Dark horizons : science fiction and the dystopian imagination
About: This article is published in Utopian Studies.The article was published on 2003-01-01. It has received 160 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Dystopia.
Citations
More filters
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that constructivists committed to reflexivity should be students of the future and that both conventional and critical approaches do not sufficiently engage with the problem of future uncertainty in the process of identity formation and neglect its behavioural implications.
Abstract: This article argues that constructivists committed to reflexivity should be students of the future. It notes that both conventional and critical approaches do not sufficiently engage with the problem of future uncertainty in the process of identity formation and neglect its behavioural implications. Against this backdrop, the article regrounds constructivism in a temporal ontology and the argument that humans, in the face of contingency, seek to establish visions of a meaningful future. It discusses how visions, as utopias and/or dystopias, define possibilities of being and thereby provide actors with a sense of direction, and it differentiates between “robust” and “creative” visions to highlight two ways in which such possibilities are manifested. In doing so, the article encourages constructivists to become more attentive in identifying the visions which enable and bind creative agents in the process of realization.
64 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an Italian trained in the United States (specializing in American modernism) in the 1980s, my reading of science fiction has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography.
Abstract: It is widely accepted todaythat, whenever we receive or produce culture, we do so from a certain position and that such location influences how we theorize about and read the world. Because I am an Italian trained in the United States (specializing in American modernism) in the 1980s, my reading of science fiction has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography. It is a hybrid approach, combining these circumstances primarily with an interest in feminist theory and in writing by women. From the very beginning I have foregrounded issues of genre writing as they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. Such an approach, however, must also come to terms with the political and cultural circumstances that characterize this turn of the century.
61 citations
[...]
TL;DR: The city is a spatial translation of the rights that govern the collective and the individual as discussed by the authors. But is it truly random? Isn't it actually the result of strong local, historical and technological constraints?
Abstract: Cities grow like some sort of plant. Some of them, including some very beautiful ones like the medina of the Maghreb, seem to have been stuck together randomly like great corals. But is it truly random? Isn’t it actually the result of strong local, historical and technological constraints? On the other hand, Greek and Roman cities were designed with rigid plans. Though the overall shape and the road and waterway networks were tightly constrained, each unit had considerable freedom, allowing the city to accommodate the unexpected and adapt itself to new things. Naples, for instance, formerly known as Neapolis - the “new city” - has kept its antique grid pattern. How can structure be given without causing rigidity? The city is a spatial translation of the rights that govern the collective and the individual. Berlin is a contemporary example of this dialectic.
57 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine aspects related to the dystopic consumption and production of the musical and performance art form known as black metal and 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 they present as a dystopian consumption model.
Abstract: 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...
42 citations
Cites background from "Dark horizons : science fiction and..."
...Some may wonder why authors and directors create a world that is ‘‘a [place] worse than [one] we live in’’ (Moylan & Baccolini, 2003: 1)....
[...]
22 Feb 2018
TL;DR: Kreider as discussed by the authors investigates the ways in which language, writing, and textuality participate in building the planet of the Mars Trilogy, treating writing as a coefficient of terraforming.
Abstract: In 2013, The New Yorker Magazine called Kim Stanley Robinson ‘one of the greatest living science-fiction writers’. And in 2008, Time Magazine named him a ‘hero of the environment.’1 Yet, no lengthy study has yet been attempted on any of his fiction. This thesis aims to redress this absence with a long-form reading of one of the high peaks of his achievement: the Mars Trilogy. It considers that what I am calling the ‘planetext’ (or planet-text) is a vital narrative space. It assumes the perspectival form in which the Trilogy is told is crucial to understanding how its planetexts are read. The several viewpoints in the Trilogy comprise the several attempts of this thesis toward understanding not only how the planet is used in the novels, but also how it arranges and functions according to textual principles of readability. My several readings adopt the scientific bases of each of these viewpoints, and develops a sense of the way different characters experience the planet around them as either enabled by science, or confounded by it. ‘Planetext’ is therefore a useful neologism for interpreting how such a vast and multidimensional site as Mars is, or is not, encountered through these sciences. Understanding the planetext of Mars is therefore a phenomenological task, with the requirement of reading how each character is able, or unable, to experience and comprehend their experiences. A sense of the phenomenologies of Mars means this thesis must take the approach of seeing how different sciences yield different phenomenologies, and different experiences of the planet. By calling Mars a planetext, this thesis investigates the ways in which language, writing, and textuality participate in building the planet of the Trilogy, treating writing as a coefficient of terraforming. Understood as a kind of planetography, or planetary writing, the planetext (or host of planetexts) foregrounds the written-ness of the Martian space in Robinson’s Trilogy. The planetextual space of the novels shapes a variety of readerly paths through the narrative, which are in turn adopted. As a long study, this thesis understands the planet as a sizeable arena, which challenges the view any one reading can give of it. Acknowledging this as a limitation, its four chapters focus only on four characters, aiming to supplement an overview style of reading the Trilogy with a series of close 1 Tim Kreider, ‘Our Greatest Living Novelist?’ December 12, 2013. The New Yorker Magazine. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/our-greatest-politicalnovelist; Oliver Morton, ‘Kim Stanley Robinson: Heroes of the Environment 2008,’ Wednesday September 24, 2008. Time Magazine. http://content.time.com/ time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1841778_1841779_1841803,00.html
32 citations