, around age
twenty… when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your
life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities”, Shevek responds with, “Or at least
accept them with resignation”.20
Shevek maintains this outlook in spite of all the work he does on Anarres,
including forming a printing syndicate with Bedap and Takver in order to publish
everything that the other Anarresti printers consider anti-Odonian or, in other words,
too radical to be considered acceptable.21 By the time he travels to Urras, Shevek
feels that he has completely lost his place in Anarresti society, and as he leaves
Anarres in a spaceship, he feels that “The world had fallen out from under him, and
he was left alone. He had always feared that this would happen, more than he had
ever feared death. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself,
and lost the rest”.22 At this point, Shevek has convinced himself that while Anarresti
society as a whole is inherently good, there are individuals within it who are corrupt,
not the least of which is his mentor Sabul, who manipulates Shevek and Shevek’s
work in order to take credit for the ideas and theories. As a result, Shevek loses trust
in humanity, and takes running water on the spaceship to Urras as “a sign… either of
20
Ibid., 249-50.
Salas’s musical composition, Tirin’s satirical play, and Shevek’s temporal theories
are all rejected by other printing syndicates for being “anti-Odonian”.
22
Ibid., 6.
21
21
great faith in human nature, or of great quantities of hot water. Assuming the latter, he
washed all over”.23
Perhaps a bit paradoxically, Shevek continues to hold fast to Odonian
principles. He continues to believe that he should work towards the betterment of his
society as a whole, and his work in physics turns out to be “the work he was
individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the sake of
society”.24 Once on Urras, however, Shevek is exposed to unrestricted human nature,
to a society on a paradise world that does not require worldwide cooperation in order
to exist. The unchecked greed and hunger for power on Urras overwhelms Shevek,
but also forces him to see that Urras has robbed him of far more than Anarres ever
has. Immediately after Shevek attends a lavish party and deals with pompous
intellectuals, he realizes that
Here on Urras, the act of rebellion was a luxury, a self-indulgence. To
be a physicist [on Urras] was to serve not society, not mankind, not the
truth, but the State. On his first night… he had asked them,
challenging and curious, ‘What are you going to do with me?’ He
knew now what they had done with him. Chifoilisk had told him the
simple fact. They owned him.25
Shevek’s total loss of agency on Urras ignites his desire to return to Anarres,
but also opens his eyes to the real problem of his home world. Urras may foster
23
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 272.
25
Ibid.
24
22
selfishness and greed much more than Anarres, but Anarresti cooperation is only
superficial. As John Fekete argues,
LeGuin’s interest is in the moral advance of people in the face of
challenge. The one law that Shevek accepts is human evolution, which
for him means a development toward morality. The anthropological
transformation that consists of recognizing solidarity as an end in itself
and not just a means to physical survival—an adoption of necessity as
a virtue—is posed as a moral imperative.26
The people of Anarres cooperate so long as their survival is ensured. During a severe
drought, Shevek meets a man who has witnessed firsthand a breakdown of Anarresti
brotherhood, a moment when starving people violently attacked a train that was en
route to delivering supplies to another town.27 Even when survival is not threatened,
however, there is discord in the harmony. People who have some authority and
influence on Anarres, like Shevek’s mentor Sabul, are able to block radical ideas
from reaching the masses, and do so in their own self-interest. As a result, Anarresti
society has become stagnant. Shevek eventually realizes this. As he explains to an
ambassador from the ravaged Earth, “what we’re after is to remind ourselves that we
didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work
together, we’re no better than a machine.”28
While full cooperation leads to stagnancy and restriction in Shevek’s universe,
the Oankali race seems to glorify consensus in Adulthood Rites. Butler’s entire
26
John Fekete, ““The Dispossessed” and “Triton”: Act and System in Utopian
Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies, 6, no. 2 (1979): 134.
27
LeGuin, The Dispossessed, 313
28
Ibid., 359
23
Xenogenesis trilogy focuses on the friction between the Oankali way of thinking and
acting versus that of human beings, but only Adulthood Rites delves into the inner
workings of the Oankali sociopolitical system. Driven by the intense need to trade
genes with other sentient creatures, the Oankali are a peaceful race that offer healing
and extended life in return for genetic mixing. They make decisions and act through
consensus, and their intense desire to ease pain and inflict pleasure throws the
violence and prejudice of human society into sharp focus. In Utopia, Dystopia, and
Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler, Hoda Zaki claims that Butler
showcases what she as an author considers the ideal form of politics, arguing that
For [Butler], human politics is not an arena for the exercise of choice
or freedom, and it offers no opportunities for the improvement of the
human condition. What she denies to humans she invests in her
description of alien societies: her aspirations for a more humane
community, where consensus is reached through communication and
dissent. Alien politics she portrays as being different from and superior
to human political activity; indeed, Oankali decision-making… figures
as utopian. Among the Oankali, true consensus, non-hierarchical
communitariansim, and truthful communication can be found.29
Zaki goes on to acknowledge that this system has the dangerous potential to swing
too far towards oppression by the majority, but for Zaki and those of a similar
mindset, the appeal of the Oankali promise of peace and cooperation is great.30
29
Hoda M. Zaki, “Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia
Butler,” Science Fiction Studies, 17, no. 2 (1990): 243.
30
Ibid.
24
What Zaki’s argument ignores, however, is that the Oankali system actually
does drown out the opinions of the minority. One of these cracks in the utopian crust
occurs when Akin’s Oankali father Dichaan explains why no one tried to rescue Akin
after his abduction by resister humans. Akin correctly suspects that he was left in the
resister village to study the humans, to which Dichaan replies,
There was a consensus… Everyone came to believe it was the right
thing to do except us [Akin’s family]. We’ve never been alone that
way before. Others were surprised that we didn’t accept the general
will, but they were wrong. They were wrong to even want to risk
you!31
As Jim Miller notes, “Because the Oankali favor the interests of the group over those
of the individual, they act in a condescending, paternalistic way that, at times, crosses
over into oppression, as attested to by their sterilization of human resisters”.32
Sterilization of the resisters is, on the one hand, what the Oankali believe to be
morally right. The Oankali constantly refer to the “Human Contradiction”—or the
lethal combination of intelligence and hierarchical behavior in human beings—as the
source of the self-destructive nature of man. The Oankali argue that if allowed to
continue unchecked, the Contradiction would ultimately lead to the annihilation of the
human race. The Oankali believe that letting such violent tendencies continue to exist
is inhumane, and their solution is to give humans the choice of mating with the
Oankali or living out the rest of their lives as sterile resisters. A large part of the
31
Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites, (New York: Warner Books, 1988), 171.
Jim Miller, “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian
Vision,” Science Fiction Studies, 25, no. 2 (1998): 346.
32
25
human population chooses infertility over mating with the Oankali, but even those
who agree to bear construct children are torn between their love for their new families
and their severed connections with other humans. Akin’s mother Lilith is especially
plagued by these feelings, to the point where she disappears for days, perhaps to force
her Oankali family to experience a small part of the pain she herself suffers.33
When a resister named Tino joins Akin’s family, the man reflects Lilith’s
emotions exactly, although as a young child, Akin is unable to fully understand the
frustration of the adult humans. Akin is only able to observe that
Tino needed to be touched more. It had been painfully hard for him
when he discovered that his entry into the family meant he could not
touch Lilith.… Human beings liked to touch one another—needed to.
But once they mated through an ooloi, they could not mate with each
other in the Human way—could not even stroke and handle one
another in the Human way…. [Tino] could have found another village,
a sterile Human-only mating. He had had several of those, though…
They were not what he wanted. But neither was this. Now he was like
Lilith. Very much attached to the family and content with it most of
the time, yet poisonously resentful and bitter sometimes.34
Although both Lilith and Tino love their families, they still share part of the resisters’
view on Oankali mating: the choice between human infertility and alien
crossbreeding is not much of a choice at all. Lilith herself was never given the choice
between sterilization and having construct children. As she tells Tino when they first
33
34
Butler, Adulthood Rites, 25.
Ibid., 55-6.
26
meet, “One of [the Oankali] surprised me… It made me pregnant, then told me about
it. Said it was giving me what I wanted but would never come out and ask for”. When
Tino asks her if this is true, she responds, “Oh, yes. But if I had the strength not to
ask, it should have had the strength to let me alone”.35
Lilith’s forced pregnancy and her bouts of bitterness bring the
disrespectfulness of the Oankali into light. The Oankali may believe in their own
morality, and may put up a convincing argument as to why the human race should not
continue to exist without intermixing with the Oankali, but they also act in their own
self-interest first and foremost. Erin Ackerman notes that
Not only are genetic trades necessary for the Oankali, but they are
pleasurable as well; the Oankali literally desire to explore and become
other, to build a significant otherness. This desire allows and, at times,
forces the humans in the trilogy to begin to abandon their own molar
subjectivities.36
Ackerman describes “molar subjectivities” as static prejudices that humans tend to
establish when interacting with “others,” or those that are radically different from
themselves. In the human-Oankali interactions, Ackerman considers molar
subjectivity a negative element, something that could and should be transcended. This
does, however, glorify the sterilization of the resisters while simultaneously
neglecting the morality of the Oankali’s decision. As Aparjita Nanda notes, the
35
Ibid., 25.
Erin M. pryor Ackerman, “Becoming and belonging: the productivity of pleasures
and desires in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy,” Extrapolation, 49, no. 1 (2008):
24+, Academic Onefile.
36
27
Oankali “seem to disguise their intent, the enforcement of a total denial of human
reproductive rights, in a rhetoric of altruism, salvation, and apparent choice”.37
This disguised dominance is what Akin sets out to unveil and undermine, for
the Oankali truly believe that what they are doing to humans is the best course of
action. Having been born to a mixed family, Akin is initially able to understand and
sympathize with the Oankali thought process, but his motivation for challenging the
Oankali sociopolitical system stems from a combination of his own human heritage
and the connection he establishes to the resisters during his time in the purely human
village Phoenix. Akin is exposed to the more terrible sides of human nature in
Phoenix, not the least of which is the desire of a woman named Neci to force
construct children to look and act more human through the physical mutilation of the
children’s sensory tentacles. Although Neci is able to persuade some people that her
idea is a good one, she also meets defiance from many others and is ultimately
blocked from harming the children.38
The episode concerning the decision of whether or not to remove the construct
children’s tentacles exemplifies what Akin finds outside of the Oankali settlements on
Earth: a mix of violence and closed-mindedness, but also of compassion and a
genuine concern for the well-being of others. These latter qualities are what Akin
places value on; in spite of his kidnapping and the resisters’ refusal to return him to
his family, Akin comes to respect the resisters, and even love a few of them. Tate
Rinaldi in particular opens Akin’s eyes to the positive qualities of humans. Tate and
37
Aparajita Nanda, “Re-writing the Bhabhian “Mimic Man”: Akin, the Posthuman
Other in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites,” Ariel: A Review of International English
Literature, 41, no. 3-4 (2011): 116.
