In a 2004 essay for the New Left Review, theorist and literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote: “Utopias are non-fictional, even though they are also non-existent. Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being.”
Today's episode of The Break Down explores the idea and the power of utopian fiction with guest Kim Stanley Robinson, the acclaimed science fiction author whose most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, offers a harrowing and detailed vision of how we might respond to the climate crisis.
Among other things, Adrienne and Stan discuss the politics of science and technology; the place of speculative fiction in an era dominated by nostalgia and the importance of utopia at a time when our political imaginations are so constrained.
Like The Ministry for the Future itself, this episode is dedicated to the late Fredric Jameson.
Further Reading: Science fiction
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, Harper and Row, 1974.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, Orbit Books, 2020.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Spectra, 1992.
Further Reading: On and by Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson, "The Politics of Utopia", New Left Review, 2004, vol. 25.
Fredric Jameson, "Fredric Jameson on Why Socialists Need Utopias", Jacobin, 2023.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Cornell University Press, 1991.
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?, Zero Books, 2009.
