Cognitve (re)mapping: Superseding Utopian and Dystopian Space in Notes from a Coma

I suggest in this essay that affiliated cultural work can be found in the residual corners of the Western imaginary, such as Ireland, especially as Irish culture and politics has confronted the onslaught of disciplinary neoliberalism and xenophobic fascism in a series of rapid turns in the last two decades. From within a diverse project of tracking and tracing Irish science fictionality, I turn my attention to Mike McCormac´s Notes from a Coma (2005). Clearly a work of sf, but one contesting the Irish literary heritage and Irish society as well as the boundaries of utopian form, the book is not so much a utopian novel as much as it is a fictive meditation on the reality and the process of the utopian impulse

FICÇÃO DISTÓPICA, ESPERANÇA UTÓPICA: UMA ENTREVISTA COM RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI E TOM MOYLAN

An interview translated into Portuguese by Thayrone Ibsen (revised by Felipe Benicio) with Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini about current trends in dystopian literature today

Architecture and utopia, 2015

No abstract available

Entre realismo y ciencia-ficción

This paper aims to analyse the novel Mañana, las ratas by German-Peruvian writer José Bernardo Adolph. Written in 1977 and published in 1984 the text is a dystopian novel set in a distant future, that nevertheless is a vivid representation of the dynamics and the conflicts of the Peruvian society of the 70s and 80s. This study intends to investigate the structure of the novel in order to point out how the author succeeds in blending together two different literary genres such as dystopian fiction and realism, creating a new version of the classic paradigm of dystopic narrative. To do so, the research will concentrate on the study of some significant example of the Adolph's previous books, and on the intertextual connections of Mañana, las ratas with both classic dystopian novels such as 1984, We or Brand New World and writers such as José Diez-Canseco, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Alfredo Bryce Echenique y Mario Vargas Llosa, whose texts explore through different mode of realism social and political issues of their time

Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination

nuova edizione, corretta, ampliata e arricchita di una sezione, a cura di R.Baccolini, sulla discussione del testo originale. Il volume \ue8 stato peer-reviewe

Further reflections on being a utopian in these times

In this essay (a revision of my contribution at the closing session of the Imaginaries of the Future Leverhulme Network held in London in September 2017), I offer a situated commentary (by ‘me’) on ‘ourselves’ (and I know that category has to be deconstructed, complicated, exploded, erased, and yet retained) as utopians and on the work ‘we’ do, and can do (for this was a utopian conference). I begin with a reflection on the current mobilization of the term dystopia as a signifier for our times, and as I do so I offer a counterpoint to the ideological appropriation of dystopia by way of my own argument in Scraps of the Untainted Sky (Westview 2000) for the militant pessimism of the critical dystopia. I then comment on several interrelated matters: the role of the utopian as scholar and as intellectual; the context and import of our work, in the academy and in the world; the utopian problematic (in its inclusion of the utopian object of study and utopia as method); and the necessity, indeed urgency, of ‘our’ work in these critical times. My aim is tease out the utopian surplus within the utopian formatio

The necessity of hope in dystopian times: A critical reflection

n the face of the dire conditions of today’s global order, for those aiming to transform this reality in the spirit of a just, equal, and ecologically healthy existence for all of humanity and nature, it is time for the political exercise of the transformative utopian impulse. Yet, in the face of such utopian praxis, capitalism’s retrieval mechanism “subsumes and consumes” (Mark Fisher) the radical potential of utopianism. A key component of this apparatus can be seen in the contemporary upsurge of “dystopian” expression (especially in literature, film, and television). While this indulgent cooptation flourishes on the dark side of the neoliberal street, a concomitant enclosure of “eutopian” sensibility further restricts utopia’s anticipatory impulse by managed innovations that shrink this energy into a resigned “dystopian” structure of feeling as the radical utopian project itself is compromised through practices of disciplined improvement within the declared “realism” of the existing order. In this essay (writing as a utopian, and especially a teacher, and in the spirt of collegial utopian discourse), I discuss two symptomatic texts which I argue are imbricated within this dystopian ambience by way of a critique that enables me to examine such works as they play out within this current sociocultural order. On one hand, and with great respect for its internationally-recognized author, I read the text of Dystopia: A Natural History, by Gregory Claeys, as a (however unintended) component of this hegemonic structure of feeling rather than a challenge to it. On the other hand, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Dystopia Now” as a negation of that negation, as the sf author and public intellectual takes up an anti-anti-utopian stance that refuses the containment field of a “seemingly omnipresent reality principle” that informs today’s “fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism” and reasserts the radical utopian project (Robinson)