Science Fiction and Socialism
Introduction
Virginia L. Conn
The relationship between artistic production and ideology has been the subject of countless academic investigations and political decisions, with such discussions taking place across formal, fan-led, and legislative spheres. Science fiction is no exception to this relational investigation, often being taken as either a “cognitive model of real changes” within the world-system or, conversely, a “model of a particular ideology” in which the ideological vectors of SF “form the socio-historical chronotope of the empty space; [one in which] reality, transformed by a fantastic hypothesis, is then represented in accordance with” the aforementioned ideological vectors (Nudelman 38). That is, the future represented by SF is shaped by one of two things: either a critical engagement with the socio-generic milieu actually producing the text itself, or a projection of an ideological system that formally abstracts the text from its productive context.
As contemporary literary engagements with capitalism and its various forms of discontent become increasingly visible within the SF publishing sphere, the intersection between SF and socialist visions of futurity—and how such projections emerge—is becoming an increasingly important area for identifying these formalistic and thematic similarities. In the case of SF and socialism, this dual-pronged approach is particularly relevant, since socialist ideology broadly falls into two similar veins as the aforementioned science fictional projections themselves. If we consider socialism—as with any political system—to itself be a kind of fiction about the way things do (and ought to) work, then broadly speaking, socialism can be divided into two genealogical genres: utopian and scientific.
Utopian socialism refers, in a narrow sense, to a group of early 19th century French and Scottish socialist thinkers, typified by Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen, who largely argued for socialism as a rational discourse and positive objective. In a broader sense (as initially defined by Engels and later adopted by most Marxists), it refers to the practice of imagining/envisioning a future society organized around socialist principles, with ethical or positive ideals being the driving force behind such projections. Compared to scientific socialism, it is a somewhat more a priori framework, as under a utopian socialist framework, socialist society as a speculative alternative to the present is held to be worth working for—that is, it could (theoretically) be instantiated at any point in history and is additionally presumed to be worthwhile before its appearance.
Scientific socialism, on the other hand, is considered more of a “hard” science than utopian socialism. Used primarily to describe Marx’s social/political/economic theory of the property relations between classes and how such relations arose as a result of specific historical factors (that is, as a response to the [then-new] social contradictions of capitalism’s new mode of production), scientific socialism is the contingent response to and resolution of the contradictions of capitalism’s expansion of production and consolidation of resources. It is not a projection of a future society so much as it is an historically conditional set of social and political relationships. In fact, Marx himself noted that he had been criticized for his focus on the present rather than on future projections:
The Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I treat economics metaphysically, and on the other hand—imagine!—confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing recipes (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future. (Marx, Afterword to the 2nd German Edition of Capital)
Of course, Marx, Engels, and other socialist theorists touched on the ideal future society numerous times in their works, but they maintained a certain degree of disdain for what they saw as the ‘imaginary’ futures of the utopian socialists, ungrounded in any kind of critical assessment of existing social and economic systems. In fact, utopian socialism is typically used as a pejorative by ‘serious’ socialist thinkers today, who see it as some variant of ‘pie in the sky’ idealism rather than as a critical engagement with measurable socioeconomic factors.
Approaching science fictional prognostications as “cognitive model[s] of real changes” presupposes a degree of probabilistic or realistic engagement with the socio-generic model out of which such texts developed, just as scientific socialism is posited by practitioners to be a quantitative assessment of contingent historical factors—i.e., a hard science and a hard literature. On the other hand, the methodological framework that sees “reality, transformed by a fantastic hypothesis,” as the positivist goal of both SF and utopian socialist speculation might be better understood as “soft” representations of ideological desire, rather than examples of critical sociohistorical engagement.
Because of this, it’s not difficult to see parallels between “soft”/“hard” socialism and “soft”/“hard” science fiction distinctions (or even, abstracted further, between science fiction itself as a “ghettoized genre” outside of and peripheral to “serious” literature). Roger Luckhurst writes of the “paradigmatic topography of ghetto/mainstream” that marks the border between “serious” literature and “genre” (specifically SF) literature (37); acknowledging a certain degree of permeability, the mark of ‘seriousness’ is awarded primarily to those literatures that are considered realistic extrapolations or direct depictions of reality. At a narrower level, “soft” science fiction—using the dual definition provided by the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (2007)—might be understood as “science fiction that deals primarily with advancements in, or extrapolations based on, the soft sciences (e.g. anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.)” or, conversely, “science fiction in which the scientific elements are relatively unimportant to the story” (191).1 Compare this directly to Engels’ definition of utopian (i.e. “soft”) socialism as a “solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, [through which] the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain”—that is, a fantastic prognostication not grounded in historical or “hard” frameworks of analysis, and thus inevitably unable to “avoid drifting off into pure phantasies” (Engels “The Development of Utopian Socialism”). If, to “make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis” (Engels), then that meant crossing that same aforementioned “paradigmatic topography” (Luckhurst 37) from fantasy to reality, just as “soft” science fiction must (apparently) do to be taken seriously.
