#utopian communes

[aesthetic-otd]

Today's aesthetic is utopian scholastic

[infinitysisters]

[thanatika]

pathologic classic is all 3 at once depending on which npc you talk to

[talefoundryshow]

In a world where there’s nothing left to conquer but boredom, how does play evolve?

Song - NFL on FOX Theme (Instrumental King)

[tanadrin]

I’m kind of spitballing this, but: I think it might be useful to distinguish “ideal societies” as falling into the following types:

Eschatological societies are ideal societies or conditions of humanity imagined as the result of a process of divine intervention, in fulfillment of some divine process or purpose. They are telic—a product of a process working toward a definite end—but that telicity is divine, not human, and humans cannot create this society; they can only prepare for its imposition by divine forces. A useful type specimen here might be the New Jerusalem of Revelation.

Edenic societies are sort of their inverse: ideal societies springing from the unmarred or undisturbed state of nature. They are often pre-civilizational in character. They cannot be returned to because the world has irrevocably changed since their downfall, and we no longer exist in a state of innocence or wisdom sufficient to realize them. The Garden of Eden is one example; the Golden Age of Hesiod is another.

Idylls are societies or conditions of humanity that are better than our own in many ways, but not as a process of telic development or divine intervention. They’re representative of one ideal or another, but they’re not the endpoint of history or its beginning. If anything they are most useful as a tool of fiction to draw the reader into a world, without necessarily embodying a specific didactic viewpoint. The Shire feels like such a society, a modern and particularly English treatment of the pastoral setting.

Utopias are specifically ideal societies that are the endpoint of a process of historical or philosophical development. They’re conceptually final, even if not literally eschatological, because the concept usually precludes anything but trivia improvement or alteration without corrupting the utopia. They are in one sense secular eschatology; though most utopias are not presented as inevitable in the same way the eschatological end of history is. Ironically, Utopia itself might be more of an idyll than a Utopia under this scheme—it depends on how much you think Utopia represents More’s own views on how a society is to best be governed.

(The dystopia isn’t really a separate category here, it’s just an artistic inversion of the utopia. I think that for various reasons dystopias are of particular interest to modern writers, especially after the horrors of the 20th century, and they’re a way to critique or interrogate the whole concept of a Utopia. They’re not ideal societies in the same sense—they are imagined, and are usually an exploration of an *idea*, but they are not an expression of *idealism.*)

Utopias also stand out as the one member of this category that really bridges the conceptual-real divide. Like, they’re the thing people can work toward in the real world—people go out and found utopian communities all the time! Utopias can be a call to action in the way Eden or the eschaton isn’t (because both are beyond human power to create), nor even the idyll (because it’s not a culmination of a telic process). Even if you cannot ever create an actual utopia, you can (or so the hope goes) asymptotically approach it.

[rosalesbeausderholle]

People would call you communist for this (lol) but the solution for the housing crisis we have all over is to set a minimum and maximum price per square meter that you can rent/sell a place for and that maximum price per meter should be adjusted so that it never exceeds a specific reasonable percentage of local salaries. Also, governments should be tougher on places not being fit to rent. No, you shouldn't be able to rent anything less than 45m² as 'a flat', that's either a room or a storage unit.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Hello, Tumblr!

Hiya Tumblr! This is the official Solarpunk Presents podcast account, which will be posting our podcasts (bimonthly... every two weeks ... however you like to say it), posts from our blog https://solarpunkpresents.com and reblogging / liking excellent solarpunk content. We're just starting up our second season, so we don't have a ton of content right now, but watch this spot for podcast episodes that explore the people and projects working on bringing us a better world today. The podcast is cohosted by Christina De La Rocha and Ariel Kroon, who is the one writing this post and talking about herself in third person like a weirdo.

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Stay solarpunk!

-Ariel

[sunlitmiracle]

smashes my current interest together with my old interest (aka yet another "what Dungeon Meshi but Gamers?" AU)

Once when I was a child I had a complete crying meltdown over Creatures, because the manual insisted that the complicated AI of the Norns made them truly alive and 10-year-old me was freaked out at the idea of being solely responsible for making sure these real animals wouldn't die. The funny part was that this was the Playstation version of Creatures, which has no biochemistry and very basic AI compared to the PC/Mac games where players actually were debating whether or not it was true artificial life. A PSX manual gave me existential dread and it wasn't even telling the truth.