38
Butler, Adulthood Rites, 129-49
28
her husband Gabe are the resisters that buy Akin from his kidnappers, but from the
start they do not treat Akin as a commodity. Instead, they try to learn about him as a
person, and Akin “[catches] himself smiling. Twice now, he had been asked his
name. These people seemed to care who he was, not just what he was”.39 Tate, Gabe,
and others like them make Akin realize, as Jim Miller points out, that “Despite the
violence and stupidity Akin sees… not all humans are fatally flawed, and he becomes
convinced that it is wrong to force them to either join with the Oankali or become
extinct”.40
Akin’s connection to the resisters forces him to reevaluate the aspects of
humans that the Oankali are so quick to condemn. Although he continues to see the
Human Contradiction as a very real and dangerous part of human beings, he also
realizes that disallowing the existence of a purely human population would destroy
the fundamental goodness found in the resisters as well as their desire to fight for and
defend what they believe in, no matter how ostracized they are by those beliefs.
Akin’s realization enables him to connect with his own human heritage on a new
level, and this is what motivates his individuality as he sets out to challenge the
established Oankali sociopolitical order. This is best illustrated when an Oankali asks
Akin if he will follow through with his plans to establish a purely human colony on
Mars, and Akin responds, “I will. But for the Humans and the Human part of me. Not
for the Oankali”.41
39
Ibid., 104.
Miller, Post-Apocalyptic Hoping, 341.
41
Butler, Adulthood Rites 215.
40
29
Akin decidedly sides with the resisters and the human part of his own
heritage, but he still understands the importance of his mixed parentage when he
presents his perception of the resisters and his plans for the Mars colony to the
Oankali. He knows that his hybridism both alienates him and gives him agency as an
individual, for
Who among the Oankali was speaking for the interests of resister
Humans? Who had seriously considered that it might not be enough to
let Humans choose either union with the Oankali or sterile lives free of
the Oankali? Trade-village Humans [those who have mated with the
Oankali] said it, but they were so flawed, so genetically contradictory
that they were often not listened to. [Akin] did not have their flaw. He
had been assembled within the body of an ooloi. He was Oankali
enough to be listened to by other Oankali and Human enough to know
that resister Humans were being treated with cruelty and
condescension.42
Human agency is virtually nonexistent with the Oankali in charge, for as
Ackerman notes, “human agency is subordinated to Oankali decisions and
technology, as it is the Oankali who decide to allow humans the ability to reproduce,
and the Oankali who begin to terraform Mars for the resister humans to settle”.43
Ackerman is not wrong in saying that the Oankali start transforming Mars into an
environment fit for humans, but this statement neglects the fact that the Oankali as a
whole need to be persuaded by Akin before they agree to give part of the human
42
43
Ibid., 159
Ackerman, Becoming and Belonging.
30
population the opportunity to exist as Akjai, as a pure species that can reproduce and
continue to exist as is. Akin explains as much to a resister named Yori when he tells
her about the new colony on Mars: “[the Oankali] would never offer you Mars. I offer
you Mars.” When Yori asks why, he responds, “Because I’m part of you. Because I
say you should have one more chance to breed yourselves out of your genetic
Contradiction”.44 Akin acknowledges that the odds of actually being able to rid
humans of violent tendencies without Oankali intervention are not in the resisters’
favor, but he is still willing to challenge the Oankali social order and fight for change.
Like Shevek in The Dispossessed, Akin is motivated by his realization and
acceptance of his own individuality as well as the deep connections that he
establishes, and both protagonists willingly set out to greatly change their societies. In
Atwood’s novel, the protagonist’s motivation is a bit more difficult to pick out; Oryx
and Crake is much more subtle than LeGuin’s and Butler’s works, and much bleaker
thanks to the post-apocalyptic setting of Snowman’s world. Even in this desolate
world nearly devoid of human life, however, we still see societal problems in the lives
of the Crakers that are parallel to what Shevek and Akin deal with.
As a species, the Crakers were bred to be “perfect”: they are well adapted to
their environment, and are free of the impulses that might lead them towards selfdestruction. When Crake created the Crakers, he eliminated the capacity for racism,
hierarchical behavior, territoriality, and jealousy as well as the need for abstract
thought, which could lead to “harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or
44
Butler, Adulthood Rites, 261.
31
money. Best of all, they recycled their own excrement”.45 The Crakers seem to fulfill
Crake’s wishes: they cooperate with each other and flourish in their environment
without technological aid, they establish routines based on the instincts Crake gave
them, and they are even physically beautiful. Crake may have engineered the Crakers
with the definitive purpose of creating a race that is distinctly not human, but he may
have gone too far, to the point where the Crakers become inhuman. Snowman
especially feels how different the Crakers are from the original human population, for
Every time the women appear, Snowman is astonished all over
again…. They look like retouched fashion photos, or ads for a highpriced workout program. Maybe this is the reason these women arouse
in Snowman not even the faintest stirrings of lust. It was the
thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws
in the design… But these new women are neither lopsided nor sad:
they’re placid, like animated statues. They leave him chilled.46
As the novel flips back and forth between two time streams—one before the
apocalyptic event that wipes out the original population, and one where Snowman
lives among the Crakers—readers come to realize that Crake may not have been
disappointed with this cold, inhuman final product. As a young man, Crake is
constantly disgusted by human behavior, but not without reason. The world that
Crake and Jimmy—the man destined to become Snowman—inhabit is over-populated
and so desperate for superficial salvation that genetic engineering projects, allegedly
designed to resolve bodily problems such as illness and aging, bring in huge profits as
45
46
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 305.
Ibid., 100.
32
well as corrupted morals; Crake eventually reveals to Jimmy that Compounds like
HelthWyzer have become too good at healing the population, and so invent new
diseases in order to generate new cures and revenue.47 Crake’s solution to this
decaying world is to wipe the slate clean and “[take] the realization that humans are a
biological species like any other to its radical conclusion—with a scheme that
effectively vitiates the very possibility of ethical choice”.48 Crake invents the
BlyssPluss miracle pill, distributes capsules to the entire world, and wipes out nearly
all human life by means of a virus hidden in the pills.
Crake’s judgment and destruction of the human population is terrifying,
perhaps all the more so because condemning his actions is not entirely possible. The
world of the Compounds and the pleeblands is decaying, is full of greed and
suffering. Crake’s own life is filled with tragedy, and his friendship with Jimmy is the
only thing that enables him to talk about his father’s murder.49 As Earl G. Ingersoll
notes,
Jimmy helps to humanize [Crake] enough so that readers will attend to
the “what if” Crake proposes: What if our species is doomed to
extinction? If life can survive only in the form of the Children of
Crake, doesn’t that survival outweigh the loss of some of what readers
are likely to consider their “humanity”?50
47
Ibid., 211.
Hannes Bergthaller, “Housebreaking the Human Animal: Humanism and the
Problem of Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the
Flood,” English Studies, 91, no. 7 (2010): 731.
49
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 211-212.
50
Earl G. Ingersoll, “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake,”
Extrapolation, 45, no. 2 (2004): 167.
48
33
These “what ifs” are embodied in the Crakers that Snowman both looks after and is
ostracized from. As an original human, Snowman cannot join Craker society, and can
only see the Crakers from the outside. What he sees sometimes disturbs him—as
anyone who observes a human-like creature recycling excrement might be—but the
Crakers are also innocent, beautiful, and incapable of malice. Crake may have wiped
out most of the human population, leaving his best friend to care for his creation and
try to survive in a hostile world, but he did so with the intent of destroying the evils of
mankind. Like the most common outcome of “Blood and Roses”—a trading game
that Crake and Jimmy play as children which pits the Blood side of “Massacres,
genocides, that sort of thing” against the Roses side of “Artworks, scientific
breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions”, etc.51—the atrocities
have outweighed human achievement in Crake’s eyes, and he leaves
Jimmy/Snowman with a wasteland. For the Crakers, however, that same wasteland is
a paradise, and their innocence has the chance to last for a very long time. The
question remains, however, of whether or not this innocence should last.
Crake’s “purification” of the world may have led to an established harmony
between the Crakers and their environment, but not without sacrifices that extend
beyond the countless lives Crake destroyed. As Bergthaller notes, “The problem is
that tallying up human achievements and human barbarism in the manner suggested
by ‘Blood and Roses’ ends up denying the significance of both and leaves one with a
drastically impoverished account of what it means to be human”.52 The game
demands that Blood and Rose items cancel each other out, but human history really is
51
52
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 78-9
Bergthaller, Housebreaking, 736.
34
defined by a combination of the two. Crake goes a step further and considers the two
sides so closely linked that one cannot exist without the other. For him, however, the
Rose side preludes the Blood side:
Watch out for art… As soon as they [the Crakers] start doing art,
we’re in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal
downfall, in Crake’s view. Next they’d be inventing idols, and
funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and
kings, and then slavery and war.53
The solution to the art problem, in Crake’s eyes, is to do away with the ability
to create art. Having never held much respect for art, the decision to eliminate it is an
easy one for Crake. In the post-apocalyptic world, however, Snowman misses art—
particularly language—and finds comfort in remembering words that are no longer
relevant to the world now that the Crakers are the prevailing species. As he spends his
days scavenging for food and trying to retain his sanity, Snowman thinks to himself,
God bless the namers of oil paints and high-class women’s
underwear… Rose-Petal Pink, Crimson Lake, Sheer Mist, Burnt
Umber, Ripe Plum, Indigo, Ultramarine—they’re fantasies in
themselves, such words and phrases. It’s comforting to remember that
Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language, and not
only with language. Ingenious in every direction at once. Monkey
53
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 361, original italics.
35
brains, had been Crake’s opinion…. Crake had no very high opinion of
human ingenuity, despite the large amount of it he himself possessed.54
Snowman tries to hang on to the remnants of the world that was, but finds that these
words are slipping away, and as per Crake’s design, the Crakers are not likely to
bring them back. Stephen Dunning points out that
Crake believes that he has successfully removed [the Crakers’]
capacity for any form of metaphysical speculation, though he admits
that their prototypes consistently frustrated his attempts to eliminate
their dreaming and singing. Yet we learn that Snowman has been
required to satisfy their relentless curiosity about their origins by
telling them sacred stories…55
Crake’s creation is intensely curious about the world and has a great thirst for
knowledge. As a result, and even though the Crakers are not likely to revive the lost
culture of the pre-Craker world, they start to seem less inhuman as the narrative
progresses. Craker children are naturally inquisitive, and seem to be thrilled by the
prospect of danger,56 which is not entirely unlike today’s children. The Crakers dream
and sing,57 and one of them—a man Crake named Abraham Lincoln—is “getting to
be a bit of a leader… Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. First the leaders
54
Ibid., 99.
Stephen Dunning, “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the
Therapeutic,” Canadian Literature, no. 186 (2005): 86-103.
56
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 7.
57
Ibid., 352.
