This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Polar Journal on 18 Dec 2013 available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ doi/pdf/10.1080/2154896X.2013. 854599

Yesterday’s Tomorrows and Tomorrow’s Yesterdays: Utopian

Literary Visions of Antarctic Futures

Elizabeth Leane*

School of Humanities / Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of

Tasmania, Hobart

This article surveys utopian visions of Antarctica’s future

offered by literary texts in English. The ‘metaphorics of

opposition’ associated with Antarctica’s South Polar location

has made it a popular site for literary utopias for centuries.

Since the time-displaced utopia (or euchronia) began to

flourish in the late nineteenth century, numerous literary

speculations on the future of the continent have appeared. The

article points out emergent patterns and repeated motifs

within this subgenre. In early temporal utopias, Antarctica

provides welcome space for imperial expansion and resource

1

exploitation. In the dystopian post-apocalyptic fiction that

burgeoned after the Second World War, its icescape functions

as both a possible threat and a place of refuge. The continent

can be a source of hope in recent near-future fiction,

although usually in an ambiguous manner. Literary visions of a

future Antarctica inevitably extrapolate problems and

opportunities evident in their authors’ own times. They

provide an estranged, denaturalized, and hence potentially

clearer perspectives on current issues: the present looks

different seen as tomorrow’s yesterday.

Key words: future, Antarctica, literature, utopia, dystopia

*Email: elizabeth.leane@utas.edu.au

2

Yesterday’s Tomorrows and Tomorrow’s Yesterdays: Utopian

Futures in Antarctic Literature

Utopias are traditionally set in a place other than the

author’s own: a ‘no place’ that is, nonetheless, normally

fixed in space and time. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) is located

on an unknown island somewhere in the New World, removed by

space alone from the author’s society. More’s work was partly

a response to the “unprecedented expansion of geographical

horizons” occurring in his day1 – the same ongoing expansion

that generated increased curiosity about the hypothesized Terra

Australis Incognita. Human encounter with the Antarctic regions and

the emergence of the utopian literary genre are in this sense

products of the same historical impulse. Of course, it is a

mistake to identify the imaginary southern continent with an

‘early version’ of either Australia or Antarctica; depending

on the cartographer, it covered territory now occupied by

both, and a lot more besides. However, over the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, this Great Southern Land became the

site of numerous utopian narratives2 that continued to

1 Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” 4.2 See Fausett, Writing the New World.

3

influence cultural perceptions of both places when their

separate geographical identities were established. Early

utopias took advantage not only of the blankness and

remoteness of the hypothesized continent, but also its

antipodean, ‘upside-down’ position.

In 1770, not long before polar circumnavigation led by

James Cook, the first literary ‘euchronia’ – a term describing

a vision of a better society in another time (usually the

future) rather than another place – was published, in French.3

The euchronia had much in common with the spatial utopia: “the

‘nowheres,’ the spatial counterworlds of traditional utopias,

can also be read as potential visions for the future. Indeed,

they always contain unrealities of all sorts whose critical

programs of contrast may be calls for changing, reforming, or

revolutionizing one’s own world.”4 The temporal utopia,

however, differed from its spatial equivalent in a way that

reflected Enlightenment confidence in progress and reason: a

society that is the future of one’s own suggests the

possibility of its achievement through human effort.5 In

English, the temporal utopia was belated: it took root only in

3 Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” 10.4 Koselleck, Conceptual History, 88.5 Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” 9.

4

the later nineteenth century, spurred on by Edward Bellamy’s

bestseller Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888). At a time when

British novelist H. Rider Haggard feared for future romance

writers, bereft of “safe and secret place[s]” on Earth in

which to set their fantastic tales, the euchronia was in the

ascendant.6

Antarctica was anomalously positioned in regard to these

developments in the utopian genre. At the turn of the

twentieth century, it represented a temporary answer to

Haggard’s fears, a largely unknown region still available to

the romance novelist. Despite the incursions of explorers, it

continued to offer itself as a viable site for the spatial

utopia when other continents had been all but imaginatively

exhausted. Antarctica’s attractiveness as utopian setting was

self-evidently dependent on its spatial qualities: its

isolation, its mysteriousness, its icy ‘barrier,’ and its

oppositional location. Temporal utopias in Antarctica made

less sense at this point, because there was no human society

there that could be extrapolated into the future. Before

depicting any future, writers had first either to imagine a

native civilization or a colonization process (or both),

6 Qtd in Bratlinger, Rule of Darkness, 239.

5

scenarios that lent themselves more readily to the spatial

utopia. However, with the burgeoning of the negative utopia,

or dystopia, in the twentieth century, new roles for the

continent in fiction became available.

Complicating this relationship is the fact that even

spatial utopias set in Antarctica often have a strong temporal

dimension. The metaphorical connotations of the ice as a

preserving medium inform many pre-twentieth-century utopian

narratives that borrow from or merge with the ‘lost race’

genre, in which a visitor encounters a society that has

anachronistically preserved the qualities of an earlier time.7

These stretch from rediscoveries of the ancient lost places of

mythology or pseudoscience (such as Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu),

through romantic (and often highly racist) narratives of

‘primitive’ tribes, to nostalgic visions of a particular

idealized period, including classical Rome and Greece, and

Tudor England. In the period since the ‘Heroic Era,’ the

narrative weight of early exploration accounts seems to have

drawn literary representations of the continent – even those

set in the future – back towards this particular version of

its past. Science fiction writer Brenda Clough’s Revise the World

7 See Leane, Antarctica in Fiction, ch. 6.

6

(2009), for example, centres on a temporally transported

Captain Oates who is confronted by a utopian civilization in

the mid-twenty-first century. In Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief

History of the Dead (2006), the last person left alive on Earth

repeats the winter journey to Cape Crozier first undertaken by

Robert F. Scott’s Terra Nova expeditioners. David Graham’s Down

to a Sunless Sea (1979) sees a planeload of people in desperate

flight from global nuclear devastation piloted to the relative

safety of Antarctica by a “Captain Scott.” Even while the

continent frequently acts as a ‘clean slate’ on which to build

a new future for humanity, utopian narratives constantly hark

back to its past, actual or invented. The most sophisticated

Antarctic literary utopias, such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur”

(1982) – a feminist alternative exploration history – and Mat

Johnson’s Pym (2010) (discussed below), thematize the

continent’s relationship with history.8 The future’s version of

the past is as important as the past’s visions of the future

in understanding the possibilities, eutopian and dystopian,

that emerge from humanity’s encounter with Antarctica.

