UC San Diego

According to Fredric Jameson’s critique of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, our abilities to think historically and to imagine a future different from the present have both atrophied beyond recognition. As Jameson puts it, we are suffering from “a consequent weakening of historicity” (Postmodernism 6). This project is an attempt to redress this ahistorical tendency of our own contemporary historical situation. Each of the chapters that follows is interested in understanding how some contemporary examples of science fiction and speculative fiction (SF, broadly defined, published between 2013 and 2021) experiment with different narrative forms as they think through the complex temporalities of our present. The first chapter examines how several recent alternate-history novels might be read as critical utopias that are able to resurrect revolutionary moments of the colonized past. The second chapter looks at a constellation of SF texts of the long 2010s that represent the longue durée of the capitalist mode of production (and sometimes even longer spans of time), and, in so doing, open up the possibility of imagining a transition to a new mode of production. By juxtaposing moments from the past, present, and future within a single narrative, they are able to provide glimpses of the utopian horizon. The final chapter interprets several recent novels set in the future that attempt to imagine both the end of the capitalist mode of production and the emergence of a future commons. Hopefully, a close reading of these anticipatory narratives will contribute to the reawakening of our species’ slumbering historical consciousness. By connecting us to another order of time, they will be our guide as we exit from pre-history into history proper, into that more utopian future which is still possible, and yet never guaranteed.