Interviewed by Terry Bisson, Robinson explains:

Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we're trying for as a civilization.

It's a slim tradition since [Sir Thomas] More invented the word, but a very interesting one, and at certain points important: the Bellamy clubs after Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward had a big impact on the Progressive movement in American politics, and H.G. Wells's stubborn persistence in writing utopias over about fifty years (not his big sellers) conveyed the vision that got turned into the postwar order of social security and some kind of government-by-meritocracy.

So utopias have had effects in the real world. More recently I think Ecotopia by [Ernest] Callenbach had a big impact on how the hippie generation tried to live in the years after, building families and communities.

There are a lot of problems in writing utopias, but they can be opportunities. The usual objection-that they must be boring-are often political attacks, or ignorant repeating of a line, or another way of saying "No expository lumps please, it has to be about me." The political attacks are interesting to parse. "Utopia would be boring because there would be no conflicts, history would stop, there would be no great art, no drama, no magnificence." This is always said by white people with a full belly. My feeling is that if they were hungry and sick and living in a cardboard shack they would be more willing to give utopia a try.

And if we did achieve a just and sustainable world civilization, I'm confident there would still be enough drama, as I tried to show in Pacific Edge. There would still be love lost, there would still be death. That would be enough. The horribleness of unnecessary tragedy may be lessened and the people who like that kind of thing would have to deal with a reduction in their supply of drama.

So, the writing of utopia comes down to figuring out ways of talking about just these issues in an interesting way; how tenuous it would be, how fragile, how much a tightrope walk and a work in progress. That along with the usual science fiction problem of handling exposition. It could be done, and I wish it were being done more often.

[Shareable via Resilience Science]

According to the New Yorker, Nader includes several real people in the novel, including Warren Buffett, Barry Diller, and Ted Turner, and he telephoned them up to let them know that they were in the book. Nader felt sensitized to this issue, because he's been featured as a character in other people's novels, including Greg Bear's Eon, which the New Yorker says

portrays Nader as "a saintly figure, a hero in a wasteland," whose followers win landslide elections in North America and Western Europe (in 2011) and bring down the Soviet Union (in 2012). "You see, that's science-fiction utopia," Nader said. "Nobody can give that any credibility."

Some people, including one famous billionaire, were a bit "snippy" about being included in Nader's book. But Yoko Ono and Warren Beatty were thrilled:

Yoko Ono, who in the book invents a logo called Seventh-Generation Eye that causes millions of people suddenly to shed their political apathy, sent Nader a brief reply. ("I think it is so sweet of you to write a book about somebody who resembles me. I don't mind at all, of course. Does she look like a tiny dragon?") Warren Beatty, whom Nader envisions running for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger, and winning, with sixty-three per cent of the vote, blurbed the book. Nader, he wrote, was showing the world "how good he thinks things could be."

So just how weird is this novel? Here's how the San Francisco Chronicle describes the plot:

The story begins in 2005, not long after Hurricane Katrina. A secret gathering is convened by Buffett at a Maui mountain retreat, where 17 very wealthy people agree to take back the country they think has been betrayed.

They give speeches, write books, organize community action groups. They infiltrate corporate boards of directors, stage demonstrations for the environment and better wages. They start a People's Chamber of Commerce, advocate changing the national anthem to "America the Beautiful" and dream up a politicized parrot, "Patriotic Polly," that becomes a media folk hero.

"Fiction is a way to liberate the imagination," Nader says, "to see what could happen if 17 billionaires and super-rich people really put their minds to it, along with a parrot, and took on the existing business power bloc and the politicians in Washington who serve (it)."

The super-rich name themselves "Meliorists," believers that people can make the world better. They persuade the elusive Warren Beatty to run against Arnold Schwarzenegger for California governor. They conspire to force Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to allow its workers to unionize. They push for universal health care. They start a new political party, dedicated to publicly financed elections. They are so quick, and clever, their foes can't catch up.

Architect Craig Hodgetts designed this awesome art for a movie of Ecotopia, but he actually put tons of thought into how everything would work. (Look at the captions in the gallery for more info on each image.) It's like peering inside an alternate history, where maglev trains with beanbag seats, and wind-power generating balloons, became commonplace.

