fredric jameson archeologies of the future

“the most characteristic SF does not attempt to imagine the “real” future of our social system. He points up beautifully how Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of Time is built around the tension of time-travellers from a more liberated future desparately worried about the politics of the novel’s present obliterating their particular history.Įlsewhere he puts it a little less pithily, but still quotably… “Perhaps… we need to develop an anxiety about losing the future which is analagous to Orwell’s anxiety about the loss of the past and of memory and childhood” That reduction of Prof J seems to produce a contradiction, but I take it from passages like the following… You can of course generalise the argument to ideas and entities of all kinds. If they were not they could not be described at all. This sounds pretty similar to the plausible argument that SF is supposedly preoccupied with aliens but constitutively incapable of depicting convincing aliens because we cannot imagine them – they are always somewhat like creatures or entities we already know about, and could not be otherwise. Interesting because it underlines that the future, and the present read as a precursor of the future which will become real, is political.Īnd b) science fiction’s alleged efforts to imagine the future succeed only in demonstrating that we cannot really imagine anything radically different from past or present because they all basically depict societies which are composed of recognisable elements of the one the author lived in at the time of writing, or has studied, albeit not usually dominant elements. But a couple of the key chapters/essays yield interesting points I do want to explore.īoiling these down so far that all that is left is a sticky residue, they seem to be thatĪ) utopias are inherently political because they keep alive the idea that things (the social order) could be different than they are – we have not reached the end of history. My immediate, probably superficial, reaction is that putative future readers of a Rough Guide to the Future probably don’t require a summary of his amazingly erudite history of utopias. Full of stimulation, occasional obscurity, and provocative comments on significant SF authors.

It’s an undeniably impressive piece of work, which would demand deep study to deal with properly.

But a title like Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions demanded a look as I tick off titles with the f-word in them. Fredric Jameson has registered faintly on my radar for years, but I’ve never followed his trajectory.

Fredric jameson archeologies of the future