Anyway, kid!Marcille would also have a meltdown over the Creatures series, especially if she had the computer games and got to see how vastly different some breeds' lifespans are. Like in C2 where you have Norns that live for around 5 hours and Norns that live for 10, both of which are vastly more than Ettins who don't even live for 1.5 hours (and usually less due to radiation or starvation).

Lucky for her, having the computer version means she could download modified genomes made by other players that make creatures live longer or even outright remove certain death triggers. However I think she'd have more fun learning to read and edit the genomes herself, to get a better understanding of how the game works and how to change it to suit her own tastes. And because she could pretend she's one of the mysterious ancient Shee who created the Norns, Grendels, and Ettins and then vanished, leaving behind relics of their old society.

(Speaking of Grendels, she would unfortunately dislike them because they're the Designated Evil Species and she'd hate how they harass and attack her Norns. I think she'd also pity them though, because they get sick a lot and have short lifespans. Likely she'd just end up downloading/creating a genome without the aggression towards Norns. Ettins she'd like except for in C3 when they dismantle her meticulously-placed gadget setups, so she might mod out their hoarding compulsions too. Both of them would of course also live for however long her Norns would live.)

Also. While standard creatures' lifespans are counted in hours, if you modify the half-lives in the genome editor you can increase it to centuries. Or even just over a millennium if you set the half-lives to their max length (assuming you also leave the old age death trigger at its vanilla value).

and I like to think that elven Creatures players would pass around copies of what they consider a template genome that's appropriate to their own lifespans. Something that would make their creatures live for weeks or months of continuous play. I also like to think the Creatures DS Warp is still active in this AU because of the hilarious frustration when these long-lived Norns travel to worlds run by short-lived players whose Norns have vanilla lifespans, and vice versa.

(Most of the time in Creatures, offspring of parents with different lifespans will just have one or the other, but there's a chance the genes cross over right in the middle of the various age triggers and cause unstable aging rates. Like a Norn that goes through the childhood stages in hours but then has a very extended adulthood. Or a days-long childhood followed by suddenly dropping dead of old age once the vanilla adulthood genes kick in. Or, if the child has one parent's half-life decay rate and the other parent's age triggers, all sorts of odd things could happen. I once had hybrid Norns who lived for 20 hours and would die of organ failure before reaching the old age threshold!)

(Now that I think of it, Marcille would absolutely hate fast-agers. The first time she watches a creature hatch, turn old, and die in just one brief minute of life, she would be sobbing for days. One of the first things she'd learn to mod out would be mutations that cause the Ageing/Life chemical to decrease unusually fast.)

On a lighter note, while I don't know what her favorite designs would be I think she'd love choosing cute breeds to use in her world. Once she figured out how to give her creatures the comfortable life she wants them to have I can see her redirecting all her gene-editing efforts into changing color expressions. She might even learn to sprite or model her own custom designs.

[acelessthan3]

I think it would be nice if my job at the leftist commune was handyman. Give me a shed with a variety of tools and then I just go around fixing things. And I could maybe teach some classes on how to do really common repairs or like a miscellaneous shop class so sometimes people can borrow the tools in my shed to fix their things if I'm busy working on other things.

[centercide]

maybe you could draw cultcom, if not at the very least sharing any headcanons about them ok? Or both if it’s ok

mod sugar answering,

a headcanon i have is that cultcom is insanely creepy.

elaboration under the cut.

i don't really see them as someone who's all "believe me, i think i'm correct! the holy one sees all!" and is extremely super vocal about it. they are indeed active but in terms of loudness or whatever, it's more on the contrary. they're silent and like to stare into the distance but if there is someone nearby, they'll keep their focus trained on them like an owl (a more twisted reprise of the polite mannerism of keeping eye contact to show respect. in this case, they're doing it as a mockery).

they are not a good person and it is unbelievably difficult to watch. they're like a venus fly trap when they brainwash people into their commune, they are very eerily disgusting and undoubtedly a walking husk of who they used to be. if you stand beside them or see them from afar, they are very chilling. you can see them either standing very still with pinprick eyes at the sky / the ground or shaking their fists.

however, as silent as they are, they are quite the preacher once you get them actually going. they go on monologues that will make you go "what the hell? is wrong with you?" and "what are you on about?". they make it seem like everything is fine in this new vision they have but it is far from that.

