Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) was a very prolific author of science fiction novels and short stories published between 1950 and 1983. He was something of a red-diaper baby and though he went by a kind of tough-guy moniker and lived an active life, he was a socialist. (1) That may have changed in 1958 when he resigned from the Socialist Labor Party in America. I know very little about that whole matter, but his transgression seems to have been, essentially, success. As Ambrose Bierce observed, success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows. Socialism, being about envy, despises it.
As I was reading late last year or early this year about Utopia and Dystopia, I learned that Mack Reynolds wrote utopian fiction. "I have to read those stories," I thought. Soon after, I found his book After Utopia (Ace Books, 1977) at a local secondhand store. As the saying goes, ask and you shall receive. I read After Utopia this spring and drew more than a little from it.
Reynolds was well aware of the conventions of the utopian novel and he observed those conventions in his own book. First, the author of stories of this type must get his hero quickly, even precipitously, into Utopia. The author mustn't bother very much with a setup when telling about his ideal society is really the object. By this convention, maybe the John Carter novels are actually utopian. After just twelve pages, Carter, lickety-split, wakes up on Mars, having flown there by a kind of astral projection. In "The Sapphire Goddess" by Nictzin Dyalhis (Weird Tales, Feb. 1934), the narrator simply wills himself into a new world--Click!--after just four very brief introductory paragraphs.
Sometimes the hero must sleep his way into Utopia, and that's what happens in After Utopia. Other examples of Sleeping into Utopia (or Dystopia) include:
- Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888)
- When the Sleeper Wakes, also known as The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells (1899)
- Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan (Amazing Stories, Aug. 1928), which became the comic strip Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. by Dick Calkins (1929)
- Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science Fiction, April & May 1942; 1948), in which a side character from the twentieth century awakens in the future
- "The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth (Galaxy Science Fiction, Apr. 1951)
- Sleeper, a film by Woody Allen (1973)
- Idiocracy, an absolutely essential film by Mike Judge and Etan Cohen (2006)
In utopian and dystopian fiction, there is very often no action and no plot. Or words and ideas become the plot and the action. Utopia/Dystopia is the goal and the intellectual playground for what Eric Hoffer categorized as the man of words or man of ideas. Words and ideas are the excitement of such a man. To him, they are the action, including in any utopian story. (How often in our world is the revolutionary--the man who seeks to overthrow everything--essentially logorrheic? Karl Marx is a perfect example. Adolf Hitler is another.) In After Utopia, there is very little action. Most of what there is, is initiated by the man of the twentieth century awake in the twenty-first. Otherwise, it is mostly talk and more talk.
In the utopian story, the protagonist has to learn the culture of Utopia, including its language, and there is usually a sped-up process for teaching it. Very often the teacher is female. Sola in A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912) fills that role. There is a female teacher--a Moon woman--in The "Lomokome" Papers by Herman Wouk (1968). The teacher in After Utopia, named Betty, is also female. I should add that the teacher in Dystopia is also often female, but she leads the hero away from or out of Dystopia instead of into it. And she uses love, sex, and human feeling to teach him and not anything out of a book.
When it isn't satirical or ironic, Utopia is a liberal or progressive genre. The dream and purpose of this creed seems very often to be sexual freedom, license, libertinism, or hedonism. Alternatively, liberalism, despite any higher or finer goals it might have, eventually reduces itself to being about sex and sexual matters, or in our time, what people call gender. Much of human society, culture, religion, and government seems to be about controlling sex (which I think is made so powerful in part so as to defy human ambitions towards godhood). The Liberal or Progressive chafes under traditional controls and wants to do away with them. But supposed conservatives sometimes do, too. Edgar Rice Burroughs is an example of that, I think. He is supposed to have been an atheist or agnostic. Beyond that, despite his very Victorian squeamishness and sentimentality, he inserted (no pun intended) sex into his books, including in the overt nudity of John Carter and the people of Mars. (3) It seems to me that Burroughs yearned for a kind of freedom in writing his Mars novels. That freedom included bodily freedom, unclothed of the constraints of his life and times. One of the things that attracted me when I was young about Frank Frazetta's illustrations of Burroughs' Mars novels is their sexuality and extraordinary vigor. Frazetta saw what Burroughs had put into his stories but was unable to depict fully given the times in which he wrote. Frazetta was free from those things. We should remember that he did his best work during the 1960s and '70s, in other words the Golden Age of Heterosexuality. As I've written before, I think that Frazetta's vision was superior to Burroughs'. I would rather go adventuring on Frazetta's Barsoom than on Burroughs' version of that Red Planet. In any case, After Utopia by Mack Reynolds is as much a sex fantasy as it is a Utopia, but then Utopia is very often just an excuse or a way to escape from constraints and into license. Call it Utopia as a letter printed in Penthouse Forum.
