Strange Horizons Discussion Forum: The Ten Stupidest Utopias!, by Jeremy Adam Smith

Thanks, everyone, for the responses. (I started writing this at 5:30 am; as the father of an infant son, this is practically the only time I get for writing. He and my lovely wife are sleeping in the next room, so, shhhhhh.) My reponses to your responses:

1) To Mr. Moles: Actually, I feel a bit guilty about picking on O'Neill. (No qualms, however, about picking on L. Neil Smith.) The High Frontier is genuinely inspiring and he's not a committed corporate fascist, just a naive technocrat. What I find so problematic about his vision is the locust-like mentality that drives it, the yearning to "solve" the problems our appetites create by simply leaving them behind. I also think that there's something stupid about any utopia that refuses to engage with the potential dark side of its vision -- there's a great deal I didn't go into in my short piece, but one can imagine many social and political problems emerging from the High Frontier. I realize that O'Neill was a brilliant physicist, not an artist like, for example, U.K. Le Guin. He had limitations, just as I have mine and you have yours, but it's my responsibility as a critic to point them out.

2) Regarding the monotheistic heaven: Well, I did start my ten sexiest dystopias piece with the Christian Hell and I thought it might provide balance to start the utopias piece with Heaven. But, the more I thought about it the more I realized that I don't actually think that there's anything stupid about the Christian idea of the afterlife. Of course, as one of those urban, secular Humanists so despised by the Christian Right, I don't literally believe in one word of it. But...there's a very simple, understandable yearning behind this concept of reward and punishment, for moral redress and rectification but also for everlasting peace. I try to respect its power as myth and moral scheme. Also, my top ten is really just a frame for developing a line of argument about the relationship between power and idealism; I didn't feel like Heaven fit.

3) Regarding burning vs. hanging: D'oh! You got me. "Witches would burn" had such a nice ring to it, horribly. I also received a very kind email from this eccentric character named David Woodard, who corrected some small facts about Nueva Germania. I actually found out about Nueva Germania from hearing about Woodard, a composer who is trying to build an opera house there. Woodard doesn’t appear to be a neo-Nazi; he just has what I consider to be an unhealthy Wagner-inspired fixation of all things Teutonic. Anyway, I will write to the editors at SH and see if we can integrate these corrections at a later date.