Kampragkos

Written report on Walter Mosley’s Futureland

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Department of American Literature and Culture

Lit. 9-589 Contemporary Cultural Studies

Instructor: Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi

Written by Chrysovalantis Kampragkos. ID: 1987. 18/1/2010

Walter Ellis Mosley (best-known for his detective fiction Easy Rawlins series) is one

of the very few African American science fiction writers, alongside the famous

Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany. Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent

Future, published in 2001, was his second science fiction following the 1998

publication of Blue Light. It consists of nine loosely connected stories set

approximately between 2030 and 2050 United States (and sometimes Africa),

depicting a dystopian world where technology and science are used for enslavement

and destruction, and where any kind of welfare state has been abolished by the

interests of globalized multinational capitalism, which leads to several degrees of

oppression and exploitation, from the division of society into multiple groups of

employed and unemployed people, to the deprivation of the most basic rights to civil

liberties and work, to the creation of drugs and viruses used for the numbing of social

consciousness and mass racial extinction. Mosley discusses issues like racial hatred,

class inequality and the dangers of technology using the vehicle of extrapolation,

which is a method showing how the possibilities of social change (for better or worse)

in the near future. He does that in order to show that excesses of free market

multinational capital, combined with the intense control capitalism has on scientific

and technological evolution, may lead to an explosive social situation in the very near

future. Mosley combines dystopian science fiction with elements of cyberpunk

(exemplified in the battle of hackers/ scientific geniuses against the status quo, like

Ptolemy Bent, who is considered the boy with the highest IQ, and the anarchist

imprisoned hacker Vortex “Bits” Arnold), and detective fiction (exemplified in Folio

Johnson, the detective with the electric eye), leading to the creation of a work of

critical dystopia, a latter, postmodern form of traditional dystopia. Before analyzing

aspects of Futureland, I will make a brief analysis of the characteristics of critical

dystopia, in order to be able to place the book in the context of its author’s perception

of the social moment.

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Lyman Tower Sargent describes dystopia as “a non-existent society described

in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended

a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which

that reader lived” (qtd. in Moylan; 2000 74). Generally, dystopia developed out of

some authors’ intense suspicion towards the utopian hope of writers like H. G. Wells

that Edward Bellamy that state-employed technology could lead to a harmonious

social life. Classic dystopian novels such as Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907),

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) negotiate the authors’ horror of

totalitarianism and state repression. The main technique employed in dystopian fiction

is defamilirization or what Darko Suvin calls “cognitive estrangement,” the strategy

of making the readers perceive of what they already know as unfamiliar or strange by

projecting possible social problems in the future (Booker 19; Suvin 4). Authors of

dystopian novels project their extrapolation of their contemporary society in locations

or periods of time distant from the present, but with clear indications that society is

very possible to end up being exactly like the imagined one. This technique resembles

Bertold Brecht’s technique theory of the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect).

In the 1970s, a new form of science fiction called critical utopia gained

prominence. Heralded by writers like Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany, this new

form was influenced by the feminist, democratic and leftist movements of the late

1960s and 1970s, and by postmodernism in its challenging of grand narratives

―abstract ideas that provide universal explanations for history and knowledge. A

major difference between critical and traditional utopian novels is that the former are

generally open-ended, in order to question the eternal stability and stagnation that is

characteristic in the latter, and to find new ways of resistance. In the 1980s, however,

with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher taking power in the United States and

Britain respectively, utopian dreaming was violently disrupted. Capitalism started

seeking new sources of profit, with the use of information systems, micro-electronics

and biotechnology. Industrially advanced countries shifted from manufacturing to

service-based economies, depleting the factory, where workers formed unions of

solidarity and cores of class struggle. Increasingly, capitalism turned interpersonal

relationships into a commodity and just another act of business transactions. New and

cheaper labor markets were founded in South-Eastern Asia, and the successes of years

of social struggles for the right in public education, public health and social security

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were subverted. In this era, cyberpunk, with writers like William Gibson, Bruce

Sterling, showed a negative vision of the world after the 1970’s. Writers like the

aforementioned Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson and Pat Cadigan

gave a new push to the dystopian imagination that was disrupted by critical utopia,

creating the genre of critical dystopia. The works of these authors “negotiate the

necessary pessimism of the generic dystopia with a militant or utopian stance that not

only breaks through the hegemonic enclosure of the text’s alternative world but also

self-reflexively refuses the anti-utopian temptation that lingers in every dystopian

account” (Baccolini and Moylan 7). Critical dystopias allow the reader to keep on

hoping by having open endings that reject a final closure. “In fact, by rejecting the

traditional subjugation of the individual at the end of the novel, the critical dystopia

opens a space of contestation and opposition for those collective ‘ex-centric’ subjects

whose class, gender, race, sexuality, and other positions are not empowered by

hegemonic rule” (Baccolini and Moylan 7). Tom Moylan views the stance of these

novels as both pessimistic and militant (2000 195). According to Sargent, the critical

dystopia “includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia

can be overcome and replaced with a eutopia” (qtd. in Baccolini and Moylan 7).