55
36
and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That’s how it’s
always gone”.58
Crake’s goal of creating an intelligent and self-sustaining, but innocent and
unchanging species is falling apart at the seams. In spite of his best efforts, the
Crakers are capable of development and growth; they just need a small push to get
them going, which Snowman unwittingly provides. Like Shevek and Akin, Snowman
proves able to bring about great change to his world. Unlike the former two
protagonists, however, Snowman’s revolution is unintentional, but then, neither
Shevek’s uniqueness nor Akin’s connection with humans was planned. There is,
however, a great deal of motivation behind all three protagonists’ actions, the
outcome of which is a society that is no longer static and can thus continue to exist.
58
Ibid., 155, original italics.
37
“Yet they resist. They would rather die than come here
and live easy, pain-free lives with you.”
- Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites
Chapter 2:
Shattering and Surviving the Static
In Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Tom Moylan writes,
a discernible and critical dystopian movement emerged within
contemporary science fiction… that at its best reached toward Utopia
not by delineation of fully detailed better places but by dropping in on
decidedly worse places and tracking the moves of a dystopian citizen
as he or she becomes aware of the social hell and—in one way or
another, and not always successfully—contends with that diabolical
place while moving toward a better alternative, which is often found in
the recesses of memory or the margins of the dominant culture.59
As noted in the previous chapter of this thesis, however, these “social hells” are not
always totally evil, and some may even be preferable alternatives to real-world
societies, depending on the viewpoints of the reader. LeGuin, Butler and Atwood
have all built worlds that are not completely hellish but are, as discussed earlier,
flawed to the point where the core values of individuality and deep human
connections are threatened with total annihilation unless the societies within those
worlds are changed.
59
Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia,
(Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 106.
38
Moylan’s statement that contemporary dystopian science fiction pulls towards
utopia by showing a character’s struggle to push his or her society towards a “better
alternative” is true of some texts, but the alternatives portrayed in The Dispossessed,
Adulthood Rites, and Oryx and Crake are not necessarily better. The alternative to
cooperative Anarres is greedy Urras; the choice is between the peaceful Oankali and
the violent resisters; the naïve but innocent Crakers or the malicious, materialistic
Compounds. LeGuin, Butler and Atwood could have constructed ideal worlds in their
novels, but instead chose to create societies that reject idealism in favor of having
room for original thought and deep, interpersonal connections. For these authors,
society can and must have flaws; by its very nature, any form of human society will
not be perfect. These novels embrace the inherent flaws of society, for those
imperfections are not the major concerns. LeGuin, Butler and Atwood warn their
readers that what actually has the potential to doom a society is the failure to initiate
change, for when a society becomes static and its rulers and citizens let it remain so,
that is when core values and morals disappear.
Anarres in particular has fallen victim to a routine existence, despite being
founded by revolutionaries with the intention of being forever revolutionary. As
we’ve seen, Anarres is utopian on the surface, but like all utopias that are considered
to be ideal in the sense that they are perfect, Anarres has stopped revolutionizing.
“Perfect” utopias require societal growth and evolution to stop, for once perfection is
reached, there is no need to go on. LeGuin rejects the idea of the perfect society by
depicting Anarres as a tragic world that is filled with cooperative and seemingly
selfless citizens, but has become so entrenched in its ways that the Anarresti are blind
39
to their own societal flaws. As Christine Nadir notes, “Most Anarresti trust that they
have found a natural and ‘good society’; they are enthusiastic about their utopia,
unaware of how its subtle laws mold their desires. Any disappointment is aimed at
nature, not society, so change cannot be imagined”.60 Shevek himself is just as
delusional in his early life, going so far as to shoot down his friend Tirin’s statement
that Anarresti are forbidden to travel off-world and help revolutionize other societies,
and are purposefully kept ignorant about worlds like Urras. Shevek says, “We don’t
leave Anarres, because we are Anarres”, and claims that to do otherwise would be
anti-Odonian.61 Bedap, however, sides with Tirin, and when Shevek demands to
know who Bedap thinks has been lying to the Anarresti about other worlds and
keeping the population blind, Bedap responds with, “Who but ourselves?”.62
Bedap’s point resurfaces when Shevek meets him again after spending some
time working under Sabul. Frustrated by Sabul’s strict control over his work, Shevek
has begun to grow disillusioned with Anarresti refusal to openly communicate with
Urras. Still convinced that the Anarresti way of life is superior, however, Shevek at
first refuses to believe Bedap’s claim that there are corrupt powers that are working to
prevent any new ideas from interrupting how Anarresti society operates. Bedap
argues,
We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see,
ideas never were controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras.
If they had been, how would Odo have worked out hers? How would
60
Nadir, Educating Desire, 39.
LeGuin, The Dispossessed, 45, original emphasis.
62
Ibid.
61
40
Odonianism have become a world movement? The [Urrasti] archists
tried to stamp [Odonianism] out by force, and failed. You can’t crush
ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.
By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our
society is doing!63
What Bedap realizes and what Shevek eventually sees is that societies that consider
themselves utopian must control ideas in order to maintain the status quo. Urras
achieved this by allowing the Odonians to travel to the moon and isolate themselves;
Anarres achieved this by remaining isolated and by subtly but forcefully blocking any
attempts to publish unconventional works in all fields. This results in what John
Fekete calls a “degenerate workers’ culture, or a degenerate rebels’ culture.… On
Anarres, the result is a stultifying and self-destructive decay of organic revolutionary
culture into mechanical conventionality; the decay sentiments bureaucratic walls that
become internalized (and invisible) as a fear of freedom”.64
The Anarresti truly are afraid of freedom, as illustrated by the wall that
divides the interplanetary trading port from the rest of Anarres. LeGuin describes the
wall at the very beginning of her novel, and notes that the wall’s functional use is to
keep the trade of physical goods between Anarres and Urras uninterrupted. LeGuin
also notes, however, that the wall has become another means of isolation, one that the
Anarresti never try to break. For the Anarresti, “The wall shut in not only the landing
field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the
ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the
63
64
Ibid., 165, original emphasis.
Fekete, Act and System, 131-2.
41
universe, leaving Anarres outside, free”.65 For the rest of the universe, the wall
“enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from
other worlds and other men, in quarantine”.66 Here again, the Anarresti have tricked
themselves into thinking that their society is superior, and can’t see that Anarresti
society is in fact “sick”, as Bedap says. They believe that the best way to preserve
their way of life is to literally build a wall between themselves and the rest of the
universe and, with the exception of Shevek, no Anarresti ever tries to cross that wall.
For Shevek, the wall becomes a metaphysical limit as well. As he tries to
publish his ideas on temporal physics on Anarres, he meets resistance everywhere he
turns, and equates this intangible boundary with the trade port wall. His decision to
travel to Urras is both a way to break Anarresti isolation and circulate his ideas, or so
he believes. Shevek travels to Urras with an expectation of greed and a lack of
cooperation among the Urrasti people, but he also expects to be able to freely publish
his ideas. As a result, Urras is in some ways preferable to Anarres in Shevek’s mind.
Shevek knows that the Urrasti, at least, do not suffer from self-delusion and believe
that their society is without flaws, although he does not fully understand the scope of
these flaws until he is finally on the planet. Urras is corrupt, power struggles happen
everywhere, sexism abounds, and there is a huge gap between the social classes, but
everyone is fully aware of these problems. Certain individuals can disregard some of
these flaws if they are wealthy or powerful enough—as the Urrasti upper class
members Pae, Oiie, and Vea are—but they do not go so far as to truly believe the
issues do not exist.
65
66
LeGuin, The Dispossessed, 2.
Ibid.
42
The Oankali follow a similar track in terms of Anarresti self-delusion. Like
the Anarresti, the Oankali believe that their way of life is superior, and that their
society has reached an ideal state. This is a bit paradoxical since the Oankali are
driven by the need to trade genes with other species, and thus physically change their
own species by way of bearing hybrid children. The Oankali way of life, however,
has become just as static as that of the Anarresti: the Oankali find trading partners,
use the ooloi to create Construct children, move on to find another potential trading
partner when the first trade is complete, and then simply repeat the cycle.
Erin Ackerman claims that “In their interactions with other organisms and
each other, the Oankali literally enter the other’s flesh through tentacles; they
physically become part of that other organism and are changed through the
knowledge that they gain”.67 Ackerman is not wrong in saying that the Oankali gain
knowledge from their trading partners, but the change that the Oankali undergo is
purely physical. They use the information from their partners to construct new, hybrid
children, but these children are born and raised in Oankali society, and they grow up
to be part of Oankali society. Beyond the construction of hybrid children, the Oankali
do not change; they remain mentally and emotionally stagnant, and do not recognize
that they need to evolve socially.
Like the Anarresti, the Oankali believe that their society is superior to all
others, and so reject the idea that they have become static. They are also blind to the
destruction they bring, for although the Oankali can create hybrid children and thus
promise new life, they do so at the cost of annihilating another species. With the ooloi
67
Ackerman, Becoming and Belonging.
43
reporting that humans are flawed to the point of inevitably destroying themselves if
left alone,68 the Oankali thus believe that their decision to end human births and only
allow the conception of Construct children is the moral and totally correct choice, and
it is incredibly difficult for them to even begin to think that they have misjudged
humans. As such, the Oankali completely ignore the positive qualities found in
humans, and so deny their human partners a future. For this reason, there is a large
group of people in the Oankali-human trade who refuse to mate with the Oankali and
have been made infertile as a result. These people are the resisters.
The resisters are the most problematic group of beings out of all the peoples
portrayed in LeGuin’s, Butler’s and Atwood’s novels. Prior to Oankali intervention,
nuclear war broke out on Earth and brought about apocalyptic conditions that only a
fraction of the world’s population was able to survive. These people were picked up
by the Oankali, physically healed, and then the genetic trade began.69 Thus the
Oankali argument for discontinuing an entirely human race is not totally unfounded.
As a Construct child tells Akin, “Humans had come to their own end… They were
flawed and overspecialized. If they hadn’t had their war, they would have found
another way to kill themselves”, to which Akin responds, “I was taught that, too. And
68
The ooloi are the third sex of the Oankali species, with male and female being the
other two. All Oankali have sensory tentacles that help them perceive information and
gain new understandings of the world, but the ooloi have a special set of sensory
limbs that enable them perceive and manipulate information at the molecular level.
The ooloi can read the tendency towards violence and hierarchy in human genetics,
but they cannot read the potential for humans to overcome these problems on their
own.
69
As outlined in Butler’s Dawn.
44
I can see the conflict in their genes—the new intelligence put at the service of ancient
hierarchial tendencies”.70
As noted in the previous chapter of this thesis, however, the deep connection
that Akin establishes with Tate allows him to begin to understand why many humans
choose sterility and emotional suffering rather than mate with the Oankali, and
“understand how vital the right to reproduce is for humans. In fact, it is here that the
dream of a human future is born… a hope made so much more compelling by a
beckoning of freedom, the freedom to go back to a state of being before the Oankali
intervention”.71 For the resisters, revolution means reverting to a pre-Oankali state of
existence. Their lives prior to the Oankali were almost ended by a nuclear holocaust,
but the resisters believe that being forced to bear hybrid children is worse than death.
