Breaking down the power of science fiction to grapple with our gravest political challenges.
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 explores the idea and the power of utopia with guest Kim Stanley Robinson, the acclaimed science fiction author whose most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, offers a harrowing, detailed and empowering 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 when political imagination feels so constrained.
Like The Ministry for the Future itself, this episode is dedicated to the late Fredric Jameson.
Kim Stanley Robinson is an acclaimed science fiction writer whose works include The Mars Trilogy and Ministry for the Future. Working within the utopian tradition, Robinson's writing engages with climate and ecological crisis, technology and politics, and has been influential both in defining contemporary science fiction and in shaping the thinking of policymakers and activists around the world.
Further Reading
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.
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.