There appears to be an influence of postmodernism in the critical dystopias, for they

contain contradictions and ambiguity in their pessimism. “If dystopian fiction is

centrally informed by a skepticism toward utopian ideals, one might say that

postmodernist dystopian fiction is informed by the same skepticism, but also by an

additional doubt that this skepticism can be truly effective” (Booker 141).

Critical dystopia has another important deviation from traditional dystopia, in

relation to the source of evil it sheds light on. Contradictory to the classical dystopia’s

simplifying logic which places the state as the ultimate evil, no matter which

economic system is behind it, the critical dystopia imaginary shifts from the state to

the economical system that influences the policies of the state, i.e. neoliberalism

(Moylan; 2003 141).

Bearing in mind the new elements that critical dystopia brings in the broader

dystopian science fiction genre, I think it is fair to categorize Futureland as such. On

the political/ economic level, Mosley warns about the penetration of multinational

capitalism into every country and what effects this might have in the near future. In

the first story, “Whispers in the Dark,” we learn that “former Soviet Union today gave

up its last vestige of sovereignty, much less socialism, when it entered into a

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partnership with MacroCode Management International in a joint venture to return

order to Russian society” (9). Also, “[b]y 2010 Vietnam was divided into twelve

highly developed corporate microstates that produced technical and biological

hardware for various Euro-corps” (20). Convicted people are jailed by state law in

private prisons run by multinational corporations as in the case of Ptolemy Bent (26).

These are all clear extrapolations from the increasing privatization initiated by

Reagan’s governments in the 80s, peaking in the 1990s with the invasion of foreign

investments in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc and Southeast Asia, and the

creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, all of which essentially lead to the

formation of banana formation and to the subversion to basic rights in national

independence, state education, health, or even justice. For example, both state and

political criminals are deprived of their citizenship, imprisoned thousands of miles

away from their countries, and assigned to labor camps, as in the case of Bits, a

hacker and member of the TransAnarchist Trade Union (92). In “Little Brother,”

Mosley warns that we are in danger of losing even the civil right of having a proper

trial, since in this story Frendon Blythe is tried by a computer court (The Court), “an

amalgam of various magistrates, lawyers, and legislators created by the biological

linkage and compression system to be the ablest of judges” (223). Of course, Mosley

treats the virtual judge not as an actual probability, but as a metaphor of the dangers

neoliberalism holds for basic democratic rights. This story is a strong example of how

dystopia works, that is, the transformation of a very concrete or imminent social

situation as an extreme, “strange” narrative.

In this situation it is inevitable that social problems like poverty and

unemployment will increase, and the result is that “poor men and women often sold

pieces of themselves to the rich in order to give their children a chance,” as in the case

of Chill Bent (24). The unemployed in Mosley’s dystopia are treated as less than

human, since they are forced to live in “Common Ground: a section of every city in

the world; the place where unemployed workers have to go when there is no other

refuge. Beans and rice to eat and a doorless sleep cubicle were the bare essentials of

those consigned there” (63, 64). The people living in Common Ground are divided

into more groups, like the White Noise, who are constitutionally barred from entering

employment cycles, because of criminal offenses (225), the cyclers, who are allowed

to find a job after an unemployment cycle, the Backgrounders, and the Muzak Jacks

(344). As Frendon Blythe says, “[t]he biggest problem with being White Noise is

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perpetual and unremitting boredom. Day in and day out you sit hunched over in your

octagon tube or against the wall in the halls that always smell of urine and mold. […]

There’s no books made from paper because the trees have more rights than we do”

(233). I perceive of the Common Ground and its castes as a metaphor for an

increasing division of labor and productive relations, which started after the 1970s,

with the turn of advanced countries to a service-based economy and the imposition of

a neoliberal capitalist globalization. Taking these concrete social situations in mind,

we can think of Common Ground as the probable future of precarious work, the

condition under which work becomes insecure, flexible, without social security, and

the increasing intensiveness of life in societies in which governments are surrendering

to capitalism the vested rights of social movements for collective labor agreements

and other social rights. This is exemplified in Jamey Holloway’s fear of getting sick,

because if he does he will become White Noise (344) and Neil Hawthorne’s anxiety

attacks that cause him to faint and can throw him into an unemployment cycle (245).