The field of utopian literary studies has paid little

attention to the Antarctic. A brief glance at reference tools

8 See Glasberg, ch. 2, for an extended discussion of “Sur” in this context.

7

such as the Modern Languages Association (MLA) database or the

online records of the journal Utopian Studies confirms that, in

contrast with other continents, Antarctica as a utopian locale

is critically neglected. Lacking an indigenous population and

a long history of settlement, the southernmost continent is

unlikely ever to loom very large within studies of the utopian

genre. However, given the prominence of utopianism in

representations of Antarctica (both literary and otherwise),

the topic needs more attention than it has received to date.

This article provides a literary-historical context for

understanding the projection of utopian visions of

Antarctica’s future. I identify and analyse some noteworthy

texts, pointing out emergent patterns and repeated motifs.

Given the space available here, my discussion is intended to

be indicative rather than exhaustive. I examine only texts

available in English, most of them novels, and then only a

small selection of the large body of relevant works.

Like any discussion of utopias, mine is faced with an

initial problem of definition. A large amount of recent

scholarship has been devoted to this problem, with the term

“utopia” assigned meanings ranging from the broad – “the

8

expression of the desire for a better way of being”9 – to the

specific – “A nonexistent society described in considerable

detail and normally located in time and space.”10 In his

introduction to the subject, Lyman Sargent divides utopianism

into three categories, the “literary utopia, utopian practice,

and utopian social theory”11 – all of which are potentially

relevant to Antarctica. The subset that constitutes my focus

here – the literary utopia – is itself plagued by definitional

difficulties, not least the confusion (evident in More’s

original pun on the ‘no place’ and the ‘good place’) between

the utopia as simply an imagined society and the utopia as an

improved or better society (scholarship has moved away from

the notion of utopia as an ‘ideal’ society). This is

complicated by the often pejorative use in everyday speech of

‘utopian’ as meaning ‘unrealistic’ or ‘unachievable’. For this

reason, scholars such as Sargent adopt the term (from More)

‘eutopia’ to refer to the ‘positive utopia’ – the better

society – leaving ‘utopia’ as an umbrella term encompassing

the eutopia and its opposite, the dystopia or negative utopia,

as well as the utopian satire and the anti-utopia (a

9 Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 8.10 Sargent, “Utopian Traditions,” 15.11 Sargent, Utopianism, 5.

9

“criticism of utopianism or of some particular eutopia”12). All

can be spatial, temporal, or both (in practice, the specific

term ‘euchronia’ is sparingly used). This is the approach I

have followed here. In addition, the term “critical utopia,”

coined to refer to both positive and negative utopias that are

conscious of their own flaws and self-reflexive in their

consideration of the utopian project itself,13 has come into

the discourse as a useful way of describing more recent

literary utopias.

If the MLA database and Utopian Studies are a good

indication, Arctic literary utopias are just as neglected as

Antarctic ones. There are sound reasons for studying these

subgenres together as “polar utopias” – or even, as Naomi

Jacobs does in an article on women’s utopian writing,14 to

consider both as part of a larger category of utopias set in

snow or ice landscapes. Fredric Jameson, one of the key

contemporary theorists of utopianism, has (in an analysis of

Ursula Le Guin’s novel set on an ice planet, The Left Hand of

Darkness15) offered a way of considering the function of cold and

12 Sargent, “Utopian Traditions,” 15.13 Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 10–11.14 Jacobs, “The Frozen Landscape,” 190.15 This utopia has its own Antarctic connections, as discussed in Le Guin’s essay “Heroes.”

10

ice in a utopian context. If heat, he suggests (pointing

particularly to the novels of J. G. Ballard), suggests “a kind

of dissolution of the body into the outside world, a loss of

that clean separation from clothes and external objects that

gives you your autonomy and allows you to move about freely,”

then cold weather “must be understood, first and foremost … as

rather a symbolic affirmation of the autonomy of the organism,

and a fantasy realization of some virtually total

disengagement of the body from its environment or eco-

system.”16 This could be a suggestive starting point. However,

ice is not the only – or even the key – defining

characteristic of Antarctica as a utopian setting. Prior to

the twentieth century, when novelists exploited theories that

(due to factors such as the Earth’s oblate spheroidal shape)

the extreme polar regions were comparatively warm, ice usually

features only as an initial barrier to a hidden temperate

land. Relatively few utopias are set in an unchanged icy

Antarctica. Similarly, the continent’s remote polar location

does not fully explain the way it has functioned historically

in the genre.

16 Jameson, “World Reduction in Le Guin,” 221.

11

There are, then, equally good reasons for separating

Arctic and Antarctic utopias, as I do here. Antarctica’s

conceptual coming-into-being as a southern landmass that the

ancient Greeks believed was required to balance the northern

one they knew is a well-rehearsed (if contestable17) narrative.

Equally common is the observation that the Antarctic was

defined, both etymologically and conceptually, in opposition

to the Arctic. As with most binary oppositions, the pairs are

hierarchical, one primary and positive, the other

supplementary and negative. There was some initial hesitation

as to which pole was which in this schema. In On the Heavens

Aristotle refers to the southern celestial pole (invisible to

the Greeks but logically necessary in a spherical cosmos) as

‘the one on top.’ However, in his Meteorologica, where he speaks

of the terrestrial poles, it is the North Pole that is ‘the

upper one’; the South Pole is ‘the other one, the southern.’18

Chinese compasses were initially south- rather than north-

oriented, and some early maps, such as those in the Arabic

tradition, put the south at the top. However, the north-

oriented perspective of Ptolemy’s Geographia – a treatise from

17 See Stallard, “Antipodes to Terra Australis.”18 On the Heavens 285b8ff; Meteorologica 362a32ff; I’m grateful to classicist Dirk Couprie for his advice on these points; the translations are his.

