Sim Socialism, or Wrapping up Unstuck in Time
Note: This is the final entry for the current chapter of Unstuck in Time, and also the final entry for the blog. I have come to realize that the last unwritten chapter (on the USSR as theme park) does not need to be a chapter, but instead should be appended to Chapter 2 or Chapter 3. And I’m not writing the Conclusion until I’ve edited the rest of the MS. So I’m moving on to the next stage of the process, which does not involve serialization.
If there’s anyone out there reading this, thank you for your patience. And I hope to see this project come out as a book in the not-too-distant future.
The element of choice is important when we remember that these stories are not merely descriptive of an imaginary future; they are describing "the future you want to live to see." Like the future Soviet citizens, readers, too, are implicitly choosing their own path. It just so happens that the Soviet path is always the better one. More often than not, the new Soviet Union arises from the will of the people, or from international agreements among former Soviet republics. The contributors to USSR-2016 apparently share the widespread Russian antipathy to revolution.
Taken together, the stories offer a significant revision of Marxist theory in sci-fi form. Instead of the workers coming to consciousness and starting a revolution, the inhabitants of Russia in the future, as well as readers today, come to consciousness in order not to start a revolution, but to build communism through consensus.
An early contribution by Villy9 called "The Decision" brings this point home through a plot line that starts as clever metafiction but ends with all the subtlety of a bulldozer. The year is, of course, 2061, and an expert on our time (the second decade of the twentieth century) is called into an experimental physics lab for his advice. Soviet scientists have opened a portal to another dimension, where it is 2010, and the Soviet Union has collapsed: "The problem is that on their Earth only one path for development remains: capitalism." This other world is so hopeless that it "has no future." Even their imagination is stunted: "A large part of their creative output is probably devoted to the coming apocalypse." Yes, reader, this is our world.
Fortunately, the scientists and the historian realize that all they need to do is somehow communicate to their counterparts (that is, to us), that change is possible, and it is up to them: "We'll give them the idea for a small literary competition. Or an art competition. We'll call it...how about, USSR-2112." The rest, as they say, is (alternate) history.
It's a clumsy story, and the point it is making is rather obvious. But if we stretch its metafictional parameters a bit further than was their likely intent, "The Decision" reveals something important about the competition's ideology and genre. These stories are meant to have the effect that all good utopian fiction strives for: to convert the reader to the cause. What emerges is the inverse of Marxism: Marx's "scientific" conceit was to put utopia at the end of a set of predictable, understandable historical processes, while pre- and non-Marxist utopian thought tended to presume that a perfect world could be built anywhere, as long as its founders and residents tried hard enough. The Soviet Union always had a strong voluntarist strain, especially under Stalin: industrial output was supposed to increase as a matter of will. But there remained at least the fig leaf of a historical theory and systematic thought. The USSR-2061 conjures a communist future by returning to the utopian roots that Marx so despised. There is no need for a revolution, nor is there really much point to figuring out how a better future is to be realized. It will be built repeatedly, and almost effortlessly, on the Internet, in a kind of graphomaniacal slacktivism.