also, i just feel like communalism was someone who would be very intent on a goal but their issue is that they're easy to stop once you manage to grab their attention. they're very open (haha, get it? because they're a communalist and everything is- im going.) to things. i feel as though they'd hear someone out but ultimately would be too stubborn to make an actual change in themselves (they are an OFF COMPASS for a reason!), i like to believe the only reason they had actually made a move to tweak themselves was because moralist was a realist and his ability or influential power or whatever manifests through the power of words. anyway, the reason why i expounded on that is because i believe that, as cultcom, they have a very one-track goal in mind and directs their attention and care to one concept of a person, people, entity, or whatever concept they envision as "the holy one" now. before it might've been easy to grab their attention because they had no utter devotion or dedication to. a concept? a thing? whatever delusional thing they believe in? it would be very hard to shake them off of this and they'd be immovable for a while.

another hc i have is that they tend to smile a lot. communalism already loved to smile but that was out of kindness. cultcom would smile as a way to "preserve" what was left of communalism (they're still cultcom) and to also to do it to express "friendliness". they don't smile all the time but it is definitely something that they do often. often enough that everyone thinks that they do it all the time.

tl;dr they gaslight and gatekeep but is not a girlboss. they are a walking creepy hazardous red flag and stink (like sulfur)

i do not know what else to say. i am not good at this. mod spice if you have anything to add, please feel free to say anything. (:

i hope my little headcanons are not too underwhelming. i offer this small doodle of cultcom and utopiary as reparation.

[infinitysisters]

“Like everything based on the writings of Karl Marx—seeing oppressors and colonial struggles everywhere—DEI was doomed to fail. The uniformity of thought known as intersectionality, fostered by DEI, meant all oppressed people must support all others who are oppressed. But that idea burst on Oct. 7 when Hamas raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis. Many liberals, especially Jewish ones, couldn’t support genocidal “colonized” terrorists. Pop! The long march is in retreat.

By the way, ESG, or investing based on “environmental, social and governance” principles, peaked last June, when BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he would stop using “the word ESG anymore, because it’s been entirely weaponized.” Never mind that performance of ESG funds has been sketchy and that BlackRock had been adding the label “sustainable” or “ESG” to funds and charging up to five times as much. Then a study published in December by Boston University’s Andrew Kingfound “no reliable evidence for the proposed link between sustainability and financial performance.” Pop!

Most offensive to me was DEI’s devious underlying agenda: societal design. 𝐁𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐟𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐰𝐧𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐚 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐫𝐮𝐧, 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞, 𝐛𝐲 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞, 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐬. That was the “my truth” that Ms. Gay invoked on her exit. Critical theories and Marxist techniques would take power from you and me, using big government as the enforcer.

The new societal design, embedded in DEI and ESG, envisioned idyllic communal progress. 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐭𝐬. Diversity meant ideological conformity. Equity meant discrimination. Inclusion meant blurring the sexes. Men winning women’s athletic events would be considered normal. It was all theatrics, like the tampons I’ve seen in men’s bathrooms on Ivy League campuses. Somewhere George Orwell is rolling on the floor laughing.

One goal of progressive societal design is to shrink—depopulation. Twenty-somethings now question having children. Net zero and degrowth, both World Economic Forum approved, are pushed via energy myths: carbon bad, cows bad. A plant-based chicken in every pot and two electric cars in every garage. They envy the merit-touting rich, shout “inequality” and wear “Tax the Rich” dresses. They tear down statues to erase history. How did we let this happen?

𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐦 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧, 𝐢𝐭 𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧. There was very little free speech at Harvard—the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked it last of all colleges last year. Those against the societal-design agenda were shouted down. Dissent was met with accusations of privilege or cancellation. Conform or be cast out. On a larger scale, the Biden administration co-opted social media to censure opposing views.

I, like most Americans, am for diversity, but not when it’s forced or mandated. In a 2017 interview, Mr. Fink admitted BlackRock would use DEI tactics to “force behaviors” of corporations on “gender or race,” including via management compensation. Now that’s power.

𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬, 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐰𝐞’𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐭 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐯𝐚𝐫𝐝, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐝𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐥𝐬𝐞𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞. Does national security adviser Jake Sullivan really care about equity or climate change? It polled well and put him back in power to implement his own societal design via “industrial strategy.”

