Saving Utopia

How utopian stories have preserved the vision of a better world in a cultural climate dominated by dystopia.

Saving Utopia is about an endangered species: utopian fiction. “Utopia is dead” has become a common refrain in recent decades, now that the dominant strand of science fiction is decisively dystopian. Visions of violent, oppressive, and authoritarian futures cloud our horizons of expectation. In Saving Utopia, Joe Davidson tackles the relative absence of utopia in the contemporary cultural landscape. He focuses on the challenges to writing utopias, explicating the societal conditions that have endangered bold visions of new and better worlds, while also examining the final holdouts of the genre.

Utopian stories are a vital but imperiled means of sustaining hope, a vehicle for gathering the flickering sparks of another world into a cohesive vision of liberation. By unearthing and analyzing the rare examples of hopeful visions published in the last decade, this book considers the survival strategies of the literary utopia—that is, the tactics deployed by utopian writers to keep the desire for a better world alive when everything tends toward dystopia. Ranging across Black, feminist, and green traditions of imagining the future, Saving Utopia shows how to make dreams of utopian societies convincing in a moment of pervasive pessimism.ENDORSEMENTS

“Against the grain of scholarship that co-opts utopia in the regime of power and profit, Joe Davidson revitalizes utopian imagination and form through rigorous theoretical interventions and close readings of key utopian fictions in this century.”
— Tom Moylan, Emeritus Professor, University of Limerick; author of Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination and Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

“Saving Utopia is a gem of a book, combing brilliant scholarship with astonishing creativity. Anyone interested in radical alternatives—why they are in short supply right now, and how we might change that—will have much to learn from it.”
— Mathias Thaler, Professor of Political Theory, University of Edinburgh; author of No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-Changed World

“Against contemporary narrative’s dystopian default, Davidson's provocative notion of postutopian utopia playing with/in our ‘shifting contours of time consciousness’ offers literary strategies for maintaining the plasticity of utopian thought, and the hopeful persistence of becoming.”
— Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Editor of Utopian Studies

“Our dark times are unpropitious for utopian visions. Yet remaining undaunted, Joe P.L. Davidson pushes through the brambles of contemporary pessimism and uncovers the first blossoms of what he terms ‘postdystopian utopias.’ Saving Utopia’s original insights mark Davidson as an important younger voice in what Fredric Jameson terms ‘the party of Utopia.’”
— Phillip E. Wegner, Professor and Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar, University of Florida; author of Invoking Hope and Late TheoryJoe P. L. Davidson is a Research Fellow at Loughborough University. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Studies, and Environmental Politics, among others.