Free New Atlantis by Ursula K. Le Guin

Foreword
    “The New Atlantis” was first published in 1975. So, as of
this e-publication in 2013, it’s been around for nearly forty years. It’s
middle-aged. Sf isn’t supposed to be middle-aged. It’s supposed to be youthful
— the new, the cutting edge — bringing us the future.
    Very little of my sf is predictive. It isn’t about how
things will be in the future. I’d rather write about ways we might go that are
different from the way we’ve been going all my life. ‘The future’ in my sf is
mostly just a metaphor for a different way to a different place.
    The way we’ve been going all my life is, put very crudely:
increasing dominance of corporate capitalism dependent on economic growth;
geometrical increase of human population; and (as a result of both) unceasing
and increasing abuse of the environment.
    These days, growth capitalism has few critics and no real
alternatives. The terrific rate of population growth is usually reported as a
neutral statistic — 2 billion in 1930, 6 billion in 2000, 10 billion by
2050 . . . . But human abuse of the environment has,
finally, begun to be perceived as a problem. The current reactionary denial of
“global warming” is a hysterical, last-ditch defense of the almost universal
indifference or wilful ignorance of the past three generations.
    In the late 1940’s and early 50’s there was a reverse kind
of hysteria — people realised the appalling threat of atomic bombs, panicked,
and dug backyard bomb shelters. Then they forgot why, and filled them in.
Hysteria never does any good. You shriek, you dig, you forget.
    Awareness is the useful thing. But you have to work at it.
    There were good people working at keeping us aware, and they
got to me. I worried. I worried about nuclear power in the fifties, and ever
since. I joined protests in in the sixties against the bomb tests that were
leaving strontium-90 in our milk and cancer in our bodies. And by the
mid-sixties, there was plenty to learn from scientists about what they thought
the human population explosion and the uncontrolled exploitation of natural
resources were doing to the environment. It’s amazing that such a huge amount
of evidence, so clearly presented, could be ignored so long. That ignorance is
a great testimony to the power of wishful thinking, encouraged by corporate
capitalism for its own ends (short-term profit).
    All the same, it surprises me that people are surprised now
that I was writing in the mid-seventies about the rise of sea-level,
deforestation, the collapse of the ecosystem. It wasn’t inspired foresight. I
was just applying the fiction-writer’s imagination to information there for
anyone to see.
    And what the scientists were telling us got clearer and
louder every year: “We are creating environmental disaster, which is already taking place in the following
ways. . . .”
    “The New
Atlantis” seems ecologically farsighted only because our society was so
nearsighted.
    As regards its social predictions, the story is a weird
mixture of blurry telescopy with total myopia. I’d known since the fifties that
big business was taking over the management of America, so I had it take over
Washington and govern by advertisement. I didn’t realise the corporations
wouldn’t have to bother taking over Congress, all they’d have to do was buy it.
    All the political jokes are decades out of date. I like my
peppy jingle about “Take all your problems to the Nine Wise Men,” but it shows
that I didn’t yet believe that feminism might actually be able to pry open that
door into the corridors of power.
    The whole thing about sex being obligatory and marriage illegal
is so far out it’s quaint. What was I
thinking?
    And of course nobody in the story has a computer or a cell
phone. The electronc revolution was one of the extraordinary number of things
sf failed to see coming. We simply couldn’t imagine it. Just as most people
under forty now can’t imagine that people ever