It was Fredric Jameson who remarked, in a line from the preface to The Seeds of Time that has since become proverbial (as well as anonymized and widely misattributed 1 ): “It seems to be easier for...

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Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood

This article examines aspects related to the dystopic consumption and production of the musical and performance art form known as black metal. Steeped in anti-Christian motifs, surrounded by a history of violence and brutal imagery, black metal is an extreme metal art form that has been growing steadily in popularity throughout Europe, South America, and the United States. We first examine black metal culture through the eyes of both artists and consumers, using mixed qualitative methodologies. Thereafter, we derive specific theoretical interpretations from the black metal subculture that are predicated on the emerging themes of signification, identity transformation, xenophobia, and a reconstructed mythology that all point to what we present as a dystopian consumption model. The model demonstrates how dystopia, in context, is at the heart of the symbiotic relationship between consumers and producers and is encapsulated by a specific set of processes and overarching conditions. Implications and relationsh...

Theoretical reflections on dystopian consumer culture: Black metal

This article examines the question of utopia and un/intention in relation to recent utopian theory and the changing socio‐historical conditions of utopianism. The notion of intentionality is rarely explicitly considered in utopian theory; however, it offers to shed new light on debates about the concept, form and function of utopia in late modernity. My principal argument is that intention has become increasingly irrelevant to theories of utopia. In the last 20 years, utopia has been reconceptualised as processual, critical, reflexive, open‐ended, and immanent. The utopics of heterogeneous spatialities have displaced temporal, future‐oriented utopianism; utopianism has been embedded in everyday life rather than displaced into formal representation; the possibilities of transformative, collective programmes for social change appear to have ceded to the free play of critique and desire. Insofar as intention implies a purposive orientation to action in the name of a predefined goal or object, it seems to hav...

No Intentions? Utopian Theory After the Future

This thesis analyses two British and two German technological dystopias published between the First and Second World Wars: Konrad Loele’s Zullinger und seine Zucht (1920), John Bernard’s The New Race of Devils (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Paul Gurk’s Tuzub 37 (1935). While there has been a considerable amount of scholarly research into interwar British dystopias, German texts have rarely been analysed; furthermore, dystopian studies have often focused on a small number of novels that were considered canonical and particularly influential. This thesis compares Huxley’s canonical Brave New World with Bernard’s less known The New Race of Devils and the two German texts, reading all of them from the standpoint of the early twentieth-century crisis of the traditional notion of humanism. Chapter 1 focuses on the two earlier novels and on their portrayal of the creation of ‘perfect’ workers and soldiers with the use of eugenics. Chapter 2 centres on the two later novels and on their depiction of a completely mechanized World State where citizens are mass produced and incapable of independent thought. The thesis shows that the four dystopias envision a radical change in the nature of men and women as a result of the mechanization of society, and concludes that they all speculate on the future of the human race once the traditional conceptualization of humanity has been destroyed by contemporary technology. Loele’s and Bernard’s texts introduce the idea of a partly artificial ‘eugenic liminal being’ who is difficult to fit into the established taxonomy of living beings. Huxley and Gurk highlight how the inhabitants of the technocracy will not be capable of meaningful action and traditional rebellion will become impossible. The four texts prove more radical than other contemporary technological dystopias and anticipate some of the most important issues of late twentieth-century posthumanism.

Changing humanity: a study of four dystopias at the dawn of the biotechnological age

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Heather Schell

Papers

Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (review)