12

the second century A.D. – was the dominant influence when

European exploration and cartography burgeoned during the

Renaissance. The South Pole was not only ‘other’ to the North,

it was cosmographically and geographically below it.

The metaphorical resonances of the South Pole’s position

at the ‘bottom’ of the world have been exploited for

millennia. Writing over two thousand years ago, the Roman poet

Virgil in his Georgics equates the South Celestial Pole with the

underworld: “One pole is always high above us, while the other

deep below our feet sees dark Styx and the spirits of the

dead.”19 Pointing to a series of similarly negative

associations, scholar of the occult Joscelyn Godwin concludes,

“The mythology surrounding the North Pole has tended to be

positive: it is always the Arctic that is imagined as the

location of the endless springtime and the cradle of noble

races. The Antarctic, on the other hand, is negative: it

evokes tales of gloom and destruction, and is populated by

primordial horrors, or else by their recent representatives,

the Nazis.”20

19 Virgil, Georgics, 1.242–3. The translation used here is from Leadbetter, “The Roman South,” 47.20 Godwin, Arktos, 134.

13

Godwin’s summary is a little sweeping: in practice, both

eutopias and dystopias are set in the Arctic and the

Antarctic. Moreover, as Eric Wilson has outlined in The Spiritual

History of Ice, early literature and mythology of the South Polar

regions demonstrates its own binary opposition: while some

classical geographers projected “their deepest fears” upon the

unknown south, representing it as the abode of “the antihuman,

the monstrous,” others “projected onto the southern void

fantasies of paradise or visions of the sublime.”21 As I have

argued in Antarctica in Fiction, these opposing visions find their

modern counterparts in the Gothic and the eutopian modes. More

relevant here than the hellish connotations of Antarctica’s

location ‘underneath’ the world are those of opposition,

negation and contradiction. David Fausett in Writing the New World

describes the way in which early modern texts used landscape

and geographical position as governing tropes: “tropical

abundance might be a metaphor for wealth, or equatorial

uniformity for egalitarianism; an antipodean ‘world-upside-

down’ might signify a revolution in moral values, and so

forth.”22 The metaphorics of opposition associated with Terra

21 Wilson, Spiritual History, 145–6.22 Fausett, Writing the New World, 7.

14

Australis, and later Antarctica,23 was constantly utilized by

utopian writers, sometimes very literally, for eutopian,

dystopian, anti-utopian and satirical purposes.

Expansion and Exploitation

The earliest literary visions of Antarctica’s future came from

geographical margins rather than centres. The first

distinctively Antarctic theatrical production, a melodrama

entitled The South Polar Expedition, performed in Hobart in 1841 to

celebrate the return of the Antarctic expedition led by James

Clark Ross, ends with the allegorical figure of Britannia

prophesying the future crumbing of the British Empire. When

this inevitability occurs, she speculates, ‘perhaps Tasmania

that proud flag [i.e. the Union Jack] shall rear / And shine

the Britain of this hemisphere.’24 The presence of Antarctica

promised a geopolitical inversion: a new southern continent

put the penal colony of Tasmania (officially then Van Diemen’s

Land) comparatively in the north, symbolically rendering it a

potential occupier rather than an outpost of empire. 23 For a discussion of nineteenth-century Antarctic spatial utopias, see Leane, “Romancing the Pole.”24 Qtd in Hobart Town Advertiser 7 May 1841, 2. The play text has been lost but the epilogue is reproduced in this newspaper article.

15

A fantastic realisation of this vision of southern

dominance is offered in another Australian performance, Australis;

or, the City of Zero (1900). With the action set in the year 2000,

Australis is possibly the earliest Antarctic euchronia. The

spectacular production, described by one critic as “the

greatest Australian pantomime of all,”25 was staged in Sydney

to celebrate the federation of Australia, but also reflects

the renewed interest in Antarctic exploration at the time.

Following a catastrophic war during which only Australia and

Antarctica have been left unaffected, the ‘King’ of Australia

(a former trade-unionist) sets his sights on the south,

announcing “We’re thinking of extending our territory and the

South Pole is about the only place left to annex nowadays.”

Although the Antarctic is already inhabited by a previously

unknown people, annexation is accomplished relatively

painlessly: “We’re getting cramped for room!” the invaders

explain, “… So we’re going to expand. The North is full up, so

we’ve come South. We propose to take in the South Pole as

well. Will you join?” The Antarcticans accede, Australia

establishes its capital on the South Pole and a “Great Empire

25 Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, 192.

16

of the South” is formed.26 As this summary suggests, the

pantomime is tongue-in-cheek and satirical in tone. However,

its concluding imperialist vision perhaps speaks as much to

sentiment as to satire. Reading the pantomime within the

context of Australian politics and theatre, Josephine Fantasia

argues that it presents “Australian nationalism as synonymous

with British imperialism”27 – a conflation that characterized

actual exploration and symbolic possession of Antarctica by

Australians in the early twentieth century.