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐬. 𝐂𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐬. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐦𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐬. Those prices inform production much better than any government bureaucrat or Harvard professor. Societal design—remember Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society?—requires government control. I’ll take freedom.

Preferred pronouns are fading. College admissions, and maybe hiring, based on race is illegal. DEI departments are being deconstructed. But while the DEI movement may have peaked, like that Monty Python character, it’s not dead yet. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐲 𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐃𝐄𝐈 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐫.”

— Andy Kessler//WSJ

[talefoundryshow]

NEW VIDEO!

In a future free from all evils, what’s left for us to do? According to a certain creator, we play ball. Game on!

[bitegore]

some practical thoughts for ~the commune~ (wherever and however that may be)

where is your commune going to be located? what is the region like? what kind of seasonal temperature changes do you have? what's your growing season and land fertility look like? do you plan to have an agricultural commune (which must be tethered to the land) or some other form? If you're going for agriculture, what's your reasonable expectation for crop yield? If you're going for something else, what do you plan to do about feeding the commune?

How are you going to provide shelter? Do you intend to build structures or use preexisting ones? What are your building codes going to look like? How are you planning to prevent disasters (carbon monoxide leaks/poisoning, fires, flooding from pipes, etc)? If your commune is going to be a roving one, what will you do to ensure that your mobile forms of housing provide protection from the elements (ie: if a storm hits)?

how do you plan to get goods you cannot manufacture? do you intend to forego them entirely? do you plan to trade with the outside world? If so, with what money? How will you ensure that trade stays sustainable?

In the event of a storage or food supply emergency (crop damage, etc) what will you do? In the event of a housing emergency (flood, fire, tornado, etc) what will you do? In the event of a medical emergency (outbreak of plague, contaminated water or food, etc) what will you do? Do you intend to have someone to coordinate minor and major emergency responses? You most certainly should have a system for this firmly in place before it happens... because it will happen.

Similarly, how do you plan to handle interpersonal problems? Does the commune have a designated moderator? How do you keep the moderator from acting along biased lines? What do you do if they just fucking hate someone else in the commune? Do you intend to have any interpersonal checks and balances to keep the commune from essentially icing out (potentially killing, in the case of a post-Revolution TM world) members of the commune who are less likeable than others?

Everyone wants to work on the commune, sure, but people are bad at self-management in practice and some jobs are not going to be glorious and pleasant no matter what happens. Who is going to handle management of waste like sewage if no one personally volunteers? Who is going to make sure that crops (f you're going to have crops) are planted in the right fields and that the fields that need to be rotated or planted according to specific crop strategies are being done that way? Who is going to take inventory and ensure that the commune as a whole has enough food, clothing, materials, etc to survive the coming months rather than just the coming days? Who is going to coordinate efforts like construction where various disparate parts need to be done in particular order by people with varied skillsets who cannot neccessarily do everyone else's jobs? The commune doesn't need a boss- but unmanaged projects fall apart, and if projects on the commune go entirely unmanaged, eventually the projects falling apart won't just be pleasure projects but will be important events that might mean the difference between starvation or freezing in winter or houses collapsing and them not doing that.

Everyone asks the medicine question and that's for good reason. How are you going to handle the disabled population on your commune? How do you manufacture ADHD medications, insulin, wheelchairs, etc in a commune setting with probably only very small-scale manufacturing systems? Do you plan to have space for physically disabled and/or neurodivergent members of your commune? How will you provide a "buffer" for individuals who cannot work temporarily (due to injury or age) or permanently (due to any number of factors) in your commune? No member of the commune will be able to reliably work consistently. Likewise, what will you do for medical treatment?

Possibly the most important one - when is this commune going to be built? Do you need to work around existing regimes? Is it tomorrow, next year, next century? is it after the Glorious Revolution fixes everything so you don't have to worry about it? How does this affect your commune? Do you have to pay communal taxes, do you have to worry about zoning laws and oppressive police structures, do you need to worry about "trespassing" and "vagrancy"? Alternately, if the Outside World is gone and it's all communes, what does your emergency medical treatment system (hospitals and trauma wards, the stuff that wouldn't need to be in constant operation on a small commune but which are absolute requirements if you want people to survive things like bad burns or certain medical issues or some kinds of serious interpersonal violence) look like? Is there an inter-commune safety net in place? What of vaccination projects and other widespread methods of keeping people alive that need to be distributed among as many people as possible? How do you pass knowledge from commune to commune?

