Write a sci-fi story set in a fictional utopian society.
I admit I have lost track of what a majority of Americans envision as our ideal system of government, the perfect way to organize ourselves into a moral, functional society. Moreover, I'm not sure anymore what people around the world aspire to be, in the collective sense. Many of our greatest nations today are neither moral nor functional and sometimes seem to move in the wrong direction.
What if you could change that? Design your own "perfect" society that runs by your rules and watch what happens. Would it work or would it fail? Who are the winners and losers in your world? And are losers inevitable — are castes a necessary side-effect of governing? Explore the deeper implications of your utopia. Is money necessary? Is morality defined differently for a society versus individuals within it?
Here's the hard part: we don't want to read a dry procedural definition of your ideal form of society in which faceless people move around like chess pieces. In fact, nobody wants to read that. We want to see an engaging story about individual characters who live there. Are they happy? Prosperous? Depressed? Oppressed?
This is not an excuse to violate SFS Guidelines by writing "rants or agendas disguised as Sci-Fi." And it must be science fiction. Yes, political science is a science. But we'd prefer your utopia to be entirely fictional — set in the future, or on another world, or with beings who are not human, for example.
The rules for the theme prompt are as follows:
Rules
Entries should be submitted in the usual way using the Write for Us submissions link.
Mention the title of the prompt (Aspirational Utopias) in the Notes field of the submissions form.
Submissions must be received by December 15 to qualify.
Entries must comply with all the usual SFS Guidelines.
Your work can be horror, romance, dystopian, alien, or whatever, as long as it’s Sci-Fi and addresses the prompt's theme.
Submit only one story for this prompt.
You may continue to submit stories to SFS that are outside the contest, and we encourage you to do so.
If you have more than one story that fits the theme, please submit your best one for the prompt and send us the others as non-theme entries. Also, if the editors feel your theme entry is good enough to publish but does not satisfy the theme requirements, we reserve the right to accept it as a non-theme submission.
After the prompt has ended and all the entries have been processed, we will list and link to the participating stories in a blog post. The editorial staff will choose one story for special mention as the Editors' Choice of the Month.
Exemplars
So many great science fiction novels and series are about utopian politics, often explicitly but at least tangentially. These include Star Trek (1966), Star Wars (1977), Starship Troopers (1959), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Dune (1965), Ender's Game (1985), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Kindred (1979), and lots more.
I've been fascinated by Asimov's fictional science of Psychohistory since I first read Foundation (1951). It's just so... plausible. In the same way that the real science of statistical mechanics can predict macro-properties of systems of particles, like temperature and pressure, psychohistory could explain and predict macro-properties of human populations. And they can do all that without knowing the detailed behaviors of the individual humans or particles. Asimov's utopian world was completely predictable at a high level while preserving individuals' free choice and allowing for the occasional civil unrest. In the final book of the trilogy, Second Foundation, it is revealed there were powerful men manipulating behind the curtain, not just science.
The word utopia is an antonym for dystopia, yet the two concepts are closely related and one often devolves into the other. Two famous dystopian novels, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and George Orwell's 1984 (published in 1949), were both about utopias gone bad. Some critics still argue that 1984 is a purely utopian novel with some nasty side effects. Huxley followed up his well-known dystopian novel by publishing a story about a pure utopia in Island (1962), just before his death.
Before any of those literary milestones were published, H. G. Wells wrote A Modern Utopia in 1905. This is a strange tale, told in Platonic dialogue, about a faraway planet "out beyond Sirius" where a utopian society is ruled by a voluntary order of nobility called the Samurai.
Oh yes, and then there is perhaps the earliest utopian story, Plato's Republic, written around 580 BCE.
---------------------
So go ahead, tell us how you would design the perfect society, and then imagine interesting ways in which it might fail or support its inhabitants.
— The Editors
Comments