Mating with the Oankali is, for them, just another way to end the human race, but one
made without any real choice. The Oankali feel differently, claiming that hybrid
mating is a way to preserve the human race. As Akin comes to believe, however, the
resisters’ fears are justified, and reversion to a pre-Oankali state is an option that they
both need and deserve.
The beliefs of the resisters are somewhat paralleled in Oryx and Crake. Like
the resisters, Crake is dissatisfied with his world, and wants to refashion the world
into a more primitive and innocent state of existence. Crake desires this so much that
he is willing to wipe out the entire human population (including himself) through the
BlyssPluss pill, and let a new race inherit the planet. The rut that Crake wants to drag
the world out of is a loop of production and consumption of drugs that often do not
70
71
Butler, Adulthood Rites, 133.
Nanda, Re-writing the Bhabhian, 125.
45
live up to their wild advertisements. Grayson Cooke describes the segregated but
interlocked world of the pleeblands and Compounds as
a world of barrages of media messages raining down on a waiting
populace: a world in which diseases, disorders, and conditions… are
created in one and the same movement as their “cures” are
“discovered”; a world in which biotechnology and medical science
experiment with “the art of the possible.”72
The “art of the possible” is the development of anti-aging treatments and the like
within the walls of Compounds such as AnooYoo and HelthWyzer, but since these
are nothing more than money-making schemes with only a flimsy foundation in
science, “The ‘progress’ science represents is in fact an imagined, fantasized
progress, a lifestyle option disguised as a step forward”.73 As a solution to the
stagnant Compound world, Crake develops the Crakers as a means of returning the
human race to an almost primal state, but with the intention of eliminating the
capacity for change.
As the Oankali intended with the resisters, the Crakers are meant to be the
final humans. Unlike the resisters, however, the Crakers have no past, and so have no
history to look back on. Where the resisters see how the world was before the Oankali
came, the Crakers have only the world as it is. They exist only in the present moment
and do as their biological programming compels them to, and Crake intends that
pattern to extend far into their future. We’ve seen that Crake purposefully tried to
72
Grayson Cooke, “Technics and the Human at Zero-Hour: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx
and Crake,” Studies in Canadian Literature, 31, no. 2 (2006): 116.
73
Ibid., 112.
46
weed out the characteristics that he believed would lead to philosophical and cultural
development in the Crakers. Crake did not make his new humans unintelligent, but
everything about them right down to their five-person-party mating rituals is designed
to render the Crakers incapable of both individuality and the deep human connections
that appear in the societies of the other novels. These connections are absent from the
Craker world, but even in the corrupted Compounds, there is a deep bond between
Jimmy and Oryx, the woman he loves.
In In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood
describes her concept of a “ustopia”. She writes,
Ustopia is a word I made up by combining utopia and dystopia—the
imagined perfect society and its opposite—because, in my view, each
contains a latent version of the other…. within each utopia, a
concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in
the form of the world as it existed before the bad guys took over.74
The worlds of Oryx and Crake, Adulthood Rites and The Dispossessed are dystopias
that contain small spots of utopia, although these utopian pieces are not necessarily
reversions to pre-dystopian times. The most clear-cut example of this occurs in
LeGuin’s novel, for Shevek’s family brings him pure happiness in an otherwise
intensely problematic world. Shevek’s spot of utopia, however, is threatened by
Anarresti society, for an emergency work posting pulls him away from Takver and
their daughter Sadik for nearly six years. Shevek is able to reunite with his family and
74
Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, (New York:
Doubletree, 2011), 66, 85.
47
regain his happiness, but he realizes that in order to keep his “ustopia” alive, he must
break from Anarresti standards and try to change his world. As Christine Nadir notes,
The Dispossessed leaves the following, cautionary message: “Sacrifice
might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for
though only the society could give security and stability, only the
individual, the person, has the power of moral choice—the power of
change, the essential function of life.”75
LeGuin makes this explicit in her novel, for Shevek’s growth as a character is based
on his acknowledgement and acceptance of his own individuality. His happiness is
also entirely dependent on his deep connection with Takver, and so his utopian spot is
easy to pick out. Butler and Atwood, on the other hand, are considerably more
difficult to pin down in terms of where their “ustopias” are, and how their
protagonists aim to preserve their utopian spots.
The resisters in Butler’s novel may seem like a prime candidate for Atwood’s
definition of a “hidden utopia” within a dystopia since villages like Phoenix are
throwbacks to pre-Oankali times. The resisters, however, focus on the future of the
human race (or lack thereof), know that they have been denied the option of having
human children, and therefore feel that their lives are lacking; the resisters are not
happy, and villages like Phoenix are far from ideal. This is not to say that spots of
utopia do not exist in resister villages. They do, however, occur not in a physical
form, but in the form of interpersonal connections, such as the one Akin shares with
75
Nadir, Educating Desire, 48, original emphasis.
48
Tate. Akin’s connection brings him security and happiness, much like what Shevek
experiences with his family on Anarres, and Jimmy with Oryx in the Compounds.
Oryx in particular is a utopian refuge. Her supposed life (for Jimmy is never
certain if her stories are true or not) prior to her arrival at the Compounds involved
being sold to a man who used children to scam tourists, forced participation in child
pornography, and living in an old man’s garage as a teenager.76 Assuming all of this
is true, Oryx has an amazing capacity for forgiveness, and she never holds any ill will
against the people who handled her, or the way they treated her. Jimmy at first refuses
to believe her, saying that he does not buy “All this sweetness and acceptance and
crap.” “If you don’t want to buy that,” Oryx responds, “what is it that you would like
to buy instead?”.77 There is, of course, nothing else that Jimmy wants to buy, and
Oryx’s compassion and resilience becomes the most valuable part of the materialistic,
malicious Compound world. Jimmy is happy with Oryx, and is able to enjoy his life
at the Compounds when he is with her as opposed to his pre-Oryx days when “his
life… felt like a party to which he’d been invited, but at an address he couldn’t
actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the
moment, it wasn’t him”.78 Oryx changes that, just as Tate eases Akin’s emotional
suffering, and Shevek’s family brings new meaning into his life.
Each of these characters has their “ustopian” refuge, but all three also
recognize that if their societies are allowed to remain static, these havens will
disappear, and the core values that go along with them will be lost forever. For
76
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 115-144.
Ibid., 142.
78
Ibid., 252.
77
49
Shevek, that is his family and his ability to act as an individual. For Akin, that is the
resisters and their empathy for others. As for Jimmy, he actually does lose Oryx
because Crake is able to fully carry out his plan and launch the BlyssPluss pill.
Oryx’s death is a result of a world remaining static for far too long; if there had been
room for change in the Compound world, Crake may not have felt that the best way
to save the human race was to wipe the slate clean and let a new breed take over. In
this new world, Jimmy witnesses firsthand the complete destruction of interpersonal
connections as well as the death of culture, and he feels those things slipping further
and further away from him every day. During his life as Snowman, however, he
keeps memories of Oryx with him as a means of comforting himself whenever he
feels just how disconnected from the Crakers he truly is.
By holding on to Oryx and the happiness he experienced with her, Snowman
is able to spark change in the Crakers, whether he means to or not. The very first time
he meets the Crakers in person, Snowman realizes the power he has as he begins to
explain the world to the Crakers, thinking, “These people were like blank pages, he
could write whatever he wanted on them”.79 He chooses to do this by inventing a
mythology centered on Crake as an all-powerful creator, but he turns Oryx into a
deity as well. In doing so, Snowman encourages the Crakers to not only revere Oryx,
but also to remember her; Oryx was, after all, the woman who came to them before
Crake’s manufactured apocalypse, and she taught them about the world, little by
little.80 Oryx therefore becomes Craker history; she was present throughout the
Crakers’ early lives, and is now gone forever. Although Snowman has turned her into
79
80
Ibid., 349.
Ibid., 308-9.
50
a deity in order to explain her absence, this has not stopped the Crakers from missing
her, and they have developed the Oryx myth of their own volition to the point where
they try to communicate with Oryx through some sort of ritual. Snowman plays no
part in this, although he is intensely curious about the attempted communication:
He’s never seen the women do this—this communication with Oryx—
although they refer to it frequently. What form does it take? They must
perform some kind of prayer or invocation, since they can hardly
believe that Oryx appears to them in person. Maybe they go into
trances. Crake thought he’d done away with all that, eliminated what
he called the G-spot in the brain. God is a cluster of neurons, he’d
maintained. It had been a difficult problem, though: take out too much
in that area and you got a zombie or a psychopath. But these people
are neither. They’re up to something though, something Crake didn’t
anticipate: they’re conversing with the invisible, they’ve developed
reverence.81
Snowman provides a jumping-off point for the Crakers in terms of cultural
development. Where he once viewed the Crakers as a game, as something for him to
mold however he wished, his mythological inventions quickly transformed into a
daily task as the Crakers came to him for information not only about their world, but
also the world of the past. In her analysis of Oryx and Crake, Danette DiMarco
discusses Crake as a homo faber, as one who “labors to use every instrument as a
means to achieve a particular end in building a world, even when the fabrication of
81
Ibid., 157, original italics.
51
that world necessarily demands a repeated violation of its materiality, including its
people”, and goes on to claim that
Atwood’s character Snowman serves as a potential site for change. He
faces the challenge of either taking deliberative and participatory
action in the creation of a yet-to-be imagined inviolate world, or
imitating homo faber.… Snowman’s liminal position and potential
power [is] to repeat a past cycle of aggression against nature in the
name of personal profit, or to re-imagine a way for future living
grounded in a genuine concern for others.82
As time passes and Snowman realizes that he will never truly belong in the Craker
world, he begins to treat the Crakers more as a burden and less as a responsibility. He
answers their questions about the world and makes up new information as needed,
and he takes great pains to ensure that his lies about Oryx, Crake, and the creation of
the world match up, but he stops taking pleasure from developing mythology and
satisfying Craker curiosity. In DiMarco’s terms, Snowman swings towards homo
faber by severing himself from the Crakers and leaving them to their own devices
when he journeys back to the Compounds for supplies; in leaving, he believes that
they will stick to their biological programming, and that their mythology will not
develop further if he is not there to nudge it along. The world will remain as Crake
intended, and the Crakers will learn to live without Snowman. The Crakers, however,
have bonded with Snowman more than he realizes, and his absence speeds up their
82
Danette DiMarco, “Paradice lost, paradise regained: homo faber and the makings of
a new beginning in Oryx and Crake,” Papers on Language & Literature, 41, no. 2
(2005), Academic Onefile.
52
cultural development to the point where they both create art and develop a ritual
designed to call Snowman back to them.