After Utopia is built on the model of Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. That much is clear. As I have pointed out, the protagonists in both sleep their way into the dream of Utopia. The problem in Reynolds' novel is that his future Utopia is not a desirable kind of place. His hero, Tracy Cogswell (a man), keeps asking his hosts, why is he here? Why have they brought him from the past into the year 2045? And they keep putting him off. Finally he gets his answer. "The human race is turning to mush," they say. And they need his help.
"For more than half a century [Academician Stein tells him] we've had what every Utopian throughout history has dreamed of. Democracy in its most ultimate form. Abundance for all. The end of strife between nations, races, and, for all practical purposes, between individuals. And, as a species, we're heading for dissolution." [Emphasis added.] (pp. 54-55)
Setting aside the idea that history can end and that we can have stasis, dissolution would seem the logical endpoint of Utopia. That or a new revolution, or, as Stein (not Goldstein, as in 1984) puts it: "To overthrow the present socioeconomic system and form a new society." (p. 55) Utopia/Dystopia resists revolution of course. That is part of its nature and its strategy for survival. In his conceit, the utopian theorizer believes that there can be no further revolution after his own is accomplished.
Cogswell's three hosts have sent for him--have brought him from the past into the present--because he, as a man of the twentieth century, is still a man. He has the qualities that are lacking among men of the twenty-first by which a society--even a society of weak, stupid, shallow, and dissolute people--can be overthrown. The film Idiocracy has more than a little in common with After Utopia, but I'm also reminded of the movie Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), in which, again, people from the past have the strength and the grit to do the things that need doing in this still perilous future. We could easily say the same thing about our own time in which there is so much stupidity, weakness, and incompetence--especially in government--enough of those things and more to get us all killed if we're not careful. People of today are not up to the task. What we need are people of yesterday. (4)
Mack Reynolds was good at scientific extrapolations, better than almost any science fiction author I know of from that time and probably just as good as Robert Heinlein. In After Utopia, there is addictive programmed dreaming, equivalent to our virtual reality, computer gaming, Internet porn, and so-called Metaverse. There are also print-on-demand books. Late in his book, Reynolds described a gem of an extrapolation, what he called a transceiver, what we would recognize as a smartphone: a combination communications device, a device for accessing libraries of information, an "identification device," and a tracker or GPS unit (p. 176) Reynolds also predicted the current idea (around on the Internet since 2016) that "you will own nothing and you will be happy," for his people of the future own nothing and are happy that way. Whether they are happy in general is another story.
Anyway, eventually, towards the very, very end of the book, Tracy Cogswell, the man with a woman's name (one of his hosts, named Jo, is also a man, or "man"), figures out how to help his hosts and overthrow their society, and finally, finally, he takes action. And it works. It's not very convincing, but it's also an idea not without precedent in science fiction and in the ideas of real-world people. It's a surprise ending, so I won't give it away. I will say, though, that the ending is similar in a way to that of Things to Come, another story of a future Utopia.
Notes
(1) In our time, socialism is not a manly or vigorous pursuit. The most prominent socialists in America today are a superannuated hippie layabout and his callow sidekick, a dingbat ex-bartender from the Bronx. Their followers are stupid and weak in the extreme, the women harridans and the men feminized or infantilized beyond reach. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin are probably turning over in their graves, or on his bier, I guess, if you're talking about Lenin.
(2) There is no doubt a relationship between waking up or awakening and being woke. Wokeness was originally a black take on the old and very human idea of waking up--of opening one's eyes--to what's really going on in one's life or in the world. A non-genre novel with that idea in its very title is Hanger Stout, Awake! by Jack Matthews (1967).
(3) The Lady in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra (1943) is also naked, but her nakedness is innocent: like Adam and Eve, she is clothed in innocence. The people of Burroughs' Mars may live before the apple, but I don't sense that innocence in them. Instead, they seem to be just another expression of Burroughs' fantasy of freedom or what you might call a conservative Utopia.
(4) As I was watching last night (Saturday, October 15, 2022), I realized: there is at least one area of our culture--and our educational system--in which there is still excellence, and that is in college football.
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| After Utopia by Mack Reynolds, cover art by Vincent Di Fate. |
Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley
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