Peter Y. Paik

On his book From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

Cover Interview of March 21, 2010

In a nutshell

From Utopia to Apocalypse is a study of political upheaval and revolutionary change, as they are portrayed in works of speculative and science fiction. It is my contention that science fiction and speculative narratives, by virtue of their fantastic character, enable us to imagine in vivid terms the experience of sweeping political change and social transformation. The narratives I discuss in this book—the superhero comics of Alan Moore, the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, the cinema of Jang Joon-Hwan, and the manga of Hayao Miyazaki—depict, with unblinking candor and rigorous equanimity, the violence committed in the name of founding a new order or destroying an unjust one. As such, they compel us to come to grips with the unrelenting compulsions and uncontrollable forces that are unleashed in the process whereby one kind of order gives way to another.

For example, in Miracleman, a revisionist superhero comic by Alan Moore, the superhuman beings tire of serving an unsatisfactory status quo and decide to take over the globe. They force the leaders of the world into retirement, eliminate poverty, destroy all nuclear weapons, and heal the environment from the ravages of industrial pollution. But these acts of humanitarian compassion soon reveal a darker side: the superheroes essentially become dictators who declare themselves to be gods, while any dissent against their rule becomes reduced to inconsequential spectacle.

Though it has little in common with classical tragedy, Miracleman contains an indelibly tragic dimension, for it lays out in vivid terms the harsh price entailed for achieving what most would consider a glorious outcome. The other narratives I look at contain similarly cruel dilemmas and wrenching twists: mass murders that trigger world peace and thus remain unpunished, the destruction of annihilating weapons that has the consequence of eliminating the technologies for creating abundance and guaranteeing human survival in an increasingly toxic planet, a program to rescue humans from their violence that requires the horrific suffering of a small number of innocent individuals. The protagonists in these works find themselves trapped in tragic conflicts, but these predicaments, which often exact a terrible price, turn out to be the necessary precondition for passing into a wholly new or entirely different state of affairs.

literature / violence / government / power / political science / politics / management / popular culture / iraq / comics /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009