From Anti-Abundance to Anti-Anti-Abundance: Scarcity, Abundance, and Utopia in Two Science Fiction Writers

It is difficult to remember in these times of looming eco-apocalypse that the relatively recent past called itself the “age of abundance.” For roughly two and a half decades after the end of World War II, the United States appeared to have finally solved the riddle of scarcity. In the eyes of its proponents, the post-scarcity United States was a land of full production and employment, high wages, and cheap consumer goods. But not everyone was content with this “Golden Age of Capitalism,” as one prominent historian has described the period.1 Among the discontent were two science fiction writers, Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin, who destroyed the United States in their fiction in order to rehabilitate scarcity. Dick’s and Le Guin’s visions of scarcity are both critiques of abundance and utopian gestures. They are utopian not because they are hopelessly idealistic, as a common definition of utopia would have it, but because they insist that the age of abundance is a false utopia, and that another, better world is still possible.