Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times

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.

Joe P. L. Davidson is a research fellow at Loughborough University. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Studies, Environmental Politics, among others.