When not the explicit subject of imperial desire,

Antarctica is still a source of resources in early temporal

utopias. Anno Dominis 2000: Or, Woman’s Destiny (1899), by Julius Vogel

(a former Prime Minister of New Zealand), takes place in an

early twenty-first century world where many positions of power

are held by women. The narrative includes a visit to Stewart

Island (just south of New Zealand’s south island), where seal-

skins and ivory from Antarctica are brought in to exchange at

market. The “Antarctic Esquimaux” who offer the goods are a

“docile, peaceful, intelligent” people covered in short curly

hair. “[E]vidently of the same origin as the Kanaka race,”

26 Epinasse and Williamson, Australis, 17, 69.27 Fantasia, “J. C. Williamson’s Vision,” 90.

17

they inhabit a temperate region close to the Pole. They make

regular journeys to Stewart Island with their goods, where

they are “showered” with presents and well treated by the

traders.28 While Vogel’s novel is firmly set in a progressive

future, where female leadership is the norm, poverty has been

eliminated by a state welfare system, and the British House of

Lords has been dissolved because its members were ashamed to

have inherited their positions, his peopled Antarctica is just

as firmly located in the imperial past, albeit in idealized

form. An uninhabited Antarctica may have presented to

contemporary explorers a seemingly utopian ‘clean’ space for

imperial adventure, but a continent without native people was

evidently beyond the literary imagination – or perhaps it

simply offered too little in the way of narrative incident.

An exception is Russian Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov’s

short story “Republic of the Southern Cross,” published in

Russian in 1905 and translated into English in 1918.

Constructed as a newspaper report, Bryusov’s dystopian

narrative is set in an unspecified future period, forty years

after an Antarctic state has been established to take

advantage of a thriving steel industry; the continent produces

28 Vogel, Anno Domini, 36–7.

18

over seventy per cent of the world’s metals. Home to fifty

million people living in domed cities connected by electric

railways, Antarctica is now a monotonous tundra, its animals

long since destroyed. The narrative focus is the Republic’s

“chief city” situated “at the actual Pole itself.” Here,

workers in an ostensible “extreme democracy” pay for their

comforts and pleasures by submitting to “pure autocratic

tyranny” that controls their every freedom.29 The inherent

tensions of this political system become physically manifest

in the disease of “contradiction,” which leads those infected

to do and say the exact opposite of what they intend, with

initially comical but eventually devastating consequences.30

While Bryusov’s South Polar setting is clearly deployed

symbolically, taking advantage of the metaphorics of

opposition, the “Republic of the Southern Cross” is perhaps the

earliest dystopia in which the continent has been ecologically

devastated due to the plundering of its resources.

The pulp science fiction magazines that thrived in the

United States in the 1920s and ’30s coincided with a period of

renewed American activity in Antarctica (most prominently the

29 Bryusov, “Republic,” 66–7.30 See Manning, “Unreality,” 358–9 for a detailed version of this convincinginterpretation of Bryusov’s story.

19

expeditions led by Richard Byrd), producing a stream of short

stories set in the continent. Many of these display the

technological optimism typical of the genre at this time. I.

R. Nathanson’s “The Antarctic Transformation,” which appeared

in Amazing Stories in 1931, is a good example. The editor

introduces readers to the story by speculating that, given the

current aviation activities in the area, “the Polar Regions

may soon become accessible to enterprising engineers and

mechanics of the present age, who may find vast natural

resources which might with their aid, assume great industrial

proportions.”31 The story imagines a terraforming scenario in

which a geologist harnesses the hot water of underground

geysers to produce a “balmy … almost tropical” landscape, in

which a new eutopian civilization springs up: “Green fields

and growing things greeted the eye, where formerly was ice and

desolation. Cities, villages, industries covered the land

connected by numerous broad highways … the uncovered folds of

the earth revealed incalculable stores of valuable materials

of all kinds, waiting for the touch of man’s hand.”32 H. P.

Lovecraft’s better-known tale At the Mountains of Madness,

31 Nathanson, “The Antarctic Transformation,” 721.32 Ibid., 729.

20

serialized a few years later (1936) in Astounding Stories, can be

read as a nightmarish warning against this kind of hubristic

vision.

In the later twentieth century, the environmental

movement framed Antarctica not as a landscape to be conquered

and transformed, but a wilderness to be protected and

preserved; the action-thriller and then the eco-thriller

became the dominant genres in which to explore resource

exploitation and corporate greed in the continent, while the

technological eutopia was replaced by the ‘cli-fi’33 dystopia

and by post-apocalyptic fiction.

Post-Apocalyptic Antarctica

Not long before Scott and his companions set out for the Pole

in late 1911, the meteorologist George Simpson wrote a short

far-future dystopia for the expedition magazine, The South Polar

Times. The narrative – framed as a manuscript found by alien

visitors – tells of a world in which an Elixir of Life,

producible only in the Antarctic due to the need for low

33 Punning on the ‘sci-fi’ with which it often overlaps, cli-fi is short for‘climate fiction.’

21

temperatures, has created a society in which both the birth-

rate and death-rate are zero. However, an inability to

recognize the climate variation revealed in the records of the

expedition and predicted by its physiographer (Griffith

Taylor) results in worldwide catastrophe when global

temperatures rise; the narrative is written by the last

human.34

In Simpson’s early Antarctic climate change dystopia the

continent acts as both humanity’s salvation and its ruin, a

pattern that pre-empts its role in twentieth-century utopian

fiction – as threat and refuge in an Earth devastated by

nuclear, biological or ecological catastrophe. Antarctica’s

melting and cracking ice shelves are often the source and

signal of future catastrophe, initially in non-anthropogenic

scenarios. An early example is J. M Walsh’s short story “When

the Earth Tilted” (1932), published in the Wonder Stories: a

close encounter with a comet makes a slight change in the

Earth’s obliquity, resulting in melting icecaps, flooded

cities and radically changed landscapes. Antarctica, a “green

and smiling country” in this otherwise dystopian future, is 34 Writer Tony White has recently published a novel, Shackleton’s Man Goes South (2013), commissioned by the Science Museum in London, which explores the implications of Simpson’s story, drawing on interviews with contemporary climate scientists.

22

viewed as “a land from which, perhaps, the salvation of the

remnant of mankind might come.”35 Its colonization is

complicated by the discovery of inhabitants – descendants of

the lost continent of Mu, who have been in suspended animation

in pyramids under the ice. Conflict over priority ensues,

until the Mu-ians find an innovative if temporary solution by

transporting themselves ten years into the future.

