Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1991 short story ‘Newton’s Sleep’ begins in a utopic society that escaped the environmental and social calamity of a near-future Earth and created an enlightened culture on a space station. The group, led by a scientific elite, pride themselves on eradicating the irrational prejudices and unempirical mentality that hamstringed Earth; but chaos blossoms as the society struggles with the reappearance of religious intolerance, and becomes confused by an outbreak of mass hallucinations of the Earth they left behind. This narrative trope of the necessity of nature for the survival of humanity—physically, mentally, and ethically—represents a new and relatively common allegory in contemporary science fiction in an era distinguished by separation from the natural world.
Spes (Special Earth Satellite). Spes’s population is made up of refugees from planet Earth in a near-future where the planet has been ravaged by wars, environmental ruin, and economic catastrophe. This group escaped ecological and social calamity by building and then retreating to their self-created space station, where they intended to build an egalitarian and enlightened culture in their enclosed metallic ecosystem.
The leaders of this new society, and the people who orchestrated the exodus from Earth, are a scientific elite whose careful planning extricated them from a dying planet. Over the course of a decade, like Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt toward the Promised Land, these engineers and scientists took a specially chosen few up from the washed-out Earth to their hermetically sealed space station, presumably never to return to the political and biological wasteland they left behind. But events take a turn for the dystopic when the station’s residents begin to “see” elements of the Earth they sealed themselves away from in their literal bubble of science and rationality. These hallucinations begin with the station’s children
No comments:
Post a Comment