Snowman himself may not be quite the agent of change DiMarco claims he is,
however. There are hints throughout Oryx and Crake that point towards the Crakers
being capable of developing culturally on their own. Craker children are highly
inquisitive and take special interest in dangerous objects;83 adult Crakers follow
instinctual habits, but also take great pleasure in hearing stories about the past;84 and
even prior to meeting Snowman, back when Oryx was alive and teaching them, the
Crakers wanted to know where they came from, specifically “who made them”, even
though Crake made sure that “That stuff’s been edited out”.85 Even without
Snowman’s influence, the Crakers are intensely curious about the world, and had
there been no one to respond to their questions, the Crakers may have come up with
their own answers. They certainly have the capacity to do so, although without
Snowman their development may have been slower.
Snowman’s true value comes not in the speed he imparts on the Crakers’
development, but on the connection he unintentionally establishes with them. Here is
where he is able to bring about the most change. Without Snowman, the Crakers may
have developed culturally, but would have continued to operate emotionally as they
were programmed to do, and Crake conceivably would have succeeded in obliterating
the Crakers’ capacity to form deep connections. Their mating rituals and methods of
raising children are designed to eliminate the need for love and affection, and Craker
83
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 7.
Ibid., 103-4.
85
Ibid., 311.
84
53
society would have become one totally devoid of human connections. Earl G.
Ingersoll writes, “it might be argued that the monster is a logical outcome of the
idealist who is intent on rarefying human experience, aspiring to the sacred, or the
ideal”.86 In this case, the Crakers would have become the monsters who are
physically perfect for the world, but are emotionally unfeeling and void of empathy,
love, and kindness.
By remaining with the Crakers as a link to the past and their history (i.e.
Oryx), however, Snowman is able to unwittingly bond with the Crakers, and his
departure is such a hard blow for them that they transform Snowman into a
demigod.87 They miss him, and long for him to return, so much so that they develop a
ritual to alleviate their distress. As such, Crake’s claim that “All it takes [to
completely redefine the world and halt progress] is the elimination of one generation.
One generation of anything…. Break the link in time between one generation and the
next, and it’s game over forever”88 may be true in one sense, but Snowman has the
ability to shatter that assertion, humanize the Crakers, and set a static society in
motion again.
Where Crake fails, however, Adulthood Rites puts forth a situation where his
ideas may have succeeded. As noted before, the Oankali stop the human race in its
tracks, and completely do away with the resisters’ ability to reproduce. Like Crake’s
scheme, the Oankali “break the link in time” and would have let the human race come
to an end, but because they leave Akin in Phoenix with the intention of giving him the
86
Ingersoll, Survival, 170.
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 360.
88
Ibid., 223.
87
54
chance to study the resisters, they allow him to see what the Oankali have nearly
killed alongside pure humans. Ironically, if Akin had been rescued from Phoenix
earlier, he would have had the chance to establish a deep and lasting bond with his
sibling Tiikuchahk (hereafter Tii), and his connection to Tate would never have come
about.
In Oankali society, forming an intimate bond with a sibling is the expected
norm; nearly all Oankali families consist of a brother and sister mated to an unrelated
ooloi. The Oankali’s total lack of empathy, however, causes them to decide to leave
Akin in Phoenix, which in turn not only allows him to forge a connection with the
resisters, but also denies him that bond with the one person that he is meant to be
incredibly close to. Akin and Tii spend too much time apart, and their ability to bond
is therefore obliterated. The Oankali do not even consider this when they leave Akin
in Phoenix, and their decision also weakens Akin’s existing connection to the Oankali
to the point where the twenty-year-old Akin is able to see Tii and his father Dichaan
“as a resister might. They slowly became alien to him, became ugly, became almost
frightening”.89
Akin’s inability to bond with Tii and his connection to the resisters turn him
into an outcast: as a young adult, he wanders away from his Oankali family for weeks
at a time in order to spend time with the resisters, avoids Tii as much as he possibly
can, and feels completely cutoff from the Oankali that he meets onboard
Chkahichdahk, the main Oankali spaceship. Akin suffers both physically and
emotionally as a result of his isolation, but he knows that he has taken a great deal
89
Butler, Adulthood Rites, 199.
55
more away from his connection to the resisters than a connection to the Oankali ever
could have given him. This is best illustrated by what he tells Tii as the siblings travel
to the Oankali ship. When Tii asks Akin if it should experience what their living
shuttle experiences as it flies through space, Akin replies, “Do it. It hurts, and you
won’t like it, but there’s something more in it than pain, something you won’t feel
until afterward…. It’s worth what it costs, worth reaching for”.90 Akin’s time with the
resisters and his forced severing from the Oankali is incredibly painful for him
emotionally, but he finds something worth fighting for, and so begins to speak on
behalf of the resisters and advocate for the Mars colony.
Akin knows that his decision to support the resisters may be counterintuitive;
the resisters are violent, and the Oankali believe that if humans are allowed to
continue on as a pure species, they will destroy themselves. What Akin believes,
however, is that there is room for change among humans. As he tells a resister,
“Chance exists. Mutation. Unexpected effects of the new environment. Things no one
has thought of. The Oankali can make mistakes”.91 Akin recognizes that a static
society will not be able to react to unexpected developments, and may fail as a result.
The Oankali themselves face this threat now that the genetic trade with humans is
underway, as Dichaan reveals to the twenty-year-old Akin. Dichaan tells Akin that
the trade with humans is “a danger [the Oankali] might not survive…. The ooloi have
been very careful, checking themselves, checking each other. But if they’re wrong, if
they’ve made mistakes and missed them… Only Akjai [a segment of the Oankali
90
91
Butler, Adulthood Rites, 200.
Ibid., 261.
56
population that does not participate in the gene trade] will survive”.92 Despite their
ability to read genetics and pick up on subtle body language, the Oankali are seldom
prepared to deal with the unexpected, and the greatest threat to them is the
unpredictable. They have become so entrenched in their cyclical way of life that there
is no room for them to maneuver if something unanticipated occurs, and thus their
static nature puts them in danger.
Something similar to this occurs in Oryx and Crake just before Snowman
leaves the Crakers to journey to the Compounds. Like the Oankali, Crake was
incredibly careful in his creation of a new species, but he also fell victim to not
accounting for chance and mutation. This has caused the Crakers to be perfectly
suited for their environment, but only if that environment remains just as static as
they do. As Snowman discovers, however, a static world and a static society do not
necessarily go hand-in-hand. As he is about to explain his forthcoming journey to the
Crakers, he sees that one of the Craker children has been attacked by a bobkitten (a
genetically engineered bobcat that is supposed to be more docile). The adult Crakers
came to the child’s defense, but not by choice. The animals of the Craker world have
never attacked the Crakers before, and so this unexpected occurrence yields
unexpected results: the docile, nonviolent Crakers were “forced to hit [the bobkitten]
with rocks, to make it go away”.93 Snowman is surprised by this event, and tries to
rationalize the bobkitten attack as an animal reacting to starvation, but realizes that
the bobkittens “have lots of rabbits to choose from, so it can’t be simple hunger”.94
92
Ibid., 199-200.
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 157.
94
Ibid.
93
57
What Snowman does not realize and what Atwood’s readers are invited to consider is
that the world around the Crakers may be changing, evolving. If the Crakers remain
static and fail to shift with the environment, they may not survive despite the many
advantages Crake incorporated into their design. As such, Craker growth may not
only be desirable, but also necessary.
LeGuin, Butler and Atwood all highlight the importance of change in their
novels, but do not give their readers much closure in terms of plot. LeGuin’s novel
ends with Shevek’s return to Anarres after releasing his temporal theory to the entire
galaxy. His decision will revolutionize space travel, but the novel does not linger on
this note and instead focuses on Shevek’s return home. Butler’s novel does something
similar: Akin convinces the Oankali to restore the resisters’ fertility, but the narrative
ends soon after, long before the Mars colony is fully established. Butler does not
explore what happens to the resisters, but instead leaves their future open to
possibilities for her readers to imagine. What Butler does do through Akin is “create a
new world on another planet, a world of possibilities, of complexities that admits a
past but promises a future of regenerative hope”.95 Atwood does the very same thing
with Oryx and Crake by ending her novel on a cliffhanger. The Crakers are beginning
to develop their own culture, but they have also encountered a small group of humans
that survived the BlyssPluss plague. The novel ends when Snowman finds the
humans, and debates whether to kill them, leave them alone, or join them.
That all three authors choose to leave their novels open-ended and only hint at
the impacts of the actions of each of their protagonists reveals that the final results are
95
Nanda, Re-writing the Bhabhian, 131.
58
not as important as the struggle for change; the final results may not be permanent,
after all. What is important is best illustrated by what Tom Moylan warns his readers
of in Scraps of the Untainted Sky:
Don’t cut a deal with the false utopian devil of your own collective
imagination as it dreams of the end of history; and don’t cover up the
deal by changing the colony from that of a place-in-process to one of
eternal delight, literally allowing time to while away.96
Moylan’s warning is taken a step further in LeGuin’s, Butler’s and Atwood’s novels,
for the true “bad place” for the three authors is one that has no room for individual
thought and desire, and stamps out deep connections in favor of keeping a collective
status quo. For LeGuin, Butler and Atwood, to move towards utopia is not to strive
for an ideal state that cannot be transcended, but to be open to and understand the
necessity for change, even if that means taking a step backwards to a previous state.
Reverting to an earlier condition may seem counterintuitive, but this does allow the
society in question the chance to move towards a different future entirely. This is seen
most predominantly with the resisters in Butler’s novel, but the reconnection to Urras
in LeGuin’s novel and Atwood’s inclusion of the surviving humans ignite the
possibility of reversion to a previous state in the other novels as well. All three of the
authors stress that the future is unpredictable and unknowable, and remind us that to
strive for the ideal is dangerous, for without enormous sacrifice, the ideal cannot and
will not last.
96
Moylan, Scraps, 15.
59
“Perhaps they’ll say, These things are not real. They are
phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams, and now that no one
is dreaming them any longer they are crumbling away.”
- Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Chapter 3:
Power to the Readers
LeGuin, Butler and Atwood have shown through their novels that reaching for
perfection is dangerous and can cause even the best-intentioned societies to fail. The
authors of The Dispossessed, Adulthood Rites and Oryx and Crake do not lecture
their audiences, but instead ask them to actively engage the novels and come away
thinking. As Tom Moylan explains, science fiction in general is focused on worldbuilding, or creating a fictional environment that is very different from the real world
but still resonates as something familiar; science fiction challenges its audiences to
accept its constructed worlds and rewards readers who are able to do so with an
exploration of a prospective fate of the human species.97 LeGuin, Butler and Atwood
all ask their readers to suspend their disbelief and accept the novels’ worlds while the
narratives explore bizarre but all too potential futures of human kind, but these three
authors also purposefully make room for uncertainties in their narratives. These
uncertainties allow readers to make their own choices while engaging with and after
completing the novels.
