Description
Book SynopsisAfter the end, the world will be un-American. This speculation forms the nucleus of
Un-American Dreams, a study of US apocalyptic science fiction and the cultural politics of disimagined community in the short century of American superpower, 1945
–2001. Between the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which helped to transform the United States into a superpower and initiated the Cold War, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which spelled the Cold War’s second death and inaugurated the War on Terror, apocalyptic science fiction returned again and again to the scene of America’s negation. During the American Century, to imagine yourself as American and as a participant in a shared national culture meant disimagining the most powerful nation on the planet.
Un-American Dreams illuminates how George R. Stewart, Philip K. Dick, George A. Romero, Octavia Butler, and Roland Emmerich represented the impossibility of reforming American society and used figures of the end of the world as speculative pretexts to imagine the utopian possibilities of an un-American world. The American Century was simultaneously a closure of the path to utopia and an escape route into apocalyptic science fiction, the underground into which figures of an alternative future could be smuggled.
Trade Review‘The tone throughout ties together the impressive mix of genre theory, cultural interpretation, political commentary, intellectual history, and biography. It balances critical theory with interpretation and argument in the exegesis of its five central texts/ideological formations. It is a pleasure to think with and a delight to read. Un-American Dreams is worth reading for those interested in the complex workings of hope for and deferral of radical alternatives to the present state of things. It is a coherent and cohesive project that presents deep research on its material from solid footing in a critical tradition. For these reasons and more, it is worth thinking with Ramírez about how to resuscitate hope the hard way, through an immanent critique of hope’s shadowy form in apocalyptic sf of the American century.’ Brent Ryan Bellamy, Science Fiction Studies
Table of ContentsPrefaceThe Dreams in Which I’m Dying
IntroductionThe Uses of Pseudo-Apocalypse
Chapter 1The Last American:
Earth Abides, Speculative Anthropology, and Settler Utopianism
Chapter 2The Revelation of Philip K. Dick
Chapter 3National Insecurity in
Night of the Living DeadChapter 4How to Bring Your Kids Up Alien: Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy
Chapter 5Waiting for the Martians:
Independence Day and the Second American Century
ConclusionPseudo-Apocalypse after the American Century