The flip side of Antarctica’s future threat, as this

story suggests, is its role as a possible or actual safe haven

within dystopia, or even a eutopian space where humanity can

build society anew after a cleansing apocalypse. This notion

ties back to early twentieth-century discourses of purity and

racial vigour. As Bill Manhire observes, “Antarctica is often

seen as the safe, clean, uncorrupted place where you can start

again.”36 Manhire’s example is Beall Cunningham’s The Wide White

Page, “a very bad novel … full of what seem to be fascist

sympathies.”37 The author marshals well-established discourses

in which whiteness, purity, and masculinity are all associated

with the continent’s ice and its invigorating climate.

35 Walsh, “When the Earth Tilted,” 1343–44.36 Manhire, Introduction, 20.37 Ibid., 19–20. Manhire points out that the author is very likely to have been Dorothy Beall Cunningham, making The Wide White Page one of the earliest English-language Antarctic novels written by a woman.

23

Published in 1936, but set after “the second great war of the

twentieth century,” the narrative sees an exiled European

royal lead the establishment of a new colony in Antarctica,

where he hopes the invigorating climate will combat the

flabbiness and slackness created by mass unemployment: “Things

have gone too far there. We must find a new world. We have

exhausted this one … We must go to the clean ends of the

earth. … We must colonise, we must settle, we must go South to

live.”38 For this coloniser, “the great blank of the Polar

continent” is a “wide white page upon which he would write a

new civilization.” His Antarctic “winter-sports stations” and

“sanatoria”39 echo suggestions made by actual expedition

leaders: Douglas Mawson predicted that “sanatoria, ice sports

and sight seeing should some day draw a summer visiting

population.”40

More often, in twentieth-century fiction, humanity does

not choose to start anew in Antarctica but is rather forced

there by the apocalyptic destruction of the rest of the world.

An early example is Van Tassel Sutphen’s The Doomsman (1906):

after an unspecified global Terror (presumably an epidemic of

38 Cunningham, Wide White Page, 15; original emphasis.39 Ibid., 183.40 Mawson, “Commercial Resources,” 216.

24

some form) only the rich and powerful manage to escape by

sailing southwards, the rest of humanity suffering a “relapse

into barbarism.”41 By the time the Antarctic Republican Navy

reaches New York in 2015, they are unsure if the land they

encounter is even inhabited. The opposite scenario occurs in

John Calvin Batchelor’s sprawling magic realist novel The Birth of

the People’s Republic of Antarctica (1983), set in the fifty or so years

after its publication: war, plague, and religious and

political fanaticism force vast numbers of fleeing boatpeople

further and further south. They are eventually contained in

refugee camps on the South Shetland Islands, beset by disease,

marauding pirates, the hostile environment, and a newly active

chain of volcanoes. At the novel’s anti-utopian conclusion,

the “perfect egalitarian state” of its title – an “icebound

Eden” – arrives only to cease almost immediately as the

refugees die or are relocated, leaving the imprisoned narrator

its sole remaining occupant.42 In Graham’s dystopian thriller

Down to a Sunless Sea (1979), refugees from a catastrophic nuclear

war successfully reach the haven of McMurdo Station after a

41 Sutphen, The Doomsman, 16.42 Batchelor, Birth of the People’s Republic, 391.

25

hazardous plane flight, only to succumb to radiation poisoning

as fallout eventually encroaches on them.

Even in texts in which all humanity will inevitably be

destroyed, then, the Antarctic is held out as a final

frontier. “I don’t know if there’s anybody in Antarctica,”

muses a submarine commander awaiting the inevitable arrival of

deadly radiation in Nevil Shute’s post-nuclear classic On the

Beach (1957): “If so, they might go on for quite a while.”43

Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead – a gender-inverted version

of the ‘last man’ genre – is set alternatively in a dystopian

Earth and an ambiguously utopian afterlife. When a

deliberately orchestrated global epidemic hits, a woman at an

Antarctic base, Laura Byrd, becomes the sole human left on

Earth. Set some time in the mid-twenty-first century, the

narrative nonetheless returns to the Heroic Era: ‘alone’ in

the continent like her namesake, Laura finds herself tracing

out the sledging route to Cape Crozier made famous by Apsley

Cherry-Garrard, the ‘worst journey in the world’ transformed

into the last journey in the world.

With the continent framed by environmental discourse as

the ‘last wilderness,’ the infection of Antarctica, literal or

43 Shute, On the Beach, 114.

26

symbolic, is a sure sign that humanity is doomed in post-

apocalyptic fiction. In The Brief History, the Coca-Cola corporation

has purchased the continent to produce a safe source of water

after a series of health scares that the company eagerly

exploits. This symbolic corporate sullying of the ‘last

wilderness’ signals a future disastrously dominated by global

economic interests and prepares the reader for the action to

come, in which the whole of humanity, including the heroine,

eventually perishes from a disease spread through bottles of

Coke. The temporary hope attached to Antarctica in this and

other post-apocalyptic narratives is premised on its perceived

exceptionality – its ability to hold out as the last pure

place, isolated from the problems that pervade the rest of the

globalized world. If Antarctica falls, all is lost.

Post-apocalyptic Antarctic futures sometimes take

advantage of the metaphorics of opposition identified earlier.

Prolific British science fiction writer Edmund Cooper’s The Last

Continent (1969) attempts to defamiliarize racial politics by

inverting existing power relations and stereotypes. The novel

is set over two millennia in the future, long after a racial

war has devastated the Earth, leaving a remnant of the white

27

population on its only inhabitable continent, a now-tropical

Antarctica. They are the descendants of the inhabitants of an

Antarctic station (the not-so-subtly named ‘New Atlantis’),

now regressed to tribal living. Black people have escaped to

Mars, where they have built a technologically sophisticated

and strongly separatist society. In a doubly inverted

colonization scenario, interest in Antarctica’s mineral

resources brings the Martians back to Earth, although they are

unsure whether they should interfere with the white ‘natives,’

whom they have been taught to believe are inherently

aggressive. In the end, political and racial tensions are

effectively resolved by the individual union of a female

Martian psychologist and an Antarctic tribesman. Any headway

the novel makes in estranging the reader from familiar

assumptions about race through its inverted hierarchy of black

coloniser and white ‘noble savage’ comes at the expense of its

gender politics: in scenes seemingly designed to titillate the

reader, the Martian woman succumbs to the Earthling’s virile

savagery and pared-down masculinity.

