Three types of Science Fiction: Raymond Williams

Three types of Science Fiction: Raymond Williams

There are three types of SF according to Raymond Williams. They are, Putropia, Doomsday, and Space Anthropology.

By Putropia he meant the characteristic 20th-century corruption of the Utopian romances. They describe stories of a secular paradise of the future.  Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Orwell's 1984 are the most famous examples.

Putropia, however, stops a little short of Doomsday. Doomsday is the immensely popular genre which, with considerable ingenuity and variety, disposes of life altogether. There are catastrophes which stop just short of this, and move into putropia.  Mr John Wyndham's Day of the Triffid’s is an example. Here, the great majority of human beings are struck suddenly blind, and the Triffids-locomotive stinging plants, sources of vegetable oil, developed by Russian scientists-take over. The sighted minority has to decide whether to try to save the blind masses, who, characteristically, have taken to drink and so on, or to abandon them, to regroup the few who can see, and start making a better society.

Putropia perhaps, is to be rationalized as a warning against combined science and war while the Doomsday is the familiar nightmare of mechanism; nobody does anything wrong, but we are finished all the same.

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