Description
Book SynopsisDystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the given historical situation by way of imaginary societies which are even worse than those that lie outside their authors'' and readers'' doors.In Scraps of the Untainted Sky , Tom Moylan offers a thorough investigation of the history and aesthetics of dystopia. To situate his study, Moylan sets out the methodological paradigm that developed within the interdisciplinary fields of scie
Table of ContentsPermissions , Preface , Science Fiction and Utopia , Dangerous Visions , Absent Paradigms , Daring to Dream , Dystopia , New Maps of Hell , The Dystopian Turn , The Critical Dystopia , Dystopian Maneuvers , Kim Stanley Robinson’s Other California , Octavia Butler’s Parables , Marge Piercy’s Tale of Hope , Horizons , Film and Video
