Finding Political Hope for the Hopeless in Contemporary Science Fiction

Since I learned to read in elementary school, reading has been my passion, my escape valve, my door to possible futures. Small wonder that in my fifties I turned to reading science fiction as my major genre. First as an avocation, then as pedagogical tool (I am a university professor of political theory and public policy), I came to see the worlds opened up by contemporary SF writers as means for broadening my own grasp of political and social alternatives and then enlarging my students’ wonder, imagination, and exploration of the politically possible through utopian and dystopian science fiction. Beginning in the 1970s, I found scores of guides to these possible futures from literary giants like Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Italo Calvino, P.D. James, Don DeLillo, Doris Lessing, and Jonathan Lethem to science fiction & fantasy figures like Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken MacLeod, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Marge Piercy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mary Doria Russell, Paolo Bacigalupi, Joanna Russ, Stephen Baxter, and Connie Willis (among many others). This interest bordering on devotion culminated in the publication of my politics and science fiction book, The Cross, the Plow and the Skyline: Contemporary Science Fiction and the Ecological Imagination (BrownWalker Press, 2001). It was my “fun” book that delighted in the examination of apocalyptic, pastoral, and urban themes in recent science fiction works that was grounded an ecological framework informed by twentieth-century critical theory. As this blog develops and unfolds, expect me to continue to work ecological and sustainability concepts and theories into my readings of newly and recently published science fiction works, as well as some now classic SF works from the late twentieth century that have passed the tests of time and reader popularity. I may even throw in a few more obscure or less well known SF novels that have caught my eye and prompted me to read them for deeper or more covert political implications for the future we are making and the future making us.