Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, challenges the dominance of capitalist realism in the Global North by setting out a speculative future history in which collective action brings capitalism to an end and saves the world from climate change. In imagining an alternative to the status quo, Robinson continues a long, honorable tradition of left-wing science fiction authors writing utopian fiction.
The tradition stretches back at least to William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), which tells of a proletarian revolution leading to an ideal society without poverty or oppression. In their different ways, Robinson and Morris share a vision of humanity living through labor as a social activity that operates both in and against nature. All such works, and those of other famous socialist utopian novelists from H. G. Wells to Iain M. Banks, further the cause of socialism by providing readers with radical depictions of post-capitalist life that rarely exist elsewhere in the media.
Utopian science fiction doesn’t just present us with a blueprint for the future: it also offers a new way of thinking about history. The back cover of Tribune’s latest issue quotes Marx to the effect that “World history would indeed be easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only under favorable circumstances.” So what if there were a conceptual way of reframing the circumstances we find ourselves in? What if we stopped thinking so much about history in relation to the past, and started thinking about it from the perspective of the future?
In his Imagined Futures (2019), Max Saunders describes the emergence in interwar Britain of a “future history,” by which he means a history of the present and its immediate future, written from the point of view of the imagined distant future. The scientist and communist public intellectual J. B. S. Haldane wrote a section of his book Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1923) in the form of a student essay from 2073 describing how biological developments, like the growth of embryos outside the mother’s body, had become a widespread practice.
Haldane presented a prediction of the complete transformation of conventional sexual relations as a simple matter of fact; by taking a future perspective, and seeing his present as a stage of history that would be superseded, he freed himself from the restrictive moral compass of tradition and the past.