Ursula K. Le Guin’s Critical Dystopias Raffaella Baccolini It is by now commonly accepted that the utopian imagination today finds its strongest expression in science fiction (SF) and, perhaps paradoxically, in what a number of critics have called the critical dystopia (see Baccolini, “Gender and Genre”; Moylan, Scraps; Baccolini and Moylan). After the important renewal of utopian thought and literature through the critical utopias of the 1960s and 1970s (see Moylan, Demand), a number of social and historical conditions have steered utopian writing toward dystopia. In fact, utopian writing, be it eutopia or dystopia (see Sargent, “Three Faces,” for definitions), is always occasioned by and related to the historical, political, and cultural atmosphere in which a writer is living and working. Early in the twentieth century, for example, the 1917 Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, and the disillusionment that ensued about the experience of real “utopias” brought about a decline in utopian writing and an increase in classical dystopias such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). And while the oppositional political culture of the late 1960s and 1970s occasioned the revival of eutopian writings (with works, for instance, by Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Ernst Callenbach, and Marge Piercy), the turn to rightwing politics, the rise of different fundamentalisms and nationalisms, and the escalation of commodification in the last two decades of the twentieth century resonate throughout the dystopian writing of those years, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Parable of the Sower (1993), Piercy’s He, She and It (1991), and Le Guin’s The Telling (2000). Similarly, the traumatic event of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, and what followed seem to have influenced contemporary SF writing, and especially cinema, toward the representation of postapocalyptic dystopias centered on characters Ursula K. Le Guin’s Critical Dystopias
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