The Female State: Science Fiction Alternatives to the Patriarchy — Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country and Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming Series

Abstract

In Demand the Impossible, Tom Moylan redefines the utopias of the 1970s as ‘critical utopias’, suggesting that writers in this period took the tradition of utopian writing and ‘revised, destroyed, and transformed’ both the genre and the idea of utopia itself (Moylan, 1986, p. 30). The previous utopian tradition is described as engaging with the political and ideological, emphasising the process of ‘willed transformation’ necessary to produce an alternative community and using the device of estrangement to present such a community to the reader (ibid., p. 23). Three key features of this earlier utopian writing are identified: ‘the alternative society’, ‘the protagonist specific to the utopias — that is, the visitor to the utopian society’, and ‘the ideological contestations in the text’ (ibid., p. 36). Critical utopias retain these aspects of utopian writing, but with two major changes. First Moylan states that critical utopias present ‘in much greater, almost balanced, detail both the utopian society and the original society against which the utopia is pitted as a revolutionary alternative’, and more importantly for my discussion, ‘the critical utopia also deviates by presenting the utopian society in a more critical light. Utopia is seen as “ambiguous” (LeGuin) or, in a response partly to LeGuin, as “ambiguous heterotopia” (Delany)’ (ibid., p. 44). It is also clear, as Moylan points out, that in the critical utopias of the 1970s, different ways of writing about utopia are being explored.