25th Conference of the Utopian Studies Society Europe
Aging, Intergenerational Relationship, and Utopia
1–4 July 2025, Valencia (Spain)
SERI will be represented by Philipp P. Thapa with a contribution based in the context of The Big Green project and his previous work on utopian thinking in the environmental movement.
Abstract
Imagined longevity as a tool for long-term thinking
Individuals, institutions, and societies often fail at long-term thinking and action, and more so for periods beyond the usual human lifespan. On a global scale, this is obvious in many aspects of the world’s failing attempt at sustainable development, including climate change. But what if, as individuals and as a generation, we managed to think and act as if we were still going to be alive and active, not just in a few more years or decades, but in centuries? Arguably, we might make different decisions today.
The same challenge applies to telling stories about larger events and processes. Narratives are shaped by the fact that readers, listeners, or viewers find it easier to follow stories that revolve around individual protagonists. In historiography, because long-term societal development is difficult to narrate grippingly, the focus has often been on individual historical figures who take action at pivotal moments. Many works of utopian fiction struggle to reconcile storytelling with their main objective of explaining the structure of an imagined society (not to mention narrating long-term, open-ended change), which often results in lame stories such as the prototypical guided tour of Utopia.
However, two major works by American author Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) successfully meet the challenge – by giving their protagonists extremely long lives. In the Mars trilogy (1992–1996), some of the first Mars colonists live for more than two hundred years, thanks to medical longevity treatments, supporting the narrative arc through successful terraforming and the development of a planet-wide polity. In contrast, Robinson’s novel The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) uses reincarnation as the device of long-term storytelling, following a group of souls through various lives from the 14th into the 21st century. Identified by their personalities and the initials of their names, the shapeshifting protagonists anchor an alternate global history based on the premise that a much more severe version of the Black Death plague effectively wiped European civilisation off the map around 1350.
Drawing from Robinson’s works and related examples, and adding to my previous work on the conception and use of ecological utopianism, I explore the philosophical potential of imagining extremely long individual lives as a tool for long-term thinking.