Also centrally concerned with race and the utopian

possibility of inversion, but written in a very different

28

literary register, is Mat Johnson’s Pym (2010). Johnson’s novel

– at times highly amusing but politically serious – is a

postmodern reply to the Antarctic fictional tradition, and in

particular Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal Antarctic novel The

Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). In Poe’s novel, the

protagonist suffers a series of terrifying maritime adventures

that culminate in his encounter with the Antarctic island of

Tsalal, where not only the inhabitants but also the animals

and landscape are black. However, when Pym travels further

south, this nightmarish (for him) experience is replaced by a

final vision of a colossal white form rising from an immense

polar cataract. Pym’s narrative is both an ironic template and

diegetic motivation for Johnson’s novel.

Set in a near future that becomes distinct from the

present only midway through the action, Pym follows the

increasingly intertextual adventures of Chris Jaynes, a black

literature professor who begins the narrative by failing to

achieve tenure at his white-dominated university. A Poe

specialist, Jaynes sees the eutopian possibility in Poe’s

horrific Tsalal: for him, the all-black island signifies the

wish “to be in the majority within a nation you could call

29

your own … for the complete power of that state behind you.”44

Discovering a slave narrative that seems to confirm the truth

of Poe’s tale, Jaynes gathers a group of companions and heads

to the ice. “Ain’t nothing for black folks down there in the

cold,” protests his long-suffering friend Garth. “White people

don’t own the ice … ” replies Jaynes, “I’m pretty sure they

didn’t even invent it.”45

Once living in the ice, however, Jaynes and his crew are

enslaved by a giant white humanoid race, identified as the

source of the white figure that concludes Poe’s novel (but

also reminiscent of the earlier Antarctic spatial utopia

Symzonia [1820], by ‘Adam Seaborn’). Living with them is the

aging Arthur Pym, preserved by his copious consumption of an

alcoholic elixir. Meanwhile, it appears that a worldwide

apocalypse is occurring back home. Eventually, in an ongoing

parody of Poe’s novel, Jaynes finds himself heading north from

the Ross Sea in a canoe with Garth and Pym. The tale ends with

an inversion of Poe’s concluding vision of whiteness, which

may or may not be the fabled island: “On the shore all I could

discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course,

44 Johnson, Pym, 30.45 Ibid., 58.

30

is a planet on which such are the majority.”46 What for Jaynes

is a sign of eutopian hope finally kills off Pym, fictional

representative of Antarctic whiteness.

Johnson nicely satirizes the notion of the Antarctic safe

haven in Pym: prior to their canoe escape, Jaynes and Garth

find themselves in a biodome maintained by a wealthy right-

wing American painter, Thomas Karvel, whose refuge is the

ultimate simulacrum, designed in the style of one of his

sentimentalized, colour-saturated but racially homogenous

paintings. The painter explains that, sick of state

interference in the U.S., he has created his own utopian space

of freedom: “Had to come down here to do it too. As blank as

the morning snow. A clean canvas. A place with no violence and

no disease, no poverty and no crime. No taxes or building

codes. This is a place without history. A place without stain.

No yesterday, only tomorrow.”47 For Karvel, Antarctica

represents a lack of history that makes room for pure future.

For Jaynes, it is a metaphor for the denial of a racist past:

“Whiteness isn’t about being something, it is about being no

thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with

46 Ibid., 322.47 Ibid., 241.

31

layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering

our tent, whipping away all traces of our existence from this

pristine landscape.”48

Guarded Hope

Not all recent future visions of Antarctica are contingent on

worldwide devastation; some are even hopeful, although usually

in an ambiguous, guarded manner. French novelist Marie

Darrieussecq’s novel White (2003; 2005 in English) takes place

in a near future (the dust-jacket, more precise than the

narrative, puts it at 2015) in which the first manned mission

to Mars is taking place. The appropriately named Edmée Blanco,

a radio communications expert, joins the personnel of the

‘White Project’ – the construction of a European Antarctic

station, about 15 kilometres from the South Pole. Seeking

distance from a psychological trauma, and unable to join the

Mars mission, Edmée is faced with Antarctica or the tropics.

Choosing the Pole to avoid the “monstrous” “creepy-crawlies”

of the Amazon, and attracted by the idea of everything “nice

48 Ibid., 225.

32

and clean and chilled,”49 Edmée seems to confirm in her

decision Jameson’s notion of the ice landscape as symbolic of

bodily autonomy. While her experience does not necessarily

bear this out, she does achieve a degree of emotional

detachment: “It is as if Edmée has managed to empty herself

out. That beneath the zucchetto of her skull, a toxin-free

brain is turning in time with the continent. That, maybe, she

has found what she was looking for here: emptiness at the end

of the world.”50

In order to construct the Pole as empty, however,

Darrieussecq must white out its history of American

colonization; although Edmée has previously been living in

Houston, there is barely any mention of U.S. stations in her

narrative. The ‘Heroic Era’ of exploration, by contrast, is

everywhere present: the action is narrated by a group of

ghostly expeditioners in a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness

style. And all Edmée finds when visiting the empty icescape of

the Pole itself is a still-ticking watch lost by Birdie Bowers

a hundred years earlier; time at the Pole loses all meaning.

