Dark Horizons

Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination

Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini, Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317793540
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 2003. 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

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction Dystopia and Histories
• Chapter 1 Utopia in Dark Times Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia
• Chapter 2 Genre Blending and the Critical Dystopia
• Chapter 3 The Writing of Utopia and the Feminist Critical Dystopia Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast Series
• Chapter 4 Cyberpunk and Dystopia Pat Cadigan's Networks
• Chapter 5 Posthuman Bodies and Agency in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis
• Chapter 6 “A useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past” Memory and Historical Reconciliation in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Telling
• Chapter 7 “The moment is here … and it's important” State, Agency, and Dystopia in Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Telling
• Chapter 8 Unmasking the Real? Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Films
• Chapter 9 Where the Prospective Horizon Is Omitted Naturalism and Dystopia in Fight Club and Ghost Dog
• Chapter 10 Theses on Dystopia 2001
• Chapter 11 Concrete Dystopia Slavery and Its Others
• Chapter 12 The Problem of the “Flawed Utopia” A Note on the Costs of Eutopia
• Conclusion Critical Dystopia and Possibilities
• Notes on Contributors
• Index