Review: Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions by Fredric Jameson

Hardcover, 431 pages
Published 2005
Borrowed from the library

Read September 2013

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
by Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson is someone who is oft-cited in science fiction criticism, and as someone who is interested in the genre as a vehicle for imagining future utopias, I felt his work would be relevant to my growing interest in the way that science fiction depicts future revolutions. Unfortunately (and this isn't necessarily a slight against the book), it turned out to be not particularly useful-- I only have a scant 2.5 pages of notes on its 431 pages, and most of them are just me rewriting the chapter titles.

Not that it was useless, though; there are a lot of concepts here about utopia that will be worth revisiting for me: that the utopia actually synthesizes the pleasure principle of fantasy with the reality principle of sf (74), that it's often impossible to imagine that the changes we seek in society could actually happen* (23, 86, 97, 118), that utopian change is often compressed into a single apocalypse because it's difficult for narrative to deal with generational time (187), that history does not end but we demand ending of it anyway (283), and that all of this thinking is not necessarily fanciful utopian fiction wants us to contemplate "real" politics just as much as sf wants us to contemplate "real" science (410).

So maybe more useful than I gave him credit for-- I am pretty sure I could build a whole essay out of any one of those ideas, and I look forward to coming back to Jameson and working with his concepts in the future.

* After all, it was Jameson who kind of once remarked that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."