After a power failure, the station is evacuated, its global

49 Darrieussecq, White, 30.50 Ibid., 60.

33

eutopian and dystopian potential thwarted, at least

temporally: “in the ancient ice, they will not discover the

antivirus to save humanity or the bacteria that could have

wiped it out.”51 However, Edmée has found personal peace and

renewal through a relationship with another traumatized

expeditioner. Antarctica is here utopian in a negative and

personal sense, as an idealized place of escape and recovery,

much as it functions in travel memoirs such as Jenni Diski’s

Skating to Antarctica (1997).

A relationship to which Darrieussecq alludes – between

Antarctic inhabitation and interplanetary colonization –

becomes explicit in several science fiction novels of the

1990s. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992–96), the

first Martian settlers train in the Dry Valleys due to the

environmental similarities; while Mars is being terraformed,

on Earth mining interests are “chipping away” the “idealistic”

Antarctic Treaty; at the end of the second book, the West

Antarctic ice sheet collapses.52 Brian Aldiss’s White Mars

(1999), in part a reply to Robinson, opens with a mid-twenty-

first-century diplomat opposing Martian terraforming and

51 Ibid., 140.52 Robinson, Red Mars, 298, 445; Green Mars, 697.

34

advocating that the planet “be preserved, as the Antarctic has

been preserved for many years, as a place of wonder and

meditation, a symbol of our future guardianship of the entire

solar system.”53 While the future Earth suffers from the usual

set of dystopian problems – global warming, scarce resources,

massive corporate corruption – the Antarctic has evidently

escaped. Its model is the precondition for the construction of

a much-debated utopia society on Mars in the novel. A note

written by Aldiss himself provides extra-textual confirmation

that “Mars must … be treated as a ‘planet for science’, much

as the Antarctic has been preserved – at least to a great

extent – as an unspoilt white wilderness”;54 an appendix to the

novel, written by a (non-fictional) legal scholar, sets out a

charter for Martian settlement based on the Antarctic Treaty.

While there is debate among the novel’s utopianists about the

form that Martian science should assume, the ongoing success

of the ATS is taken as a given – its already eutopian nature

is assumed.

Robinson’s Antarctica (1997) – an example of the critical

utopia – also points to the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) as a

53 Aldiss, White Mars, 9–10.54 Ibid., 323.

35

site of possible hope, but is far more self-reflexive in its

exploration of this idea, and more willing to see the

continent as an integrated part of the globe subject to the

same problems that beset other places. Set in a near future

only just distinguishable from the author’s present, the novel

initially establishes an image of a dystopian Earth plagued by

the familiar litany of problems: population explosion, global

warming, environmental destruction, with (in the U.S.)

political stalemate preventing any progress in dealing with

these problems. Antarctica is no exception: its ice is

diminishing, the Ross Ice Shelf has entirely calved away, and

the ATS is threatened by the combined resource interests of

U.S. corporations and developing nations. Adventure-tourism

treks not only follow in the footsteps of ‘Heroic Era’

journeys but also ‘re-enact’ literary utopias, such as Le

Guin’s “Sur,” channelling utopian energies into non-

threatening leisure experiences.55

However, Antarctica’s inability to remain outside the

global system is not, as it is in so many dystopias, a prelude55 Robinson’s fictional version of near-future Antarctic tourism reflects historical trends: utopian theorist Ruth Levitas has noted the way that contemporary utopianism “has retreated into the private sphere,” taking theform of diet and exercise programmes which aim at perfection of the body; home or garden makeovers; and holidays. Levitas, “Imaginary Reconstitution,” 54.

36

to world destruction. The main action of the novel, in which

an eco-terrorist group comes into conflict with a mining site,

a tourism trek and a ‘feral’ community secretly living in

biodomes in the ice, is also a working towards a cautiously

eutopian conclusion. Competing groups come together to draw up

a series of recommendations, some of them provocative:56 the

Treaty should be renegotiated and renewed; Antarctica should

be declared a “world site of scientific interest”;

“demonstrably safe” resource extraction should be allowed, as

should settlement, subject to research on carrying capacity

and environmental restrictions; “co-operative, non-

exploitative economic models” should be given special

attention; all interactions should be peaceful. The list ends

with a statement in which Antarctica’s utopian potential is

contingent on its unexceptionality: “What is true in Antarctic

is true everywhere else.”

Antarctica has attracted more critical attention than most

other Antarctic utopias. While lauding Robinson’s novel for

its attempt to reconcile Marxist and environmental

perspectives, Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould identify “non-human

life” as a “key aporia” in the novel’s politics, pointing to

56 Robinson, Antarctica, 535–9.

37

the author’s tendency to set his “utopian experiments” in

settings that are – or seem to be – emptied of plants and

animals. They also question Robinson’s “techno-optimism,”

which “often suggests that science is based on values that

will allow us not merely to resolve problem of scarcity

through technological solutions, but also, if embraced, to

transform social relations.”57 While the novel inevitably has

blind spots, and its expository and didactic tendencies no

doubt frustrate some readers, it is nonetheless the most

ambitious attempt in fiction to work through the dystopian and

eutopian possibilities that Antarctica represents.

Conclusion

There are evident patterns in this (albeit selective) survey

of Antarctic fictional future. One is a strong focus on the

continent’s ecological and biological futures: the physical

impact on the continent of warming temperatures, the spread of

epidemics, the movement of radioactive dust. Less evident are

attempts to extrapolate (and hence interrogate) Antarctica’s

recent human history, particularly its embeddedness in

57 Vint and Bould, “Dead Penguins,” 257, 258, 264.

38

national and international geopolitics, although Robinson’s

Antarctica is an important exception. Critically well-received

literary representations of Antarctica such as Brockmeier’s The

Brief History of the Dead and Darrieussecq’s White seem intent on

collapsing the near future into the heroic past, and the

interim – including the whole ATS period – largely drops out

of sight. There is only one yesterday in these tomorrows, and

it occurred in the early twentieth century.

