The Search for Utopia in the Selected Science Fiction Novels of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin and Octavia Estelle Butler: A Study in Themes and Techniques.

Abstract

Utopia, science fiction, and dystopia are three interrelated genres as they express the same themes and ideas with very slight differences. They cooperate to coin only a part of modern fiction. Writers manipulate such genres in order to criticize their world freely. Fiction and reality are rather controversial as fiction examines the problems facing societies at a certain time depending on the writer's own vision or imagination. Writers begin to search for a better society by isolating themselves from their societies and aspiring for a better place. The challenging question is how can such writers attain the ideal society aspired for? Or even what are the means of changing the real corrupt world for a better one? It is not just a quest of eliminating hunger and poverty but it is rather a call for a just society where everyone despite differences of colour, or race, or gender can attain equality and freedom. The aspiration for a utopian society cannot be achieved by imagining and criticizing the non-existing societies only. It could be fulfilled through utopian speculation that helps visualize a better society through condemning the real world and its forms of oppression. Conclusion 266 Writers of utopia search for a better place as do those of science fiction. Both writers criticize their societies aspiring for a better life. In case of science fiction, they make use of technological advancement in science where one can travel faster than light. Utopia and dystopia are two faces of the same coin, and have been so throughout history. In utopia, the writers flee their own society through imagining a better society where all the evils vanish and the good prevails. As for dystopia, it is regarded as anti-utopia. Dystopian fiction is the creation of a nightmare world where the utopian ideals have been subverted. Many novels compromise both terms and use them as a metaphor for the contradictory behavior of human race. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and speculative fiction. Sometimes science fiction is mistaken for fantasy because both of them deal with imagination but the former extrapolates from science whereas, the latter adopts its main theme from different subjects and it is more like fairy tales. The dissertation applies such definitions onto the selected works of both Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness (LHD), The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia(DIS), The Telling(Telling) and Octavia Estelle Butler (Kindred, Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents). Conclusion 267 The coming chapters conduct a thematic and technical study of selected novels and examine some of the aspects of feminism as well as aspects of racial relations and their influence on both writers. The study also provides the reader with a comparative study of the selected novels.