In her essay Posthuman Bodies and Agency in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis,
Naomi Jacobs writes, “But unlike classical dystopias, it is not clear which of these
97
Moylan, Scraps, 7.
60
narratives is to be preferred”.98 Jacobs refers to the narratives of the Oankali and of
the resister humans in Butler’s trilogy, but her statement holds true for the competing
narratives in Atwood’s and LeGuin’s novels as well, for the uncertainty that all three
authors create demands that their readers step back from the narration and consider
the presented issues from all sides. Giving the power of judgment to the readers is
exactly what LeGuin, Butler, Atwood and other dystopian novelists like them intend:
they ask their readers to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong, and
what the ultimate fates of the characters and societies should be.
LeGuin, Atwood and Butler empower their readers by establishing distance
between their novels’ audiences and the protagonists. All three novels follow their
protagonists from a close, limited third-person perspective, creating an “over the
shoulder” feel that turns readers into spectators. This does not, however, force readers
to synchronize their views and sympathies with those of the protagonist. Readers are
instead shown what the protagonist does and experiences in all three novels, and are
given the opportunity to judge the protagonist based on his thoughts and actions.
Readers are allowed to see the protagonist from all sides, recognize the virtues and
flaws of the character, and then decide which elements outweigh the others.
In the case of The Dispossessed, LeGuin shows her readers that Shevek is a
brilliant physicist who wants to perform groundbreaking work, and yet he is often
blind to the world around him. On Anarres and Urras alike, he is almost totally
incapable of recognizing the power struggles that tamper with his own life, a naivety
98
Naomi Jacobs. “Posthuman Bodies and Agency in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis,”
in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Raffaella
Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 101.
61
that almost destroys his work on both planets. On Urras in particular, Shevek sees
only what he has been bred to see: the lavishness and luxury of the greedy Urrasti. He
becomes dimly aware of the lower classes on Urras by reading newspapers, but does
not gain a concrete idea of what the other side of Urrasti life is like until he hears
about the squalor and poverty from his butler, Efor.99 The exchange with Efor opens
Shevek’s eyes to just how ignorant he truly is, but even when he is fully aware of the
limits of the world around him, Shevek reveals his other flaws by withdrawing into
himself and acting selfish and bitter. On Anarres, for example, when Shevek finally
realizes that his mentor has been blocking publication of his theories, Shevek
emotionally withdraws from his pregnant partner Takver for several months. He only
breaks out of his sullenness when he becomes afraid that Takver will die during
childbirth.100 He has a similar emotional lapse on Urras when he realizes that his
hosts are his captors, and that they only want his temporal theories for personal gain.
Once he is aware of his hosts’ motives, Shevek becomes reckless and (in spite of his
still-existing partnership with Takver) attempts to have sexual intercourse with a
wealthy Urrasti woman named Vea.101 Despite all of this, however, Shevek becomes
a loving father and goes on to revolutionize the entire galaxy, as noted in the previous
chapter of this thesis. Readers have the chance to see that Shevek is not a bad man,
but much like the society he is born and raised in, he is not without his flaws.
99
LeGuin, The Dispossessed, 284.
Ibid., 242.
101
Ibid., 229-30.
100
62
Ultimately, readers are asked “not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but
to include and connect” the two extremes.102
Atwood does the very same thing in Oryx and Crake; throughout his early life,
Jimmy is shown to have both flaws and virtues. Even as a young boy, there are
conflicting facets to his personality. With regards to his mother, Jimmy purposefully
provokes her and is most satisfied when he can reduce her to tears, but he does so
because he loves her and wants to break her out of the cold, emotionally-distant state
she repeatedly lapses into.103 As a young man, Jimmy becomes emotionally
manipulative in his relationships with women, and he tricks his girlfriends into
breaking up with him once he feels that their liaison has run its course.104 This
behavior continues well into his adult life, although he shifts his attention to married
women who never demand long-term commitments from him,105 but this string of
empty relationships leaves him emotionally drained. Jimmy is lonely and unhappy by
the time Crake hires him, but he is also still loyal to his friend and capable of falling
in love. Jimmy is like Shevek in that both men are blind to what happens around them
(Jimmy never even suspects that Crake’s manufactured apocalypse is a possibility
until it happens), but they both have virtues to balance their flaws. It is left up to
readers, however, to determine whether or not each character’s faults are totally
counterbalanced by his merits, or if one set outweighs the other.
Butler’s protagonist Akin, on the other hand, is a bit more difficult to judge
because he is a child for the majority of Adulthood Rites. Most of his mistakes and
102
Ibid., 284-5.
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 32-3.
104
Ibid., 190-1.
105
Ibid., 250-1.
103
63
shortcomings stem from his lack of experience due to his youth, and he always
expresses a desire to atone for his wrongdoings when he unwittingly causes someone
emotional pain. There are moments, however, when in spite of his advanced
intelligence, Akin speaks or acts without thinking and his carelessness becomes
offensive or causes trouble, especially among the resisters. Sometimes, the resisters
are able to understand that Akin is not intentionally being rude, as is the case when he
tells Tate “I’d rather go out and eat leaves” than eat with her and Gabe.106 As a
construct child, Akin’s diet consists mostly of leaves, roots and barks found growing
naturally, and his rejection of Tate’s offer is not meant to be an insult to resister food,
although Tate does not realize this immediately. She is, however, able to laugh, which
is a better reaction than what Akin’s offhanded remarks usually elicit. For example,
when Gabe tells Akin about the mythological origins of the namesake of the village
Phoenix, Akin calls Gabe’s story “a lie” without pausing to consider the implications
of his remark;107 in two words, Akin denies that the dream of the resisters to hold on
to their human identities and rebuild the population without the Oankali will ever
come true. Akin apologizes to Gabe, but his inability to understand why the resisters
continue to fight the Oankali does not lessen the wound. As such, while Akin is very
young, he is also intelligent and mature enough for readers to step back and judge him
by his own merits and faults.
Establishing distance between readers and protagonists in order to allow the
readers to make their own judgments is not the only method Butler, Atwood and
LeGuin use to actively engage their audiences. The authors also purposefully leave
106
107
Butler, Adulthood Rites, 145.
Ibid., 123.
64
cracks and uncertainties in their narratives that, much like the novels’ protagonists,
demand to be considered from all sides. The narrative cracks of Butler’s Adulthood
Rites in particular are closely tied to Akin’s youthful lack of understanding of the
resisters, and occur most notably in dialogue exchanged between Akin and the
resisters regarding the abduction of construct children. This culminates in a
conversation that Akin has with Tate. At this point, Akin reveals to Tate just how
frustrated he is with the resisters’ refusal to return him to his family—which is
justifiable—but he also continues to struggle to understand why the resisters kidnap
construct children, and why they desire purely human children.108
Akin never draws a straight answer out of Tate or the other resisters when he
questions them about their longing for children and dogged refusal to mate with the
Oankali. By leaving these gaps in the conversations and never explicitly stating what
drives the resisters on, Butler allows her readers to puzzle out the answer on their
own. Butler’s readers can decide for themselves why mating with the Oankali in order
to bear construct children is not enough for some humans, and why—in spite of all
their empathy—Tate and Gabe refuse to return Akin to his family. Thus, while Butler
explains the reasoning of the resisters to a certain degree, the novel leaves readers
with an open invitation to figure out the resisters’ true motives and decide if those
intentions are justifiable or not.
Atwood goes further than Butler in leaving gaps for readers to fill in Oryx and
Crake. The details of Jimmy/Snowman’s life are readily available to readers, but the
events surrounding Crake’s are only revealed in murky pieces, and the story Oryx
108
Ibid., 158
65
tells Jimmy about her past is possibly a total falsehood. Atwood leaves the validity of
Oryx’s history in her readers’ hands; readers can decide for themselves whether or
not Oryx is lying, and if it’s problematic if she is. As for Crake, his character can be
seen as something of a tragic hero; his father is killed for discovering a conspiracy
within the Compounds, and his mother marries a man who may have been involved in
the murder.109 With that dark past behind him, Crake goes on to develop the
BlyssPluss pill, and wipe out all of the violent, heartless people and make way for a
new breed of human.
There is no denying that Crake is brilliant, and he seems to care about Jimmy
as demonstrated by offering help with high school math homework and showing
sympathy when Jimmy sees his runaway mother on a news broadcast of a riot.110
Atwood’s readers, however, also have the chance to catch hints at some of Crake’s
more disturbing behavior, such as the possibility that his first tests of the BlyssPluss
pill were on his own mother and the man she married after Crake’s father died.111
There is also the matter of whether or not Crake realizes that Jimmy and Oryx
become lovers soon after Jimmy begins working on the BlyssPluss advertising
campaign, and if Crake’s murder of Oryx is because of this love affair or some other
unstated reason. Atwood offers no clear answer, and leaves her readers to determine
just how much sympathy should be shown for Crake and his cause.
The gaps in LeGuin’s novel are not as explicit as they are in Atwood’s, nor do
they create tension between characters, as is the case with the conversations Akin has
109
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 182-3.
Ibid., 174, 181-2.
111
Ibid., 177, 253.
110
66
with Tate and other resisters. In The Dispossessed, LeGuin is much more overt when
describing Shevek’s thoughts and emotions, and by their own natures, most
characters in the novel leave very little unsaid. There are, however, still events and
facts that exist only on the peripheries of the narrative, and these are what create the
uncertainties in The Dispossessed. The most clear-cut example of this occurs at the
end of the novel when Shevek meets Keng, an ambassador from the planet Terra.
Initially unbeknownst to readers, Terra is actually Earth, but a future Earth that has all
but been destroyed by overpopulation and wasting the planet’s resources. By the time
readers learns this, Shevek has denounced Urras as hell, claiming that for all its
beauty, the planet is beyond help, is too far gone in power struggles and materialism.
Keng, however, responds, “I know its full of evils, full of human injustice, greed,
folly, waste. But it is also full of good, of beauty, vitality, achievement. It is what a
world should be! It is alive, tremendously alive—alive, despite all its evils, with
hope”.112
What Keng asks both Shevek and, through him, LeGuin’s readers to see is
that in spite of all its flaws and rigidity, Urras is still a paradise to some, is still a
preferable alternative to some states of existence. Keng brings a new perspective into
the narration, one that Shevek rejects but readers are encouraged to consider. Keng’s
statement “It is what a world should be!” has the potential to ring true for all of the
worlds of The Dispossessed, Adulthood Rites and Oryx and Crake, although
evaluation of that potential is entirely dependent on the viewpoints of the readers.
This is exactly what LeGuin, Butler and Atwood intend for their readers to consider.
112
LeGuin, The Dispossessed, 347.
67
Each of the worlds presented in their two-world systems has its flaws and virtues,
much like the characters that inhabit and move between those worlds. In each
instance, readers are asked to consider which world is superior, which character has
the correct moral stance, and if it is actually possible to be totally superior or morally
correct. All three novels allow their readers to make decisions on these matters, and
then leave the readers with an open ending, which invites readers to project their own
imagined futures for each of the worlds in question.
