Peter Y. Paik

Paik's book is interested in science fiction with a political bent, and limits itself to sf produced in the 1980s through the 2000s, and popular ones at that: his key works are four comics (Alan Moore's Miracleman, Watchmen, and target="_top">V for Vendetta, plus Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) and three films (the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix and V for Vendetta, plus Jang Joon-Hwan's Save the Green Planet). Though it's interested in ideas of utopia, the book doesn't approach them through traditional literary criticism, but rather how these works engage with revolutionary political theorists, especially Slavoj Žižek, and see how much they succeed in displaying what Paik and Žižek see as the realities of political violence.

Paik's introduction and the first chapter, where he lays out the basis for his analysis and employs it for the first time, is predictably the strongest part of the book-- having him explain what he's up to is more interesting than seeing him do it three more times. According to Paik, utopia and catastrophe are innately linked, in that it is impossible to have a utopia without catastrophe-- or at least it should be; many fictional utopias elide the conditions necessary to bringing about their foundation, going all the way back to Thomas More's Utopia, where the society only succeeds on the basis that the Utopians seem to lack pride (4), which Paik sees as a cheat that ignores political realities. Paik ultimately suggests that "the main blind spot of utopian thought in the present postpolitical era lay[s]... in a lack of determination in imagining the irresistible pressures unleashed by political upheaval, a loss of nerve in confronting the intractable forces of social equilibrium that make genuine change impossible without a 'catastrophe' befalling the entire society" (7). Alan Moore, he claims, is unusual in showing all of the violence on the page in great detail; Watchmen shows us that bringing an end to violence is a violent action in and of itself-- and unpreventably so.

Paik's limitation of his ideas to "the present postpolitical era" is unnecessary; as his own example of Utopia shows, his ideas here are more broadly applicable to pre-1980s utopian/apocalyptic fiction. Much of the book is focused on the idea of what Paik calls "the inhuman redemption of the saved" (41), the notion that true change cannot be achieved without passing through some kind of awful intermediate stage. Paik mentions the current rash of narratives that posit no human cause of catastrophe, pointing out they all perhaps go too far, showing the change as overwhelmingly violent, which is of course in the favor of our currently-existing system. It's okay for people to think there's a better system out there if they thing it's too dangerous to try!

The book is really useful as a jumping-off point; like I said, I think a lot of his ideas apply to other works than the ones he discusses; I feel like I've had a fair amount of success myself working with them in the 19th century with works like Jane Loudon's The Mummy!, George Griffith's Angel of the Revolution, and H. G. Wells's The War in the Air. And even though he focuses on the works that do show the acts of violence he is so fascinated by, doing so naturally raises some interesting avenues in looking at works that elide that violence, and how/why they do it. For example, he mentions Alan Weisman's ostensibly nonfictional The World Without Us as a work of catastrophic fiction, but doesn't really discuss how the book's convenient disaster lets it imagine a new world without having to blame anyone for it. (Some of these ideas, though, are taken up by Claire P. Curtis in her Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: "We'll Not Go Home Again" which came out around the same time.)

Though he offers fascinating insights into the works under discussion (well, except for The Matrix, but I'm not convinced that fascinating insights into The Matrix exist), Paik's main flaw is that he occasionally gets a little too excited by his political theory, and vast swathes of pages will pass where we hear a lot about Žižek, but nothing about any of his primary texts. Plus, Paik's discussion of Watchmen moves on to laudable political acts, where Paik ultimately criticizes Ozymandias and endorses Rorschach. But given that Paik himself points out that Moore is always careful to not set up binaries where the subjugated participant is valid simply through being subjugated (188-9, n. 21), I can't help feeling that in holding up Rorschach as an example of a positive political actor, Paik has fallen straight into Moore's trap.… (plus d'informations)