You don't have to be able to answer all these questions right now, and you don't have to answer them to me at all. But you should be able to answer them before the answers become relevant. The absolute last time you want to be answering the "what do we do when someone needs surgery or they will actually die in real life" question is when someone is bleeding out at your feet; the last time you want to have to answer the "who handles human shit and how do we handle it?" question is when someone has dysentery or e. coli because someone's mismanaged sewage got into the commune's water supply.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Hi, friend!

Hiya Tumblr friends! This is the official Solarpunk Presents podcast account, which will be posting our podcasts (bimonthly... every two weeks ... however you like to say it), posts from our site https://solarpunkpresents.com and reblogging / liking excellent solarpunk content.

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Keep dreaming, and keep up the good work!

-Ariel

[bea-lele-carmen]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Central to the superman idea, is, of course, the outcast, loneliness, the feeling of standing apart from other human beings. After the original, more complex or ambivalent science fiction classics dealing with supermen, Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmale, and Hans Dominik’s Die Macht der Drei, virtually all science fiction stories dealing with supermen have dealt with young ones, young and angry and alienated supermen, misunderstood by a cruel and stupid world. A very popular contemporary example is Marvel’s best-selling Spiderman comics, a modern superman with sinus trouble, girls trouble, money trouble. Most adolescents at one time or another feel that they stand outside the world, that no one really understands them and that other people are stupid. Science fiction fans tend to form a high opinion of their own group of science fiction fan friends, strengthening the conviction that they are really a breed of select supermen, standing apart from the mundane world which does not read or understood books - particularly science fiction. Tests made by and on fans on many occasions, in many countries during the past thirty years or so, unanimously suggest that fans - in their own opinion at least - are more intelligent than other people. No wonder superman tales have always been popular in science fiction.

A. E. Van Vogt’s Slan even started a Utopian community of sorts in 1943, when a group of American fans in Battle Creek, Michigan, lived together for nearly two years in the ‘Slan Shack’ community. Only fans were invited, and grandiose plans were drawn up for a ‘Slan Center’ consisting of an entire city block in Battle Creek, with its own grocery store, general store, common heating plant and electricity generating plant. Utopian societies have certainly been founded on flimsier premises than a common interest in science fiction and the belief in the Slanishness of oneself and one’s friends, but the project never materialized and the original Slan Shack, an eight-roomed house sheltering a dozen or so fans, finally was abandoned as well.

An exception to the misunderstood adolescent superman of science fiction is in one of my own favourites, the Mule, in Isaac Asimov’s celebrated Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, originally published as eight stories in the American magazine Astounding from May 1942 through November 1949). The Mule, an enigmatic mutation of superior intelligence and with the ability to play upon people’s emotions, appears in Foundation and Empire, soon unifying the entire known galaxy into a new, strong empire, using complicated Byzantine intrigues the like of which had seldom been seen in science fiction, until he finally meets his end in Second Foundation. A frail human being without most of the hero traits usually found in literary supermen, he is an oddly convincing and tragic personality and complex person who in many respects is the real principal character of the trilogy, certainly the most interesting of all the cardboard characters inhabiting this classic. He is no hero, though, and no science fiction fan community was ever founded to honour him.

The superman is in many respects the Utopian ideal of science fiction on a more personal level, coupled with the inevitable feeling of loneliness felt by many adolescents who prefer to read books instead of running round and hitting the other kids on the head with a baseball bat. The underlying dream of power is here, as is the feeling that one really ought to have the chance to change the whole world into something more glorious, or at least something more interesting. The fact that A. E. Vogt’s Slan, by far the simplest of all superhuman stories, is also the most popular in science fiction, never out of print since it first appeared and much imitated, tells, I think, a lot about the psychological mechanisms behind the lure of this science fiction theme”

- Sam J. Lundwall, Science Fiction: An Illustrated History. New York:Grossett & Dunlap, 1977. p. 184

[AL: Obviously, a 50 year old book - one of my favourites I’ve read over the years since being given an old copy by a friend in middle school - doesn’t necessarily tell us much about science fiction now, or is fully applicable to fandom now. Nonetheless, an interesting perspective on the superman and superhero in science fiction. Lundwall, a Swedish science fiction writer, was also a step removed from the American SF scene, and much more skeptical and critical about science fiction compared to the typical boosterism found in much SF writing and fandom at the time...or even now.]