In their introduction to Dark Horizons, Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan
write:
the new critical dystopias allow both readers and protagonists to hope
by resisting closure: the ambiguous, open endings of these novels
maintain the utopian impulse within the work. In fact, by rejecting the
traditional subjugation of the individual at the end of the novel, the
critical dystopia opens a space of contestation and opposition…113
Baccolini and Moylan define “critical dystopias” as a mixture of utopian and
dystopian elements that is intrinsically more hopeful than early dystopian works—
such as Orwell’s 1984—because critical dystopias hold the promise of change. For
Baccolini and Moylan, this promised change is meant to be for the better, and the
“space of contestation and opposition” refers to a fight against the established
authority system of the novel in question. As discussed in the previous chapter of this
thesis, however, LeGuin, Butler and Atwood do not necessarily push their established
113
Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan. “Introduction: Dystopia and Histories,” in
Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, (New York:
Routledge, 2003) 7, original emphasis.
68
worlds down the path towards a better future, and the struggles of their protagonists
are not against authority per se, but against stagnation. LeGuin, Butler and Atwood
conform to the critical dystopian subgenre insofar as they do not ultimately crush
their protagonists’ individualism, but Baccolini’s and Moylan’s classification of
open-ended critical dystopias leave their audiences with a sense of success and
improvement. The Dispossessed, Adulthood Rites and Oryx and Crake, on the other
hand, leave their readers with the task of deciding whether or not the protagonists’
end goals are fully achieved, and if that potential future is better after all.
The Dispossessed ends with Shevek returning to Anarres from Urras after
releasing his temporal theories to the entire galaxy. His work promises to
revolutionize space travel and make the exchange of goods and ideas faster than ever
before, but his home planet is still closed off by a wall. Shevek’s journey to Urras has
shattered a near two-century-long spell of isolation and made things “a little broken
loose, on Anarres”, but Shevek knows that the turmoil makes the planet dangerous
and he “cannot push too far”.114 The future of Anarres is completely uncertain, and
could range anywhere from another revolution to the establishment of an even more
rigid sociopolitical system. Shevek knows that he has opened the door to new
possibilities, and he welcomes the change in spite of the danger he has placed himself
in by defying Anarresti tradition, but LeGuin’s readers are left wondering if breaking
Anarres out of its routine is justified.
We’ve seen how becoming static puts a society like Anarres in danger, but
does that mean that Shevek’s journey will bring about the right kind of revolution?
114
LeGuin, The Dispossessed, 384.
69
The way Anarres operates prior to Shevek’s departure for Urras is designed to ensure
survival in a harsh desert environment and, for the most part, that initiative has
succeeded. In order to continue to thrive, Anarres requires both effort and sacrifice
from its citizens. Shevek, however, has seen and experienced for himself instances
when he believes that Anarres has demanded too much of individual people. The
Dispossessed “Rather than blaming someone for current problems or failures” asks its
readers, “Would and should we be willing to punish someone or allow someone to
suffer if to do so we would produce a good life for everyone else?”115 While the
reader is free to consider that issue and decide for themselves, Shevek’s own answer
is a resounding no, and the demands of Anarres have destroyed his faith in his own
people to the point where his solution to Anarresti stagnation is to work towards
change on another world. Readers, on the other hand, have the chance to question
Shevek’s decision and wonder if the journey to Urras will bring about the change that
Anarres actually needs, or if outside influence will harm rather than help Anarresti
society.
Adulthood Rites leaves off on an even more open ending than The
Dispossessed. Where Shevek has ensured change of some kind, Akin has won the
right to give the resisters the opportunity to change, but with the knowledge that they
might fail. Akin and the entire Oankali population recognize the violent nature of
human beings, and worry that the resisters who travel to Mars will not be able to
overcome their own instincts and will destroy themselves. Here again, though, the
115
Lyman Tower Sargent. “The Problem of the “Flawed Utopia”: A Note on the
Costs of Eutopia,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination,
ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 227.
70
potential fate of the resisters resides in the hands of the readers. Butler leaves her
audience with the establishment of the Mars colony, but also with the final image of
the village Phoenix burning to the ground. Resisters started the fire, and although
Akin, Tate, Gabe and a few others are able to escape, the flames destroy the village
and claim many lives. Readers are left with this vivid reminder of the destructive
capabilities of humans, but also with the symbolic image of Phoenix burning. Butler
leaves it up to her readers to decide if the resisters will be able to rise out of their
metaphorical ashes and successfully breed themselves out of their violent tendencies,
or if they will fail and the human race will come to an end once and for all. Readers
are asked to consider whether or not the Oankali were correct not necessarily in their
treatment of the human race, but in their judgment of human beings.
In the years 2000 and 2001, Ruth Levitas and Lucy Sargisson—two academic
writers and researchers of utopian literature and conceptualization—exchanged a
series of letters discussing the idea and achievement of utopia. Sargisson wrote to
Levitas:
It is important not to run away from the dangers and dark sides lest we
become naïve in our conceptualization of Utopia. That would be
irresponsible, sloppy, and dangerous.… perhaps Utopia is simply
dangerous. Lives are affected by idealism. Ideals can, I’m sure,
inspire, motivate, and galvanize us to action. But what if those ideals
demand the annihilation of other people?116
116
Lucy Sargisson to Ruth Levitas, 8 January 2002, in Dark Horizons: Science
Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 25, original emphasis.
71
In the case of the Oankali, the ideal is the construction of a new species that is
intelligent, peaceful, and self-sustaining. The cost is the human race. Some readers
may find themselves agreeing with the Oankali perspective, believing that humans are
too violent and resistant to change to achieve peace. Others may side with the
resisters and fully deny the validity of the Oankali viewpoint. Others still may not
agree with either side and take a middle-of-the-road stance. Whatever the reaction of
the readers, however, Butler leaves the fate of the resisters open and does not provide
closure even in Imago, the third and final novel of the Xenogenesis trilogy.
Even more open-ended than LeGuin’s and Butler’s novels, Oryx and Crake
leaves its readers with two cliffhangers: the beginning of culture in the Craker world,
and the discovery of a group of BlyssPluss plague survivors. In spite of this openness,
Atwood’s novel is remarkably bleak and seems to defy what Moylan’s “critical
dystopia” stands for; the open ending of Oryx and Crake does not contain much hope.
The Crakers have created a grotesque icon and elevated Snowman—a self-serving
liar—to the level of a demigod; Snowman has sustained a possibly fatal injury during
his trip to the Compounds, and is at the very least at risk of losing his foot to
infection; and the surviving humans may be killed by Snowman in order to save the
Crakers’ innocence. Regardless of the sense of hopelessness that saturates the end of
the novel, however, Atwood’s readers are free to project what they believe would be
the most fitting outcome for the Crakers, Snowman, and the survivors.
With regard to the Crakers, readers have the choice of creating a future where
the Crakers have ceased to change and remain as blissfully naïve as possible. Or
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readers could imagine the development of Craker culture and picture them moving
towards a more advanced form of civilization. There are, of course, many more
potential outcomes, and Atwood’s ending could support almost any possibility,
including a cyclical progression towards a Craker version of the Compound world.
What the novel ultimately challenges readers to consider is not how far could the
Crakers go, but how far do they need to go. In his article on Oryx and Crake, Grayson
Cooke notes that “The end of one understanding of the human being is the beginning
of another… what counts as human will shift. Given time, even the Children of Crake
may come to count as human, as their language develops, as they mythologize and
epigeneticize”.117 Atwood’s readers are faced with the questions of what makes a
human, and are the Crakers capable of reaching that state on their own. Are the
Crakers at risk of developing malice alongside their virtues, or did Crake’s actions
save them from the darker sides of being human?
Tied in to the fate of the Crakers are the futures of Snowman and the
survivors. Arguably, the Crakers cannot maintain their innocent state if anyone from
the Compound world is there to corrupt them. We’ve seen that Snowman was able to
establish a deep connection to the Crakers without intending to do so; one can only
imagine what will happen to the Crakers if they reconnect with the survivors of the
BlyssPluss plague. Shuli Barzilai argues in favor of Snowman killing the survivors in
order to save the Crakers from a doomed future, claiming that the words that echo
117
Cooke, Zero-Hour, 123.
73
through Snowman’s mind at the end of the novel—”Don’t let me down”118—point
back to Crake’s final words to Jimmy: “I’m counting on you”.119 Barzilai claims that
Given all that has happened before in history, and all that [Snowman]
has heard, seen, and even smelled, his choice is as overdetermined as
the mortal coil of his fate. Hard-wired for aggression and destruction,
human beings have gone through the good earth like slugs, leaving
wreckage in their wake. Homo sapiens have had their chance for ages,
for millennia, and have seriously failed. Snowman has no more reason
than Crake to love his kind…. He will step forward, spray gun raised,
to complete Crake’s lethally altruistic design.120
Crake did task Jimmy with looking after the Crakers and protecting them, and
Snowman may have nothing to lose by killing the survivors, but Atwood’s ending is
nowhere near as rigid as Barzilai would have his audience believe.
Atwood purposefully uses “Don’t let me down” in three distinct places in her
novel: when Jimmy sees a recording of the execution of his mother (she addresses
Jimmy directly and uses the phrase);121 when Oryx asks Jimmy to take care of the
Crakers should anything happen to her;122 and when Snowman wonders what he
should do about the surviving humans.123 Atwood could have traded the final instance
of “Don’t let me down” for Crake’s appeal of “I’m counting on you”, but instead uses
118
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 374.
Ibid., 329.
120
Shuli Barzilai, ““Tell My Story”: Remembrance and Revenge in Atwood’s Oryx
and Crake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction,
50, no. 1 (2008): 108.
121
Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 258.
122
Ibid., 322.
123
Ibid., 374.
119
74
the phrase that Jimmy’s mother and Oryx use earlier in the novel. As the result, and
while Barzilai’s argument may not be wrong, there is a stronger connection to Oryx—
the woman who bore no ill-will against anyone—and to Jimmy’s mother—the
woman who openly defied the Compounds and all that they stood for by destroying
her own research and participating in demonstrations and rallies against Compound
products. With the phrase echoing back to the earlier instances, the possibilities of
Snowman either leaving the survivors alone and returning to the Crakers—as Oryx
would—or fully severing himself from the Crakers, stepping forward and trying to
join the survivors—as Jimmy’s mother would—seem just as likely as Barzilai’s claim
that Snowman will do as Crake would and murder the survivors in order to preserve
the Crakers. Just as with Adulthood Rites and The Dispossessed, however, Atwood
leaves her readers with the freedom to explore the potential futures of the characters.
The previous two chapters of this thesis have argued for the necessity of
change and outlined what is in danger of being lost should a society become static.
