Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination

by Moylan,Tom; Moylan,Tom

• ISBN13: 9780415966146
• ISBN10: 0415966140
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2003-09-17
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

With essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, Dark Horizons focuses on the development of critical dystopia in science fiction at the end of the twentieth century. In these narratives of places more terrible than even the reality produced by the neo-conservative backlash of the 1980s and the neoliberal hegemony of the 1990s, utopian horizons stubbornly anticipate a different and more just world. The top-notch team of contributors explores this development in a variety of ways: by looking at questions of form, politics, the politics of form, and the form of politics. In a broader context, the essays connect their textual and theoretical analyses with historical developments such as September 11th, the rise and downturn of the global economy, and the growth of anti-capitalist movements.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Permissions	xi
Introduction. Dystopia and Histories	1	(12)
RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI AND TOM MOYLAN
1. Utopia in Dark Times: Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia	13	(16)
RUTH LEVITAS AND LUCY SARGISSON
2. Genre Blending and the Critical Dystopia	29	(18)
JANE DONAWERTH
3. The Writing of Utopia and the Feminist Critical Dystopia: Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast Series	47	(22)
ILDNEY CAVALCANTI
4. Cyberpunk and Dystopia: Pat Cadigan's Networks	69	(22)
DAVID SEED
5. Posthuman Bodies and Agency in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis	91	(22)
NAOMI JACOBS
6. "A useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past": Memory and Historical Reconciliation in Ursula K. Le Gum's The Telling	113	(22)
RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI
7. "The moment is here ... and it's important": State, Agency, and Dystopia in Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica and Ursula K. Le Gum's The Telling	135	(20)
TOM MOYLAN
8. Unmasking the Real? Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Films	155	(12)
PETER FITTING
9. Where the Prospective Horizon Is Omitted: Naturalism and Dystopia in Fight Club and Ghost Dog	167	(20)
PHILLIP E. WEGNER
10. Theses on Dystopia 2001	187	(16)
DARKO SUVIN
11. Concrete Dystopia: Slavery and Its Others	203	(22)
MARIA VARSAM
12. The Problem of the "Flawed Utopia": A Note on the Costs of Eutopia	225	(8)
LYMAN TOWER SARGENT
Conclusion. Critical Dystopia and Possibilities	233	(18)
RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI AND TOM MOYLAN
Notes on Contributors	251	(4)
Index	255