Yet for all the denigration of the “soft” sciences and literatures that remains extant in both the academy and popular spheres today, recent discussions have begun to more forcefully highlight the moral imperative of imagining a better world. Ursula K. Le Guin’s now-famous maxim about imagining a world outside of capitalism2 is routinely trotted out to illustrate the power (and possibility) of imagining a better world. Solarpunk—one of the more recent subgenres to emerge in our capitalism-weary and climate-anxious era—explicitly aligns itself with an optimistic view of potential future human-nature integration through a rejection of doomerism and capitalism. And for every sad puppy-ish lament that SF has gotten “too soft,” even the most cursory scan of the most recent Hugo and Nebula winners across recent years shows an ongoing trend towards post-capitalist utopian community-building. It’s clear that there’s a real hunger for something better whether that hunger is based on a rigorous critique of social relations or not, and many within the SF community—writers, readers, scholars, thinkers—see literature as playing a significant role in imagining and actuating that future.
Back to Le Guin: her quote about imagining a world outside of capitalism is routinely used (for good reason) to highlight the inability of or resistance to “imagin[ing] the end of the world [rather] than the end of capitalism” (Fisher, Zizek, Jameson), but what’s often missing from its utilization is the context in which it takes place. Le Guin is not discussing capitalism broadly writ, but, rather, is specifically referring to the contemporary American (and US-led) SF publishing industry, which lacks, as she claims, “writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art” (2014). What we need are “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now,” past the “sales strategies” that “maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue” at the expense of creating artistic representations of hopeful futures (2014). Le Guin forcefully argues that this is the role of art itself: to imagine alternatives, to resist commodification, to inspire hope and to inform the reader how to get to that hopeful future being depicted.
As a result, the more utopian promises of socialism have led and are currently leading to literatures that take the task of imagining a better future as a moral imperative. And while this engagement with capitalist practices of production, expansion, and cooptation are particularly pressing at this particular inflection point of history, the possibility of socialism as an alternative to capitalist futures has long been an important aspect for utopian socialist thinkers (keeping in mind that scientific socialism sees socialism as an inevitable resolution of the contradictions introduced by capitalism, thus capitalism is a necessary precondition for the emergence of socialism, whereas utopian socialism sees socialism as an alternative to capitalism—a future that might be chosen if adherents are persuasive enough to onboard enough capitalism-weary converts to make the changeover). The current imperative in the SF publishing world to imagine utopian socialist futures is one that draws on an established history of interactions between politics and generic concerns, not just to critique the present, but to propose something better in its place.
For example, in the late 1930s, economic and political upheavals across the world presented a troubling problem to science fiction authors and audiences invested in the genre’s utopian worldbuilding promises. With the rise of fascism both at home and abroad (history is nothing if not repetitious), prominent authors such as Frederik Pohl and Robert W. Lowndes denounced the apathy of the genre and actively moved to radicalize it towards action, seeing in socialism a new utopian promise with actionable worldbuilding goals. An explicitly socialist-informed science fiction, they argued, was one “opposing all forces leading to barbarism, the advancement of pseudo-sciences and militaristic ideologies,” and further insisted that “science fiction should by nature stand for all forces working for a more unified world, a more Utopian existence, the application of science to human happiness, and a saner outlook on life” (qtd. Moskowitz 119).
Their proposal was not popular. A relatively conservative and increasingly jingoistic audience and publishing industry denounced socialism itself as a type of science fiction (i.e., unserious and outside the mainstream), with little to offer in the way of “realistic” paths forward. Its utopian aspirations simply were simply not “serious” enough for rigorous critical evaluation. At the same time, preeminent scholars then and now explicitly defended the discursive potential of SF, with figures such as Darko Suvin stating that utopia was “the socio-political subgenre of science-fiction” (2016) and Fredric Jameson arguing that science fiction’s preoccupation with utopian political desire echoed that of socialist revolution (2005).
These conflicting responses to the importance of and overlap between SF and socialism illustrate the difficult nature of identifying the purpose of science fiction in the political sphere, but the aforementioned Western authors were, in some ways, already working at the tail end of a tradition that had begun decades earlier in countries actively transitioning to socialism. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin—both a political rival of Marx in the First International and translator of the first Russian edition of Capital, Vol. I—once mocked the intellectualism of his Marxist opponents by quipping “we have too many ideas and not enough action.” In response, the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress claimed that these “too many ideas” had a direct effect on human development, and in order to guide that development, science fiction authors would be held responsible for producing positive-but-accurate—and, more importantly, actionable—depictions of human futures. Similarly, in a China undergoing its own political and literary revolution at the turn of the century, the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun, argued that science fiction could be explicitly used as a tool for nation building, writing that: “More often than not, ordinary people feel bored at the tedious statements of science… Only by resorting to fictional presentation and dressing scientific ideas up in literary clothing can works of science avoid their tediousness while retaining rational analyses and profound theories” (preface, 1903).