Life for those who still work is not any easier though, since they live in constant fear

of being sent to Common Ground, their behavior is constantly monitored by cameras

in workplaces, and similarly to the underground facilities of Common Ground, they

live in the lower floor-avenue levels of buildings, where no sunlight ever reaches

(248, 249). In “En Masse,” we see that people sell their children for their retirement

(310). Thus, we see a prediction of what is to come: a growing gap between the rich

and the poor, which leads to an increasing deprivation and segregation in any aspect

of social life.

Technological advancements are made in the name of profit, as shown in the

eyescans done by the World Bank so that Internet robbers are prevented from stealing

money online (12). We have already seen how capitalism and technology collide in

the destruction of national sovereignty so that corporate technology unobstructedly

improves the military arsenal. The most notorious scientific advancement in the book

is the drug Pulse which enables its users to “create a complex fantasy, build a whole

world and live in it for what seemed, like days, weeks” (35). Of course, the drug

cannot be considered outside its social context since users become completely

dependent on it for their life, like Leon Jones who makes his daughter Fera fight

boxing games so that he can afford the drug (35). Pulse is of course a product of the

horrors experienced by people, since it makes users lose any interest in the actual

world, but also leads to Pulsedeath, in which “the brain collapsed in on itself without

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regular ingestion of the drug. It was an addiction from which death was the only

withdrawal” (36). Exemplary of the social function of Pulse is Neil’s thought of

taking “a megadose of Pulse,” preferring to die from brain collapse than living in

Common Ground (246). To make matters worse, capitalist interests have subverted

any kind of judicial independence and Pulse becomes a legal drug in 2031 (36), and is

even prescribed for those who are permanently unemployed (246).

Mosley also makes hints towards posthumanism, with the building of

information systems into bodies (like Doctor Kismet’s monocle or Folio Johnson’s

electric eye) and genetic engineering on the part of a feminist organization, which

seeks to create women that are biologically superior to men. In “Voices,” Leon Jones

becomes the victim of brain cloning: when his brain collapses, his surgeon replaces it

with his dead daughter’s brain so that she will relive again. Here, Mosley raises

questions about what means to be human in an age of advanced science in an ultra-

capitalist world, and what are the costs of it. Certainly, these technological and

scientific advancements are never neutral and autonomous from the capitalist status

quo; instead, they are aimed towards the benefit of all mankind, but are reflections of

rising antagonisms between classes, races, sexes, and they are in the direction of

determining what social groups will be on top of the rest. Indeed, there are

sophisticated surveillance systems of monitoring people’s behavior, like the ChemSys

snake pack, which detects every physical and mental activity of prisoners in Angel’s

Island, and delivers pain doses or even coma for every normal human act (97).

Generally, I believe that Mosley treats technology not as the most central aspect of his

work, but as another way through he expresses his pessimism about the future. In my

opinion technology and science in Futureland are representations of the path

capitalism has taken, a path that leads to totalitarianism in the previously

“democratic” world, and to barbarism, as shown in the International Socialists’

manipulation of science for racial hatred. This is evident in the apocalyptic final pages

of the book, where a Russian army drop atomic bombs on the USA in retribution to

the IS mutated virus (368, 369).

In Mosley’s dystopia race relations are far from being harmonious. Blacks are

still suffering from inequality and oppression, and in many cases they take a radical

turn to demanding separation from a society still dominated by the whites. Chill says

that Ptolemy “was born in trouble,” because as a black child he is bound to grow up in

povery and segregation (11). Chill refuses to send Ptolemy to a normal school because

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“he wanted Popo to know African-American history, ‘like them white kids know their

history. From stories at home’” (10). Furthermore, Chill says that American schools

are not better than prisons and he fears that white people will “turn [Ptolemy] into

some cash cow or bomb builder or prison maker” (18, 19). Mosley clearly implies that

blacks are still enslaved in the 21st century America of advanced capitalism. American

capitalism wants to exploit Ptolemy’s extraordinary IQ for profit (7, 8), and Ptolemy,

even though he is only four years old, is already aware of racial inequalities and tells

his uncle that “[w]e could go in the swamps like them slave men you said about” (10).

