Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Seven

The Red Utopia in the Sky

Gentleman John Carter journeyed to Mars, there to fight and befriend Tharks, all before Tarzan swung on his vine. Like James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) a century before him, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) got his start by believing that he could pen something better than what he was reading in the popular press. He set out in 1911 to write his story. The first place his imagination went was not to the jungles of Africa but to the red planet Mars. John Carter was projected bodily from a mystical Arizona cave. Burroughs made the journey in his mind.

We might think of Utopia as a socialist or progressive genre, perhaps as a sub within the larger genre of science fiction. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887 (1888) would seem an exemplar of the socialist Utopia. In their book The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice (1982) Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor used the passive voice to pose a sideways question:

It may well be asked why so many 'modern' utopias are socialist--indeed, the two categories almost became coextensive during the nineteenth century.

The authors went on to suggest some answers. The point is that in the nineteenth century, utopianism and socialism were seemingly joined, perhaps with other elements into a nascent science fiction. (Perhaps into a progressive Scientism, too.) We might still think of them that way. The Lost Worlds fantasy, about which I have been writing, might be the conservative's answer to the progressive/socialist Utopia, an exploration into new lands but without all of the abstruse and ultimately murderous theorizing. Instead of going into the glorious future, the Lost Worlds hero ventures into the nostalgic past.

In "Utopias Beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia" (1991), Peter Fitting, in an epigraph, quotes from Ms. Goodwin and Mr. Taylor's work--

Since the revival of utopianism and utopian scholarship in the 1970s, there has been a growing realization that there are also utopias which eschew and even reject socialist ideals.

--before setting off on his own discussion. Mr. Fitting posits the existence of what he calls "right-wing utopias" (I believe him) and promises to look at some of them. Unfortunately, all but the first page of his paper is hidden behind a paywall. Darned capitalists!

Ditto for Michael Orth's paper "Utopia in the Pulps: The Apocalyptic Pastoralism of Edgar Rice Burroughs" (from Extrapolation, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1986). We might not think of Burroughs as having been a utopian thinker or writer, but the late Mr. Orth made a good start to his case in his opening sentence:

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote more than seventy books, and at least fifty of them contain elements of utopian thinking--that is, they offer more or less detailed presentations of imaginary cities, peoples, or nations which the author clearly wishes his readers either to admire or detest; and they express a conservative vision of history and possibility.

(Mr. Orth's citation here is to a previous work by Mr. Orth.) And he went on from there, writing: "The conservative vision has always been strong in utopias"--and placing Thomas More's original Utopia, as well as Looking Backward, in the category of conservative utopias. Interesting. Unfortunately again, you can't read very much more before reaching the end of the free part. Double-darn them!

I might agree with Mr. Orth. I have already written that the utopian/progressive/socialist program is essentially conservative in orientation, though of a fiercely reactionary type: it dreams and strives and yearns for a return to the Middle Ages, in which the Progressive/Socialist imagines the monarchy, aristocracy, and clerisy to be few and powerful; the masses of serfs to be static and powerless; and the middle classes, whom he or she derisively calls the bourgeoisie--"bougies" to two-bit Marxists like the Great Bronx Dingbat--to be non-existent.

There are a couple of distinctions to be made here, though. First, if it's a detestable place, then I would call it Dystopia rather than Utopia. Second, conservatives--being essentially non-intellectual or even anti-intellectual--are more likely to write non-intellectual stories of adventure rather than dry, intellectual utopias or even drier and overly intellectualized scholarly works. If it's an adventure story, it was probably written by a conservative, and if it's a Utopia, it was probably written by somebody else. But if Mr. Orth is correct and many utopian stories are essentially conservative, then maybe that distinction falls apart.

One more distinction: the people tend to read popular fictions and forms. If you want them to read it, you've got to make it interesting. There has to be love and car chases. Utopias and scholarly works are more for the intellectual élite. People like that don't mind being bored by prose as long as their little ideas are turning in their heads. Or, as another of Peter Fitting's epigraphs reads:

. . . the freedom of writing implies the freedom of the citizen. One does not write for slaves. The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy.

That quote is from Jean-Paul Sartre--and he was a Marxist and an intellectual. (So maybe we don't trust it after all.)

So is Utopia essentially a conservative genre? And did Edgar Rice Burroughs write of conservative or "right-wing" utopias? Maybe so. I'd like to read the papers by Mr. Fitting and Mr. Orth in order to learn more. But here we are. Anyway, maybe my line of inquiry has been wrong. But these things might actually fit together pretty well: That the original Utopia and stories like it led to the Lost Worlds fantasy. That the Lost Worlds fantasy, once it could no longer be set on a fully mapped and explored Earth-of-the-present, had to take place somewhere else--or sometime else. And that some of the resulting genres would find a warm and natural home in the pages of Weird Tales.

To be continued . . .

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Note: My title, "The Red Utopia in the Sky," is a paraphrase of an expression in Stephen Baxter's sequel to The War of the Worlds, called The Massacre of Mankind (2017). His original phrase is "their arid utopia in the sky" (p. 148), "their" meaning the Martians'. Thanks to Mr. Baxter.

A Princess of Mars was originally entitled "Under the Moons of Mars." If you were reading The All-Story one hundred and nine years ago this month, you would have found yourself halfway through it. You would also have encountered Dejah Thoris' takedown of her Thark captors' primitive socialistic society:

"Why, oh, why will you not learn to live in amity with your fellows. Must you ever go on down the ages to your final extinction but little above the plane of the dumb brutes that serve you! A people without written language, without art, without homes, without love; the victims of eons of the horrible community idea. Owning everything in common, even to your women and children, has resulted in your owning nothing in common. You hate each other as you hate all else except yourselves. Come back to the ways of our common ancestors, come back to the light of kindliness and fellowship. The way is open to you, you will find the hands of the red men stretched out to aid you. Together we may do still more to regenerate our dying planet. The granddaughter of the greatest and mightiest of the red jeddaks has asked you. Will you come?" (pp. 52-53)

The illustration is of course by Frank Frazetta, who was a great fan of Burroughs in his youth. In contrast, Conan and Robert E. Howard were mostly or wholly unknown to him before he landed assignments for which he is so well remembered, his covers for the Conan series published by Lancer Books in the 1960s and '70s.

Original text and caption copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley