When utopia goes wrong

[bibliogramma]

Solution Three, Naomi Mitchison.

Naomi Mitchison was never reluctant to challenge anything – the sexual mores and gender assumptions of the times she lived in, the political regime and class structure of her homeland, or any tradition or system of ideas that seemed to need a bit of shaking up and airing out.

In the early 1960s, after a long and distinguished career writing contemporary and historical fiction, and socially and politically progressive non-fiction, Mitchison wrote her first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, in which she presented an image of a future in which women had transcended the limited roles prescribed to them by the social and economic conventions of the time.

By the mid 70s, the world of ideas was full of theories about how to change the future, to remake it nearer to an ideal world, free of such evils as aggression, sexism, racism, poverty and hunger. Some feminists were advocating the use of genetic techniques to change the biology of reproduction in the hopes of eliminating sexism, and modifying desire to remake the concept of pair bonding, and the family. Some argued that it was the heterosexual family dynamics that created violence and greed in human beings, that the very nature of heterosexual sex distorted power relations between men and women. Scientists advocated the use of genetic manipulation to relieve world hunger. The air was full of radical ideas of using technologies of science and social change to remake the human experience into a kind of paradise.

In Solution Three, Mitchison takes a hard look at the kind of society that might come about given the adoption of such ideas and technologies, and delivers a serious critique of a world that, in sacrificing both social and genetic diversity, has created yet another set of limitations to be challenged. Yet at the sam time, she insists that the solution to such problems is not a return to previous, unacceptable ways of organising human existence, but to move forward, finding new paths that build on past lessons.