Abstract
Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1954), one of the most representative science fiction texts
in the early Cold War, and Yukio Mishima’s A Beautiful Star (Utsukushii Hoshi) (1962), a rather
minor work written in response to the former, share a certain aesthetic ideology symptomatic of the
period: a strong skepticism towards utopia. Reading Clarke’s text and Mishima’s together, this essay
argues that their shared anti-utopianism is a product of “chastened” liberalism, which defines itself as
post- or anti- ideological as opposed to communism as the only ideology; and also that this ostensibly
non-ideological liberalism continues to confine our political imagination to the extent that, as Fredric
Jameson says, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
The argument first conceptualizes the Cold War anti-utopianism as a symptom of the cultural or
psychological logic of liberalism, which increasingly interpreted historical events within ahistorical,
psychological categories instead of socioeconomic ones. The hegemony of this culturalized liberalism
is manifested in such diverse discursive fields as cultural criticism, psychology and social psychology,
the third world discourse in the international relation, and SF.
In Childhood’s End, anti-utopianism appears as “a safe, liberal anti-colonialism” (Jameson);
for the novel represents Karellen’s utopia or interplanetary colony, which is clearly modelled after
British-Indian colonialism, as ultimately a dystopian one. However, the logic in which colonialism is
criticized in the novel, namely as a cultural and psychological intervention rather than a structural
exploitation, is in sync with the contemporary third world discourse, which functioned to legitimatize
liberal ideology by representing the US as the proper model for developing postcolonial nations.
In A Beautiful Star, utopianism is likewise ironized through the narrative structure. Utopianism
of the protagonist Juichiro, who believes himself to be an alien endowed with a mission of rescuing the
mankind, is ironized both by the fact that his alien-ness is nothing but fantasy and the fact that he and
his opponent indeed share a psychologized notion of history characteristic of the period despite their
apparent conflict. At the same time, however, Mishima’s text retains a notion of history irreducible to
such a psychologized and fatalistic one. That is, by using a place-name “Nanakita village” that no longer
exists due to the postwar annexation, and thus inscribing the community’s struggle for “Iriai (commons)”
in the form of an absence, Mishima’s text presents history as a site of conflict and therefore
open to a utopian possibility.