What this should make clear is how the politics of futurity are intimately bound up with those of various literary establishments, and how visions of the future—as well as the sociopolitical and economic assumptions constraining them—both reveal and shape these exercises of power. How those imagined futures came into existence, as well as how newly imagined socialist people, states, and literary traditions came to be created through political, ideological, and literary policies, was taken up explicitly by socialist literary regimes in the mid-twentieth century and is being newly litigated in the popular literary market today.
The articles included in this symposium all grapple with the impulse to either direct the future along socialist lines or to criticize (and change) existing sociopolitical models antithetical to full human flourishing. Ruiyang Zhang delves into the intersections between SF narratives and the concurrent advancements surrounding cybernetics in socialist China, exploring how the underlying themes of such mid-century cybernetic narratives consistently directed the use of such innovations towards socialist construction and industrial production. Gabriel Burrow rejects “the ideal purity of a perfect system” (Jameson, Archaeologies xi) to instead explore the ‘low bar’ for what can be considered a utopia, using M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022) as a case study. Meltem Dağcı investigates the question of artificial intelligence, humans, and machines in Ruhşen Doğan Nar’s story, “Wake Up!”, through the contextual framework of utopian socialist planning. Pavla Veselá argues that although Andrei Platonov’s work did not shrink away from (frankly brutal) descriptions of the hunger, poverty, and violence endemic to the Soviet Union of the 1920s, neither did Platonov shy away from insisting on the viability of a utopian socialist future. Last but certainly not least, Chiara Viceconti reviews the process by which an East German SF novel, Günther Krupkat’s Als die Götter starben [When the Gods Died, 1963], aligned with strictures outlining socialist realism while didactically presenting a socialist utopian future.
These articles ask us to consider multiple questions about the intersection of literature and politics, but perhaps most pressing is—to borrow a term from Naomi Klein about climate and trade concerns—to what extent do literature and socialism really function as “two solitudes” (215) without overlap, and how has the insistence that art ‘mean’ something changed this siloing? Does literature have—either because of political regulations that require it to or social expectations about its role—the moral imperative to show us a ‘good’ future? And to what extent is this ‘good’ future driven by facts, analysis, and the imperative of response, versus simply representing a desperate, longing cry for something—anything—better than this? Does it matter? We hope that readers will grapple with these questions for themselves and, in doing so, imagine the kinds of sociopolitical futures they’d like to create for themselves, both in and outside of fiction.
NOTES
- “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
- Without getting too deeply into the weeds on this particular topic, it is notable that the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction compares “soft” science fiction to “science fantasy” as a genre. As I have written about elsewhere (Conn “Formal Fictions” 2024), the term “science fiction” is often applied in non-English contexts (specifically Chinese and Russian) to genres that are internally circulated as science fantasy, with a corresponding flattening of contextual meaning.
WORKS CITED
Conn, Virginia L. “Formal Fictions: “Chinese” “Science” “Fiction” in Translation.” Chinese Science Fiction: Concepts, Forms, and Histories. Springer International Publishing, 2024, pp. 99-119.
Engels, Frederick. “The Development of Utopian Socialism.” Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. [Revue Socialiste 1880] Marxist Internet Archive, 2003.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? John Hunt Publishing, 2022.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005.
Klein, Naomi. Hot Money. Penguin UK, 2021.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.” Speech given 19 November 2014.
Lu, Xun. Yue Jie Lv Xing Bian Yan [Preface to From the Earth to the Moon]. 1903. Xian Dai Zhong Guo Ke Huan Wen Xue Zhu Chao [The Mainstream of Modern Chinese Science Fiction]. Ed. Wang Quangen. Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing House, 2011.
Luckhurst, Roger. “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 21, no.1, March 1994, pp. 35-50.
Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. 1, [Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR, 1887] Marxist Internet Archive, 2015.
Moskowitz, Sam. The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom. Hyperion, 1974.
Nudelman, Rafail. “Soviet Science Fiction and the Ideology of Soviet Society.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 1989, pp. 38–66.
Prucher, Jeff, ed. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Peter Lang Publishing, 2016.
Virginia L. Conn is a Teaching Assistant Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. She researches depictions of the “new socialist human” in socialist science fiction and how those depictions guided policy decisions in Mao-era China, Soviet Russia, and East Germany. She is currently working on her book manuscript, which offers a literary-material account of the relationship between socialist literary policies and the concurrent sociopolitical and technological drive to create the “new human” in daily life. She is also the managing editor of the Science Fiction Research Association Review.
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