The point of this survey is not, of course, to evaluate

supposed predictions. Rather, literary visions of Antarctica’s

future, in suggesting potential developments of current (or

past) society, are worthy of our attention because they offer

an estranged, denaturalized, and hence potentially clearer

perspective on that society. Antarctica’s present looks

different seen as tomorrow’s yesterday.

References

Aldiss, Brian, with Roger Penrose. White Mars, or, The Mind Set Free: A

21st-Century Utopia. London: Little, Brown, 1999.

39

Batchelor, John Calvin. The Birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica. New

York: Dial, 1983.

Bratlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,

1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

Brockmeier, Kevin. The Brief History of the Dead. London: John Murray,

2006.

Bryusov, Valery. “The Republic of the Southern Cross.” 1905.

In The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica, ed. Bill Manhire, 65–

86. Wellington: U of Victoria P, 2004.

Clough, Brenda. Revise the World. Book View Café, 2009 (e-book).

Cooper, Edmund. The Last Continent. London: Hodder and Stoughton,

1970.

Darrieussecq, Marie. White. 2003. Trans. Ian Monk. London:

Faber, 2005.

40

Diski, Jenny. Skating to Antarctica. London: Granta, 1998.

Epinasse, Bernard, and J. C. Williamson. Australis; or the City of Zero.

Souvenir programme. Sydney: J, Andrew, 1900.

Fantasia, Josephine. “J. C. Williamson’s Vision for Australia:

Australis; or the City of Zero (1900).” Australasian Drama Studies 23 (Oct.

1993): 82-91.

Fausett, David. Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the

Great Southern Land. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1993.

Glasberg, Elena. Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of

Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2012.

Graham, David. Down to a Sunless Sea. 1979. London: Heywood, 1989.

Godwin, Joscelyn. Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi

Survival. Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited, 1996.

41

Jacobs, Naomi. “The Frozen Landscape in Women’s Utopian and

Science Fiction.” In Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of

Difference, ed. Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten, 190-

202. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1994.

Jameson, Fredric. “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence

of Utopian Narrative.” Science Fiction Studies 2.3 (Nov. 1975): 221–

30.

Johnson, Mat. Pym: A Novel. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010.

Koselleck, Reinhart. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History,

Spacing Concepts. Trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others. Stanford:

Stanford UP, 2002.

Leadbetter, Bill. “The Roman South.” In European Perceptions of

Terra Australis, ed. Anne M. Scott, Alfred Hiatt, Claire

McIlroy and Christopher Wortham, 45–60. Farnham, Surrey, and

Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.

42

Leane, Elizabeth. Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far

South. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.

Leane, Elizabeth. “Romancing the Pole: A Survey of Nineteenth-

Century Antarctic Utopias.” ACH: The Journal of the History of Culture in

Australia, 23 (2004): 147–71.

Le Guin, Ursula. “Heroes.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts

on Words, Women, Places, 171–5. New York: Grove, 1989.

Le Guin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness. 1969. London: Orbit-

Little, Brown, 1992.

Le Guin, Ursula. “Sur.” 1982. In The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine

Antarctica, ed. Bill Manhire, 90–109. Wellington: U of Victoria

P, 2004.

Levitas, Ruth. “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society:

Utopia as Method.” In Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social

Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, 47-68. Bern:

Peter Lang, 2007.

43

Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP,

1990.

Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness. 1936. New York: Modern

Library, 2005.

Manhire, Bill. Introduction. The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine

Antarctica, 9–28. Wellington: U of Victoria P, 2004

Manning, Clarence Augustus. “Unreality in Russian Literature.”

Sewanee Review 29.3 (1921): 351–9.

Mawson, Douglas. “The Commercial Resources of Antarctica.” In

The Adelie Blizzard: Mawson’s Forgotten Newspaper 1913, ed. Archie McLean

and Douglas Mawson, 213–16. Adelaide, SA: Friends of the State

Library of South Australia, 2010.

Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian

Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986.

44

Nathanson, I. R. “The Antarctic Transformation.” Amazing Stories

(Nov. 1931): 720–29.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 1838.

New York: Penguin 1999.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Antarctica. London: Voyager-HarperCollins,

1998.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Green Mars. London: HarperCollins, 1996.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Red Mars. London: HarperCollins, 1993.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 2010.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Utopian Traditions: Themes and

Variation.” In Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World,

ed. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent, 8-

17. Oxford: Oxford UP; New York: New York Public Library,

2000.

45

Seaborn, Adam. Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery. 1820. Gainsville, FL:

Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965.

Simpson, George. “Fragments of Manuscript Found by the People

of Sirius when they Visitied the Earth during the Exploration

of the Solar System.” South Polar Times. Vol. 3.2. London: Smith,

Elder, 1914. 75–8.

Shute, Nevil. On the Beach. 1957. London: Pan-Heinemann, 1966.

The South Polar Expedition. Perf. Royal Victoria Theatre, Hobart,

Australia. 3 May 1841.

Stallard, Avan Judd. “Antipodes to Terra Australis.” PhD

Dissertation. University of Queensland, 2010.

Sutphen, Van Tassel. The Doomsman, New York and London: Harper

& Brothers, 1906.

46

Vieira, Fátima. “The Concept of Utopia.” In The Cambridge

Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys, 3-27. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2010.

Vint, Sherryl, and Mark Bould. “Dead Penguins in Immigrant

Pilchard Scandal: Telling Stories about ‘the Environment’ in

Antarctica.” In Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays,

ed. William Burling. 257–73. Jefferson, NC, and London:

McFarland, 2009.

Vogel, Julius. Anno Domini 200; or, Woman’s Destiny. London:

Hutchinson, 1889.

Walsh, J. M. “When the Earth Tilted.” Wonder Stories 3.12 (1932):

1343-1351.

White, Tony. Shackleton’s Man Goes South. London: Science Museum,

2013 (e-book).

Williams, Margaret. Australia on the Popular Stage: 1829-1929. Melbourne:

Oxford UP, 1983.

47

Wilson, Eric G. The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the

Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

48