In Ecotopia, the Westernmost U.S. states secede and form their own country, with a liberal woman president. Hodgetts says if the movie had gotten off the ground, he would have scrapped much of the storyline of Callenbach's novel and focused on trying to create a kid-friendly movie, with lots and lots of marketable toys and "consumables." Ah, capitalism. It sort of warms your heart to think of it.

More pics, and interview, at the link. [A/N Blog, thanks to Designguybrown]

Long-running space-opera Star Trek isn't strictly about time travel of course. But it's amazing how often Starfleet's crews seem to travel back in time — Kirk and friends visited the 20th century on a few occasions, and stopped by planets that looked just like 20th century Earth on several others. Voyager went to 1990s Earth and matched wits with Evil Bill Gates. And two of the Trek movies so far have featured trips back to our present or near future.

At the other end of the spectrum from Trek is the Terminator franchise, which has always featured visitors from a shitty future coming back and trying to tinker with events in the present. Usually revolving around John Connor, the future hero. There's a nice moment in a recent episode of the Sarah Connor Chronicles where Brian Austin Green and the rest of his scruffy mob of freedom fighters appear (naked as usual) in the present, and marvel at how clean and nicely built everything. It's a half-remembered dream from their youth.

Both Star Trek IV and Terminator involve people (and things) journeying back from the future to the 1980s. But in Trek, the present is a crude time, when people practice "medieval" medicine and go around talking about their asses all the time. Kirk and friends have a hard time fitting in, because they're so advanced. In the Terminator, meanwhile, the danger comes from the future. The people of the mid-1980s are backward technologically, and refuse to believe the truth about the coming Skynet takeover. But they're also living in a promised land compared to the world Kyle Reese comes from.

Terminator 2 also features a visitor from the messed-up future bringing danger, plus another visitor bringing salvation, as they both try to mess around with the timeline. But it also introduces the idea that the seeds of the horrible future are already here, in the form of the nascent Skynet and Cyberdyne.

Similarly, in First Contact, Trek finally travels back into a past where things are fucked up — even worse than the present — but the seeds of the wonderful future are already present, in the form of Zephram Cochrane's warp-travel experiments and the first meeting with the Vulcans.

And, of course, time travel apparently plays a huge role in J.J. Abrams' upcoming Trek movie, due out in May. People who've seen the new full-length trailer say it includes young Spock (Zachary Quinto) and old Spock (Leonard Nimoy) sitting hand in hand, watching the Enterprise sail past. (Okay, they don't hold hands.)

I would be shocked — well, mildly surprised — if the movie doesn't include a scene where old Spock tells young Spock how great the future is going to be, and how wonderful his life with Jim will turn out. Not to mention how nice the Next Generation-era Federation is going to be. That's sort of an obligatory scene in the visitor-from-a-lovelier-future school of science fiction.

Does Terminator 4 include time travel? We don't know yet. It does take place in our future, after the rise of Skynet. So if there is any time travel, it'll mean visiting our future. (In much the same way that Abrams' Trek is visiting our future, but the franchise's past.) I suspect there will be a time-travel element of some sort in the movie, judging from this bit in the official synopsis:

But the future Connor was raised to believe in is altered in part by the appearance of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a stranger whose last memory is of being on death row. Connor must decide whether Marcus has been sent from the future, or rescued from the past.

Rumor has it that Marcus is from the past, the product of a cyborg experiment by Skynet. But he could be from further in the future, for all we know.

With both Star Trek and Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins opening next May, we'll see dueling time-travel narratives. Or really, we'll see dueling versions of the future. Trek will show us the start of Starfleet's golden age, when James Kirk is just on his way to becoming a captain and a century of radness lies ahead. And TSTFB (not the greatest acronym) shows us John Connor at the start of the most hellish period of Skynet domination, when everything has already been wrecked and he's having to lead the resistance against the machines.

Which version of the future will audiences prefer? Star Trek's sunny future, including a pointy-eared visitor from an even sunnier future? Or Terminator's bleak and horrendous dystopia, which may include a visit from an even more dystopian time further in the future? I guess we'll find out next May — but a lot depends on how we feel about our present. If we see ourselves as living in a backward, messed up era, like the "present" that Captain Kirk regularly visits, then maybe we'll gravitate towards Trek's vision that things get better. If we see ourselves as living in a brief patch of sunshine before things get worse, then we'll embrace the Terminator worldview. (And yes, whether we prefer J.J. Abrams or McG as a director could have something to do with it too, I guess.)

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