The nightmare of a dystopic American future was at the heart of my post from last week. Looking at the works of Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, it’s clear that they both see a future for the United States—not to mention the world—that doesn’t entirely match the utopia of Star Trek.[1] An essential element of science fiction in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s however is the specter of homelessness in the future. This crystallized for me when reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which concerns a dystopic future in California. There, the constant presence of homeless people throughout the Golden State offers just one prominent fear that the main characters of Butler’s book have to deal with. The prominence of homeless—not just as a problem, but a problem Americans fail to deal with—in science fiction at the end of the twentieth century, is an example of how science fiction tries to talk about real-world problems.
Parable of the Sower, as I mentioned last week, features a United States that is experiencing severe economic and social decline. Water and other everyday necessities have become luxuries due to environmental catastrophe. Many American citizens live in walled communities, which offer a modicum of protection from roving bands of desperately homeless citizens, trying to survive in an America where an instant, end-of-the-world apocalypse would at least provide a respite from the day-to-day misery of a slow-moving disaster. The fact that this book was written in the early 1990s, an era where concerns about homelessness still dominated national political discourse, should give us some sense of what Butler was thinking about when writing her book.
As I’ve written elsewhere, homelessness has played a role in other, more famous science fiction franchises. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s two-parter “Past Tense” showcases a United States in 2024 that has virtually given up on fighting homelessness and instead put the homeless in “sanctuary districts.” The commentary on 1980’s America in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home also offers some critique of America’s inability to deal with its myriad of social problems. In both instances, America is a place that could do more to solve its social problems, but simply refuses to do so.
In a sense, Butler’s work also argues this—but with a caveat. In Parable of the Sower, the sadness that permeates the older generation that grew up in the late twentieth century is a mix of nostalgia for the past and a realization that, yes, America dropped the ball on numerous occasions when it came to dealing with its social, economic, and environmental problems. The past casts a large shadow in Parable of the Sower, with Butler asking her readers, “Do you realize things can get worse and not better?” The terror inherent in so much of Butler’s novel is that the threats aren’t aliens or some other outlandish force from beyond; the problems are man-made, and humanity refuses to create solutions.
This problem of homelessness seen in science fiction is mirrored today by a similar concern of class warfare—films such as Elysium (2013) delve into this. Science fiction in a post-Great Recession, post-Occupy Wall Street context cannot but help talk about this. I suspect homelessness and economic decline will continue to be an important part of modern science fiction literature and film, as artists try to grapple with the peculiarities of the twenty-first century.
[1] Although, considering that the Earth that we see throughout the various iterations of Star Trek was born out of a Third World War in the mid-21st century, even that Earth wasn’t spared some of the dystopic visions of the future that prevail in so much science fiction literature.
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