Mosley implies that multinational capitalism and its effective colonization of

countries may lead to racial violence, since the dependence of underdeveloped

countries will lead to a growing gap between Western ruling capitalism and the

colonized peoples of the third world. Mosley’s warnings are currently becoming

reality around the globe, with the increasing poverty of immigrants and colored

people in the big cities of Europe, and the displacement of Indian and Peruvian

peasants from their home areas, results of their countries’ transactions with

multinational corporations like Monsanto, which privatizes large rural and forest areas

in Latin America and India. In many of these cases, both in the First and the Third

World there are violent uprisings of the poor minorities.

Mosley indicates all these through the Sixth Radical Congress, a black

organization which supports the use of armed violence by blacks against their white

capitalist oppressors (73). RadCon6 fights for “the good of Africa, Africans, and the

African diaspora around the world” (66), and advocates that “[t]he weight of poverty,

the failure of justice came down on the heads of dark people around the globe.

Capitalism along with technology had assured a perpetual white class” (75). In “The

Nig in Me,” even the opposite thing happens: an African corporation, Claw-Cybertech

Angola, annexes Luxembourg, “making that business-state the first Afro-European

nation,” and the Luxembourgians are revolting, “ma[king] no attempt to hide the

racial nature of their political unrest” (347) On the other end of race relations are the

International Socialists, or Itsies. The IS initially claim that they are not against

blacks, but only against Jews, because “Zionism is incompatible with social

evolution” (142). However, they are conducting a gene-testing projecting in order to

make a race war. They create a virus that would supposedly kill all blacks. However,

the virus mutates and kills “everybody but people with at least 12.5 percent African

Negro DNA” (377). This is reminiscent of the one-drop rule. Here Mosley mocks and

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inverts the white’s delusions of racial purity, which still persist, half a century after

the end of segregation laws in America; television broadcasts show “[a]stonished

Caucasians who survived the plague realiz[ing] that there was a sizeable portion of

Negro blood in their veins” (377).

Despite the overall apocalyptic and pessimistic mood that pervades

Futureland, it manages to retain a certain degree of positive attitude, mainly in the

open-ended ambiguity in which most of the stories end, and in the militant pessimism

that informs some of the protagonists. These characters, mainly cyber-revolutionaries,

like Bits, the staff at LAVE-AITCH, Frendon, and Ptolemy, pose a real threat to the

hegemony of multinational corporations and racist organizations. Most of them get

killed in their attempts to disrupt the well-function of surveillance systems.

Nevertheless, Mosley argues through their battles that despite the world is walking in

a totalitarian path, nothing is yet over, and there always openings and in the system

that can be invaded and become standpoints for resistance. Also, the critical

dystopia’s resistance to closure, as opposed to the absolute pessimism of classic

dystopia, exemplified in the ending of “The Nig in Me” (“When Harold realized that

he had escaped death, he began to laugh. The world had started over”-382), is a sign

that the attempts of “the bad guys” (the IS in this case) at achieving total world

domination will not always become reality; on the contrary, they might backfire and

lead to a better future, or at least a future where people realize that racial purity is a

delusion, and therefore peaceful racial coexistence can be fulfilled. Indeed, the fact

that the stories are loosely connected with each other is evidence that the horrors of

technologically-advanced capitalism are bringing more people closer to a common

cause of resisting enslavement.

To conclude, I believe that as a dystopian science fiction book, Futureland

raises important issues and forwards accurate descriptions of how American (and

Western in general) society is organized today, but more specifically, what it is

transforming into. Mosley handles very well the technique of defamilirization, and

makes very clear that his extrapolations are based in very evident social situations that

are indeed heading to his imagined future. Moreover, he does not demonize

technology, even though most technological achievements in Futureland are in the

service of totalitarianism and exploitation. Rather, he sees it within the context of the

attack of capitalism on the peoples’ basic social rights, and as an expression of the

social consequences of exploitation and oppression. Yet, because technology is a tool

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and not an autonomous institution, Mosley is correct in showing that it has its own

gaps and inconsistencies and that control over technology becomes a not-yet-finished

battle between capitalists/ racists and revolutionaries.

Works Cited

Baccolini, Rafaella and Tom Moylan. “Introduction. Dystopia and Histories.” Dark

Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Ed. Rafaella

Baccolini and Tom Moylan. New York: Routledge, 2003. 1-12.

Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social

Criticism. Westport : Greenwood Press, 1994.

Moylan, Tom. “‘The moment is here…and it’s important’. State, Agency, and

Dystopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The

Telling.” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Ed.

Rafaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan. New York: Routledge, 2003. 135-53.

Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia.

Boulder: Westview Press, 2000.

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a

Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

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