Utopian Thought in Modern Science Fiction
Researchers: Professor Edward James and Dr Farah Mendlesohn (Middlesex University)
The remit of this project is:
• to challenge the fallacy that it is no longer possible to write Utopias
• to introduce more writers into the increasingly narrow utopian canon
• to argue for the emergence of the post-modern, pluralistic utopia in defiance of the modernist tradition.
The book will focus on the emergence of the post-war utopia, which has been a marked feature of science-fiction writing since the 1940s despite the capitalist insistence that utopia is both unattainable by and inappropriate to the human condition. Most of these utopian writers have been ignored by the growing band of utopian scholars, largely because they have been regarded primarily as science fiction writers; some of these writers have been studied by utopian scholars, but cut off from their science fiction roots, and thus misinterpreted and misunderstood. Most utopian writing is now done within the genre of science fiction, and that has allowed an exploration of possible social and political arrangements that are far removed from the classic utopia of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Utopian Thought in Modern Science Fiction will not attempt to provide a thorough coverage of the scores of science fiction writers who have contributed to the utopian genre. It will offer studies (some 7000-8000 words long) of a dozen writers from USA and the UK who have made particular, and very different, additions to our perceptions of utopia. Those who have been chosen, provisionally, include four British writers (two of whom are Scottish), eight American writers, five women, two African Americans, two gay writers, one Quaker, and so on: offering a widely divergent set of modern approaches to utopia.
So far around half the chapters have been written; James has written chapters on Arthur C. Clarke, Mack Reynolds and Sheri S. Tepper. Completion awaits the appearance of utopia, or of sabbatical leave, whichever comes sooner.
