Year of manufacture: 2005
By Fredric Jameson
Genre: Literary criticism, literary criticism
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 1-84467-033-3
Format: PDF
Number of Pages: 448
Language: English

The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness — alien life and alien worlds — and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson's essential essays, including "The Desire Called Utopia", conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today. Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson's project on the Poetics of Social Forms.

PART ONE THE DESIRE CALLED UTOPIA. CHAPTERS
Introduction: Utopia Now XI
Varieties of the Utopian
2 The Utopian Enclave 10
3 Morus: The Generic Window 22
4 Utopian Science versus Utopian Ideology 42
5 The Great Schism 57
6 How to Fulfill a Wish 72
7 The Barrier of Time 85
8 The Unknowability Thesis 107
9 The Alien Body 119
10 Utopia and its Antinomies 142
11 Synthesis, Irony, Neutralization and the Moment of Truth 170
12 Journey into Fear 182
13 The Future as Disruption 211
PART TWO AS FAR AS THOUGHT CAN REACH. ESSAYS
1. Fourier; or; Ontology and Utopia 237
2 Generic Discontinuities in SF: Brian Aldiss' Starship 254
3 World Reduction in Le Guin 267
4 Progress versus Utopia, or; Can We Imagine the Future? 281
5 Science Fiction as a Spatial Genre: Vonda Mcintyre's «The Exile Waiting» 296
6 The Space of Science Fiction: Narrative in Van Vogt 3 14
7 Longevity as Class Struggle 328
8 Philip K. Dick, in Memoriam 345
9 After Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr Bloodmoney 349
10 History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick 363
11 I Fear and Loathing in Globalization 384
12 "If I Can Find One Good City, I Will Spare the Man": Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. 393
Acknowledgments 417
Index 419

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