Saving Utopia Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times

How ​​utopian stories preserved the vision of a better world in a cultural climate dominated by dystopia. _The book “Saving Utopia_” deals with an endangered topic: the literature of utopia. The phrase “Utopia is dead” has become common in recent decades, with the dominance of dystopian science fiction. Visions of a violent, oppressive, and authoritarian future cloud our horizons. In this book, Joe Davidson addresses the relative absence of utopia in the contemporary cultural landscape. He focuses on the challenges of writing utopia stories, explaining the societal conditions that have endangered bold visions of new and better worlds, while also highlighting the last bastions of the genre. Utopia stories are a vital, if threatening, way to maintain hope, a way to gather the sparks of another world into a coherent vision of liberation. By exploring and analyzing rare examples of hopeful visions published in the past decade, this book examines the survival strategies of literary utopias—the tactics that utopia writers use to keep the desire for a better world alive when everything is turning dark. By examining the traditions of black, feminist, and environmental literature in imagining the future, Saving Utopia shows how to make the dreams of utopian societies compelling in a moment of pessimism.