Negative Utopia

Fanfiction
Title:	Negative Utopia
Author(s):	prufrock's love
Date(s):	posted to alt.tv.x-files.creative in four parts on May 17, 2000
Length:
Genre(s):	het, MSR, Post-Colonization
Fandom(s):	The X-Files
Relationship(s):
External Links:	online here
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Negative Utopia is an X-Files story by prufrock's love.

SN 1572 is the author's reworking of this story.

Reactions and Reviews

2000

Read this folks. It's dark. It's angsty. It's incredibly wonderful. This one's a keeper.

Since the author does not want feedback, I'll just post a huge REC ... Go run and read this on Ephemeral .. a fabulous post-colonization piece ......

Leave the poor guy/girl alone! By mysterious, be totally visible, whatever! This is the 'net! If Prufrock is really Stephen King, then so be it! I would request that Negative Utopia be translated to big screen.... :)

This story is *extremely* dark and angsty, but I dig post-colonization fics so this one sucked me in. While I'm notorious for being the "wimp" of the group when it comes to reading fanfic, this one walked that fine line between "just angsty enough" and "too angsty to finish" quite well.

2001

Another reread...This was the first fic I read by pru, and the angst almost killed me. I'm still here today though, and am (arguably) a better person for having read it. <g>

2009

For real angst, nothing beats a post-colonization story by prufrock's love. This is almost certainly her darkest post-col. "Negative Utopia" is a novel, it's MSR, everybody/other, and NC-17, so underage readers turn back now. This story is not for the faint of heart.

I read or at least skimmed this one, and it's a beaut, though kind of...hard...to...process. (Go for the ellipses, right Wendy?) I look forward to reading it again, though it will take time.

So I just read Arizona Highways for the first time and was in a funk because I thought I have read the best fic ever and that anything else would pale in comparison. (And yes that is the best fic ever but Negative Utopia does not pale in comparison.) First [Negative Utopia] is a delight to read because it is well written. That is a huge consideration in fan fiction. I don't really know why I liked this story I almost gave it a miss because I don't like post colonization and I don't like M/O, S/O stories. But I am so glad I read it.

Now this might seem odd but I will start with the things that I did not like as much. In the end Mulder is a little waffly and I can understand that it is in character but it was a little too much for me. I kind of wanted to say make up your mind and stop thinking about it. For the most part I find the characters very well represented especially Scully. And I can buy that Mulder wanted to marry Scully and that she is the only woman he wanted to marry I can't quite believe that he wanted to adopt lots of children with her. That just doesn't seem like Mulder to me. There was so much more to explore IMO with the Mulder/rape mention. I felt like it was stated and not followed up on too much and that is a pretty big side line to give us and then not deal with very much. I also did not like the Gibson part. I always liked him in the show and this story changed him into a dark perverse character that creeped me out. But again that was so in keeping with the tone of this fic, so I did not like it but it was well done.

As to what I liked OMG! So dark, so angsty! I love that when Scully is with Skinner it is because she thinks Mulder is feeling those sensations too and I love that she touches herself when she thinks he is in her mind. And Mulder's 'Ok touch yourself' in the end when he is remembering. It is almost funny and tragic that he is tuning into her to find out where she is and she thinks it is because he wants the pleasure. I also really love the whole mini story of the watch and the baby. So haunting and sad. (Although I wish the watch had been engraved and Scully knew for certain that it was his.) That part of the story could have carried on but it was beautiful and really filled out this whole desperate universe they are in. And Skinner's head. That is why I love fan fiction that would never work in the show or a movie but in this story in these circumstances it is right and believable. The author gets you to the right moment to accept that, an amazing accomplishment. That is why I read fan fic to get to those moments and I would reject and find them so well done that I buy into them.

I'm not sure I would call this 'dark'... more like 'blacker than CGB Spender's tar-stained soul'!

I think the story was extremely well executed as a very bleak but quite realistic vision of a world after the 'human harvest' described. I felt very convinced by the world-building, though I felt like the references to other dystopian novels were a bit heavy-handed- I don't really need an author to shove it down my throat that they've read Atwood and Orwell.