The open endings of The Dispossessed, Adulthood Rites, and Oryx and Crake leave
room for debate, and allow any given reader to choose the potential outcome that he
or she believes is truly better or more fitting than all of the others. Readers are
challenged to pass moral judgment on the novels’ worlds and characters, and then are
presented with an almost-impossible-to-ignore invitation to imagine the future. The
novels show what can be lost when reaching for utopia, but ultimately ask their
readers to decide if the sacrifice is worth the outcome, or if the forfeiture is too great a
price. There is no concrete answer within the texts despite what the characters say and
75
believe, and readers have to decide for themselves what is right, and what should be
avoided.
This does not, however, give readers the power to close the narratives and say
for certain what will and will not happen to the characters and societies. Since the
novels do not ask their audiences to agree on interpretations of their endings, the texts
demand to remain open-ended. Any reader can favor one potentiality over all the
others, but still must acknowledge that the other outcomes are just as possible. The
question the novels pose therefore changes from “What could happen in these worlds
tomorrow?” to “What should happen tomorrow, and why?”
As such, the authors do not lecture their readers or provide a formula for a
future society, but instead challenge their readers and ask their audiences to think
about where the societies of the novels should go, and at what cost. The novels—and
dystopian science fiction in general—therefore serve more as sparks for thought and
debate than as predictions for the real world, and they ask us to decide what is in need
of change and what is worth preserving within our own societies. We are not,
however, asked to forget about the past or the future in order to focus exclusively on
the present. The genre instead reminds us of the problems within our current
societies, and demands that we refuse to fall into the alluring trap of stagnation by
“refusing the temptation to move quickly to a restful refuge”.124 Existing in the
present without considering the past or the future is easy; allowing the past and the
future to influence the present and make room for change is difficult, but necessary.
124
Moylan, Scraps, 276.
76
“Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator.
And change has its enemies.”
- Robert Kennedy
Conclusion:
Away from Idealism
Dystopian science fiction is a warped reflection of the real world, one that
establishes distance between itself and its audience but still resonates as something
familiar and relatable. The aim of the genre is to provoke thought about the readers’
own societies by creating a deeply flawed world that could be a potential future of the
real world unless something is changed. This active engagement of the audience is
one facet of the dystopian genre that helps maintain its popularity around the world,
but utopian works have nearly the same goals. Utopian novels, however, are not as
widely read, and are not produced as commonly as dystopian works today. There are
utopian novels—such as Aldous Huxley’s Island—but in terms of readership in
today’s world, they trail far behind their dystopian counterparts, despite the
similarities between the two: both utopias and dystopias are concerned with the
societies of their contemporary readers, and both want to encourage their audiences to
actively think about the future and how to shape it. Why, then, do dystopias provide
the basis for popular novels and movies while utopias remain more firmly in the
sphere of philosophy? Why do utopias fail to captivate large audiences while
dystopias hold a powerful position in today’s world?
The quick and readily apparent answer to this question is that dystopias, by
their very nature, contain a central flaw and, therefore, the basis for engaging plots
77
and a series of character struggles. The utopian genre, on the other hand, is filled with
idyllic worlds and societies, the very bane of suspense and intrigue. Where dystopian
writing showcases dark futures, utopian writing presents alternatives to the real world
that are meant to be preferable, something to strive toward. Utopian and dystopian
texts alike want to see improvement in the world, but utopias try to sketch out better
ways of living. This holds true for utopian nonfiction as well as utopian novels.
Modern-day nonfiction that swings towards utopianism is filled with noble intentions
and tries to suggest that a better future may not be impossible, and yet these bright
projections fail to catch the attention of the world.
One explanation for this trend may stem from the current condition of the
world, and despite its status as a first-world country, the United States of America is
no exception. In Part One of his utopian manifesto America the Possible, James Speth
outlines most, if not all, of the challenges and shortcomings of the modern-day
America. Speth points to social, economic, political, environmental and educational
problems—such as high poverty rates, low test scores compared to other first-world
countries, and severe gender inequality125—and then runs through the policies and
institutions that have pushed the country towards the Great Recession. Taken alone,
Part One of America the Possible appears to explain why utopias seem hopelessly
unrealistic in today’s world.
Part Two of Speth’s manifesto, however, claims the exact opposite by
sketching out a future America where poverty, racism and other ugly elements have
125
James Gustav Speth, “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I: From decline to
rebirth,” Orion, March/April 1992,
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6681/.
78
all but disappeared. Speth acknowledges that, in today’s world, his manifesto seems
like a prime example of idealism, but claims that with much work and sacrifice, his
vision could be achieved by the year 2050.126 Speth puts forth in detail what he
believes will constitute a better America, but his manifesto is more of a lecture than a
call for action. Speth definitely wants to see the country change for the better, but the
vision put forth in America the Possible remains more of a utopian conception than
anything else.
This characteristic sketched-out proposition for an idyllic future is what truly
diminishes the appeal of utopian writing in today’s world. Utopian texts showcase an
ideal or highly desirable world, but they do little more than set out a model for the
future. Like dystopian novels, the aim of utopian writing is to stoke the imaginations
of readers and get audiences thinking about the future. Unlike dystopian novels,
however, utopian writing presents an end goal that is to be worked for and achieved
with the intent of replacing the current status quo. Utopian texts decide what the best
future is by passing judgment on the world and choosing what is worth working
towards rather than leaving that task in the hands of their audiences. Unfortunately for
utopian writers, however, there is only one real way to achieve utopia, and a million
and one ways to fall short. A society that achieves some, but not all, of the established
conditions of a utopia cannot be considered a true utopia, and as the dystopian genre
warns us, pursing utopia too far and for too long without any guarantee of success can
be dangerous.
126
Ibid., “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part II: A new politics for a new
dream,” Orion, May/June 2012,
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6810.
79
In the case of Speth’s manifesto, there are a few instances where his ideas for
the America of 2050 border on dystopian. For example, Speth calls for “true popular
sovereignty” where “the majority should prevail”.127 Speth wants America to
reestablish itself as a true democracy, but while his intent is to give all Americans an
equal opportunity to vote, he fails to acknowledge that in a true democracy the
majority has absolute power, and any minority vote is completely overshadowed and
ignored. We’ve seen how majority rule can be truly problematic thanks to the Oankali
political system depicted in Adulthood Rites. As is the case with Akin’s family when
they want to rescue their son from the resister village Phoenix, the minority vote in
Speth’s future will be ignored no matter how strong the argument or reasoning.
Another part of Speth’s vision of the future that resonates with dystopia is his
desire for more frugal living and communal consumption, meaning that the American
population will share physical goods and resources rather than possess them.128 This
seems like a preferable solution to rampant consumerism, but we can see this
principle brought to its ultimate end in The Dispossessed on the world of Anarres.
LeGuin’s novel suggests that we as humans need to own, need to possess; ultimate
communalism blocks fulfillment of that necessity, and so drives our behavior to new
extremes. Anarres may be the antithesis of a consumerist society, but that has not
eliminated greed and possessiveness. In fact, these elements have found a far more
dangerous foothold on Anarres; instead of controlling tangible items, ideas are
controlled and manipulated. This is one of the main problems of Anarresti society,
and while the anarchist world of Anarres may seem like a far cry from America, the
127
128
Ibid.
Ibid.
80
dystopian restraint of free thought should strike a sensitive nerve in a country built on
free speech. Speth’s vision for America certainly does not intend to place freedom of
thought in danger, but LeGuin’s novel reminds us that the possibility still exists and
cannot be ignored.
Speth goes on to explain that achieving his 2050 America would require a
drastic cultural shift towards an American citizen who places value on tolerance,
cooperation, and a sense of community.129 Speth also wants people to “[see
themselves] as part of nature… close kin to wild things”.130 Here’s where we start to
see the makings of the idea that eventually results in the Crakers of Oryx and Crake;
fed up with the superficial consumerism of the Compound world, Crake wipes out the
population in order to make room for a new breed of human that is gentler and much
more in tune with nature than the original Homo sapiens. Oryx and Crake shows an
extreme outcome, and Speth’s ideas for the future are not meant to yield these kinds
of results, but dystopias remind us once again that even the best intentions can have
dangerously unexpected results.
When armed with dystopian rhetoric, arguing against utopian thinking is fairly
simple. A great many dystopias are, after all, failed utopias. This does not, however,
mean that dystopian rhetoric completely destroys that of the utopian genre. The
rhetoric of the dystopian genre is typically a call to action, one that asks readers to
consider the future and then act in order to incite change. Dystopias present social
outcomes that could and should be avoided, and the worlds built by LeGuin, Butler
and Atwood show us that even if our world ventures down dark paths, the chance to
129
130
Ibid.
Ibid.
81
change course still exists. Novels like The Dispossessed, Adulthood Rites and Oryx
and Crake remind us that there can always be room for change if individuality and
deep human connections are preserved. Utopian rhetoric, on the other hand, asks
people to figure out a plan to achieve an end goal, and then follow through to the end.
Success comes when the presented utopia is achieved; anything less is failure.
Ironically, this turns dystopian rhetoric into the more hopeful one. Utopian
writing falls victim to the unfortunate truth that avoiding an outcome tends to be
much easier than achieving one. Dystopian writing takes advantage of this by
presenting a future that is to be avoided, which leaves a great deal more room for
success should the writing spark action among its readers. Dystopias are very
(sometimes fatally) flawed worlds, but there is room for change within them and
some—like LeGuin’s, Butler’s and Atwood’s—leave space for interpretation and
judgment on the part of the audience.
Utopias, on the other hand, swing towards the sense of “all or nothing”. They
are meant to be the final state of society, a permanent place of happiness and little to
no suffering. Speth’s America the Possible seems to aim for a final or nearly-final
state of America, in which there is no more hardship, competitiveness, or
corruption.131 Speth’s utopian concept is undeniably well-intentioned and aims to be
desirable, but dystopias like LeGuin’s, Butler’s and Atwood’s remind us that the
ability to change is necessary for a healthy society, and seeking a permanent solution
is dangerous. Aiming for the ideal is not inherently awful, and can be—and usually
is—a noble cause, but striving for perfection as an end goal is what often leads to
131
Ibid.
82
truly terrible worlds, and may allow flaws to become dangerous and unmanageable.
Hitler’s Nazi Germany was, after all, meant to be an ideal world, one that fell solidly
on the other end of the spectrum.
This does not mean that utopianism is dead. The dystopian genre is more
popular, but dystopias do not necessarily have to fill the world with pessimism. That
is the aim of anti-utopianism: to persuade against the disruption of the current state of
the world for fear of dooming everyone to a truly terrible future. Dystopias, on the
other hand, warn us against chasing after the ideal, and then demand that we consider
our world and which way we are pushing it. As such, dystopias can actually preserve
elements of utopianism and carry the impulse forward, but in the form of an engaging
genre that has captivated a broad audience for nearly a century and will continue to
do so. Utopia, after all, is the “no place”, but where utopia cannot exist, dystopias can
fill in the gaps and remind us of what is worth preserving as we actively shape our
future.
83
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