Deconstructing Utopia in Science Fiction: Irony and the Resituation of the Subject in Iain M. Banks's the Player of Games

Summary Utopian formulations, in some form or another, formed the basis of science fiction (SF) at its inception and can be said to still lie at the root of most SF texts. Nevertheless, as Cad Freedman (2000: 62) points out, "today the dominant Anglo-American colloquial meaning of the word is mildly pejorative: to describe an idea or plan as utopian usually connotes that it is naive and wildly impractical, though perhaps well-intended". Such views of the function of utopia seem to suggest that utopian forms have become redundant and unproductive, a perception that also extends to SF. Whether it envisages the creation of an ideal or forewarns of the apocalyptic, the utopian is teleological; therefore the subject (both the individual and the subject matter)in the utopian narrative has no choice but to be what has already been decided for it to be. However, I wish to argue that through SF's ironic deployment of utopia's fixation with ends, the subject (matter) is liberated. Irony offers a both--and kind of logic that transgresses the bounds of predetermined definitions, allowing room for the suspension of choice so that the subject may continually interrogate the possibilities of its own existence. The process of interrogation describes a deconstructive trajectory in which the text evades termination, so as to discern a difference between utopia and SF. This article considers the notion that there are, indeed, certain SF texts that consciously perform this difference, of which lain M. Banks's The Player of Games (1996) is an example. References to this text will demonstrate that, in a coincidental gesture, irony both preserves the utopian fixation with ends and abolishes it, presenting utopia as a site of deconstruction in which the genre can continually interrogate the possibilities of its existence.