I also wasn't entirely convinced by Scully in this. Obviously she'd been traumatised by the events she'd been through, but the whole way through she felt... absent, just a bit too disconnected from the Scully I see in canon. I've found this with other fics by Prufrock's Love actually, which is a shame as I think her Mulder is rather better. It just felt like Scully was blankly observing her own life.

I also found the ending a bit odd- particularly when Scully had earlier been extolling on how difficult it was for people to get on living away from the colonies. The skills that Scully in particular has are conducive to living in a community, not in the middle of nowhere, but there was no indication that their holing up in the cabin was anything other than a permanent arrangement.

Overall it was a pretty difficult read just for the subject matter, and I did enjoy the story itself, but I felt pretty unsatisfied by the characterisation.

I agree this Scully does not seem like the Scully I know from the show or from other fics. I just took it as Scully transformed by the why the world is now. More interested in observing and not investing in what is going on. This could have been made more obvious though. When she is coming to terms with Mulder being with other women and she doesn't judge because it is what he had to do she could have remembered the professionally polished agent who was wildly jealous over any woman she thought Mulder might have an eye for, make the contrast in Before and After even more striking...

I agree that this is clearly a traumatised Scully, but she just seemed so blank at times that I just could not believe it. To draw a comparison that the author herself invites, Offred in The Handmaid's Tale suffers in an equally debasing and horrifying dystopian society, but retains her agency and an internal rebellion against her situation. We see that Gilead is awful in part because of what it does to this woman.

But in 'Negative Utopia' Scully barely seems to register that there is something wrong about this new world- she just acquiesces to it with barely any inward resistance, let alone outward, which I just cannot see Scully actually doing- particularly when it seemed clear to me that she does have the opportunity to wield at least a little social power as a community's doctor.

I've always waffled with how I felt about Prufrock's Love's fanfic. on the one hand, I loved 'Flesh and Blood'. on the other, I loathed 'Cycles'. 'Paracelsus was intriguing, but despite its initial charm and its decent writing, ultimately it felt like reading nothing more than a historical romance novel. I'd seen Negative Utopia rec’d elsewhere before and always opted out of reading it, figuring, how dark and sensitive to the subject matter could it be, written by someone who seemed to specialize in writing romance? as it turns out - it could be very, very dark and excellent. I don't quite know what to say about this fic. I love it. overall, I think it is sublime. but I also have a few big problems with it. as petite0red0head said, I felt like mulder's part was a bit wishy washy. I understood what an impossibly hard decision he was attempting to make, and that he would have been driven to the brink of insanity with uncertainty and mental torment, but I felt like his state of anguish would have been obvious even if the text hadn't actually put his thoughts into words a good twenty times: stay or go. I’m a terrible person. scully can't love me. stay or go. once or twice would have been plenty. unfortunately/fortunately, some of part three (mulder's part) contained some of my favorite examples of how one goes about establishing a scary-as-all-hell post apocalyptic world. THE DETAIL. OH MY GOD THE DETAIL. Pru is fearless and sensitive to every horrific little detail and I am in awe.

somehow in this particular fic the distance - the blankness - of scully seems fairly believable to me. It was her way of showing strength, being impassive - internally inflexible, but externally flexible to her circumstances. she does it in canon all the time. her simply 'observing' her own life did bother me though. it made sense to a point, that she would simply learn to subsist under the radar, and that her ability to subsist would prove her strength, but i feel like Pru took that a little too far. i wanted to see her kick some ass - really prove that the brutality of the world had toughened her up and that she had readied herself to do whatever she had to do in order to survive and get what she wanted when it was really important. this may be completely off the mark, but i've always associated the slightly vacant quality that sometimes slips into Pru's scully with the fact that Pru (from what gossip I’ve heard) writes genre romance, which doesn’t tend to put a ton of emphasis on the deep set fortitude of female attributes. The fact that even in scully's parts of the fic, the story seemed to revolve around what mulder was doing was an interesting dynamic, and it did play fairly well because the writing was so strong, but it diminished scully's character a bit, i felt.... It’s a testament to how much I ultimately liked this fic that all I could think for the last third was: ‘why end it now, Pru? Don’t you have another 500K that you could put into this gem?” I felt like she had just got the world they were living established to the best of her ability and I wanted her to write me an actual story that occurred in that world. I wanted to see how mulder and scully would preform not that they had begun to get their feet under them a little.

