Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Tom Moylan is perhaps most famous as a literary critic of science fiction: his two most well-known collections of reviews were Demand the Impossible, published in 1986 and reissued in 2014 with a number of critical reactions appended, and Scraps of the Untainted Sky, originally published in 2000. At any rate, the topic with Becoming Utopian is utopia, utopia as an abstract notion, influenced by the writings of Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas, Fredric Jameson, and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Moylan's focus in these books is consistently upon the defamiliarization promoted by certain ideas of utopia, opening to the reader the possibility of conceiving different subject positions. As the preface to Scraps...