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"This book examines various expressions of the utopian imagination, understood broadly as encompassing both better and worse visions of the future. In so doing, it focuses on the most pressing challenge of our times: how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Its key assumption is that tackling such a complex problem inevitably gives rise to utopian ideas and projects. The book tracks these forms of social dreaming across two domains - political theory as well as speculative fiction - so as to realize the following objectives: first, to uncover the key eutopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; and second, to provide orientation for our planetary existence on the basis of which a political theory of radical transformation, avoiding both fatalism and wishful thinking, may emerge. By juxtaposing theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, the book argues that the current desire for other ways of being and living can be educated in vastly different and frequently conflicting ways"--
List of contents
1. Solid Frames and Open Doors; 2. Varieties of Utopian Thinking; 3. What if: Planet Earth as an actor; 4. If Only: Eutopias of Scientific Progress between Techno-Optimism and Anti-Capitalism; 5. If this goes on: Hope Lost, Hope Regained; 6. Sober Realism and Radical Imagination.
About the author
Mathias Thaler teaches Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh.
Summary
Analyzes various utopian visions of our climate-changed world. Engages with both theoretical positions and literary works by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, with the objective to critically interrogate the role of hope and fear in the Anthropocene.