I agree, this helps convey just how bad the post-col existence really was. I haven't read "The Stand" but compared to "Negative Utopia," the denizens of Brave New World and A Handmaiden's Tale have it pretty easy. I think the novels are mentioned purposefully, as a point of comparison, for both the characters and the readers. Definitely, this story could have been longer. I would have happily read another 500k of her dark vision.

I think that Negative Utopia is one of the genuine milestones of our fanfiction. I'm no angst buff, so I didn't like it much. That's beside the point. It's not there to be liked.

Some of the difficulties have been touched on already: detached Scully, self-pitying Mulder. If you're familiar with Prufrock's Love's stuff, you know that she draws her characters like this repeatedly, and I've learned to be wary of a Mulder and Scully that I can't really glom onto successfully, that seem to be creating unhappinesses for themselves just for the sake of it. Pru is really into the bad stuff (as in The Wasteland). Me, not so much.

In Negative Utopia, however (and why not Dystopia? anyone?), the postapocolyptic scene pretty much justifies anything she can do to these people. It seems to me that when the whole world is warped almost beyond recognition, "character" is going to suffer like everything else. I believed in Scully and I believed in Mulder, although as someone noted, he does harp on his self-loathing to an exasperating extent. For someone who has gotten out of the habit of talking, he can't hardly shut up. Pretty good excuse for jabbery thought-balloons, I suppose.

Actually, Pru has here provided an almost-happy ending. If, that is, you can forget about starving babies in India. The version I'd read before was incomplete.

This is a brave, tough fic that follows the lightly proffered notions of canon to a hideous conclusion. I'm glad to have it and to have read it, though I probably won't again.

There are some minor nits. Mulder as a reluctant father is very touching, but worrying about Boy starving because Marita can't cook? Hey, this is a life-threatening situation, and cooking ain't brain surgery. It seems an oddly coded way of saying that Marita would drink and not bother to provide. Well, I said minor.

Slightly more major is--acknowledging that this is a super-talented and obviously sophisticated writer--how about some beta? I'm in the minority here, I'm pretty sure, but grammatical problems drive me up the wall. In particular, for God's sake learn to distinguish between the verbs "to lie" and "to lay" and their tenses. The lapses really stuck in my eye during the strongest and most touching scenes. I had never heard that Prufrock's Love wrote romances, but she *did* once allude to her educational degrees.

I've read some after-the-end fiction, being an sf buff (though not the Atwood). I'm not fond of it. I really don't know, judging by what we see around us, that the better angels of our nature would survive. So the horror and self-loathing in NU strikes me as honest.

Of course I forgive occasional lapses and typos, but there are persistent and recurring errors that indicate to me that, probably, no beta was involved. The lie/lay thing is a common mistake but no professional writer would get away with it and no educated individual has an excuse not to get it under control. This is writing, not talking. Sorry. I am immovable on this subject.

Okay, so no beta was involved and it bugs you. I'm not saying you are wrong. There isn't much to add on that point, then. All I am saying is I would rather have her unbetaed writing, with its annoying flaws, than not. I would prefer it had been betaed, but Oh Well. You are not alone, by the by. There are people who will not even read unbetaed fic on principle, period. Not even hers.

2014

"Negative Utopia" features colonization, with most of humanity being dead of disease, starvation, or murder. Humans are killed by their own kind and hunted down by the aliens. Women are murdered, turned into property, or become "whores." Skinner gets beheaded at Mulder's request, Gibson is raping a child who gets pregnant and dies in childbirth, Scully is having sex with Mulder because she is too afraid to refuse him. Marita has a child by Mulder, so he's been fucking with her, too. Strangely, after the apocalypse, no one remembers how to use birth control (now I'm mocking prufrock). Mulder has been helping the colonists, so he's a traitor to humanity. That litany of horrors is just off the top of my head.

Unknown Date

This was the first fic from this author that I read and I was fascinated by it. It had me open-mouthed through the entire story. I must say it is kinda dark and absolutely NC- 17. But it is amazing! Anything I've read by Prufrock is great (almost all his stories already), but Negative Utopia is one of my favorites...If you have a chance, check out the site and read them, another recommendation from this author is "Hiraeth" which is entirely different from Negative Utopia, but as captivating.