There are a plethora of things I’ve watched, read, or played where the cast of characters were working towards a goal such as a utopia. But the thing ends when the character has done the last thing he/she/they need to do for that utopia to become a reality.
But we never see the utopia itself.
One example is Fallout 3…
Set in a nuclear wasteland with irradiated water and food. When you complete the game you’ve achieved the purification of the water supply, so the wasteland can begin to improve. But of course the game ends when you’ve done your bit
I can’t think of any other examples right now so maybe you can. Is there a valid literary reason for doing this to be a bad idea? or is it just a sort of laziness/unwillingness to spend too much? Unwillingness to invest the creativity required to create a/the utopia?
I remember a game of the original Civilization in which Id been quite liberal with nukes, winning the war but blighting the entire planet, with global warming turns virtually all landspace into low-production swampland. I had only one city that could support a settler (it was coastal and had access to fish) and that settler started out on the lonely business of clearing all the polluted squares, bringing global warming under control and allowing the recultivating of land.
The lesson being that conflict is fun, but cleaning up is not.
Veidt’s ultimate plan seems to be leading to the unification of all of the major countries in the world at the very end, although the possibility that Rorschach’s journal could be published and ruin it all still exists.
Because utopia is boring.
That’s why there are Great Tragedies, but no Great Happy Stories. Once the strife and pain and conflict are done with, “and they all lived happily ever after” suffices.
Have you not noticed how *annoying *happy, loving and ever-cooing couples are ?
EDIT : oh, forgot what I was going to say in the first place. Typical. Anyway :* Brave New World* starts with the utopia and, depending how you look at it, it lasts for the whole book.
