Editors’ Message

We open by acknowledging the passing of one of our Advisory Board members, Dr. Ronald R. Creagh, Professor Emeritus at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, who died on September 8, 2023, at the age of ninety-four. A sociologist and historian, Dr. Creagh was a very prolific and much-admired author and activist, best known for his many publications on anarchism, libertarianism, utopianism, and American intentional communities. Utopian Studies is grateful for his wide-ranging work, his political commitment, and his service to the journal over many years.You have in your hands (or on your screen) a substantial (and we hope exciting) double issue of Utopian Studies. In addition to seven regular articles, you will find a CRITICAL FORUM on Solarpunk; our first AUTHOR-CRITIC INTERVIEW; another new feature, the FIRST-BOOK AUTHORS COLLOQIUM; three DESIRE LINES; a (double) set of twenty BOOK REVIEWS; and a record number of CONFERENCE BRIEFINGS. The ARTICLES section opens with an important theoretical contribution by a scholar very familiar to our utopian studies field, Fátima Vieira (University of Porto). “Complex Democracy, Complex Utopianism” draws from a variety of contemporary social theorists, Anglophone and European, to argue for the notion of a “complex” utopianism that departs from previous, traditional models of utopian narrative, thought and practice. To resist the seemingly dystopian spirit of our own time, Vieira argues, we need to define, and then establish, a new “utopian class” akin to (and perhaps coinciding with) Latour and Schultz’s proposal for an “ecological class.” Wide-ranging in its theoretical sources, the essay invites scholarly conversation about “what’s next” for human sustainability and for utopian thinking. To that end—and because this essay is a work in progress—I invite readers to respond to this essay by submitting a “Letter to the Editor” online at http://www.editorialmanager.com/uts/; see the drop-down menu under “Submissions”).“Science Fiction as a Narratological Model,” by Alexander Nikolaev Popov (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski) is a second important theoretical contribution. This article draws from Samuel Delany’s notion of science fiction (SF) as a “trivalent discourse,” touching on texts by Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ted Chiang to argue that SF is “a practice of dialogizing forms of thought,” including science, philosophy, art, nature, and more; but Popov demonstrates how those authors’ works deploy the polyvocal, integrated with the resources of the fantastic, in order to resist the tyranny of Western literary realism. Popov concludes by articulating how these SF strategies contribute to the utopian drive often behind science and speculative fiction.In “‘City of Glass’: Architecture, Narration and Unruly Bodies in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We,” Jocelyn Sears (Harvard University) argues that the 1924 depiction of a future city built entirely of glass rejected contemporaneous associations of glass architecture with utopian impossibility. Instead, claims Sears, Zamyatin demonstrates transparency’s potential to threaten individual subjectivity. Drawing on the concept of constitutive rhetoric, Sears argues that the glass architecture “trains the city’s inhabitants to think in the plural, inscribing a subject position in which each person is but one tiny part of the societal whole.” While the narrator tries “to speak for a supraindividual subjectivity,” his effort falls far short: “the material particularities of embodiment interrupt his sense of collectivity, ultimately destroying the illusion of interchangeability on which the dystopian state ideologically depends.”The fourth essay, by independent scholar David Shaw, offers us a rather different perspective on utopian models of organization and labor. Of course, there is nothing new about the topic of “work” in Utopian Studies, but rarely have we heard about work from an expert in the field of financial management. In “Management Consultancy Firms and Hythloday’s Island: Utopian Visions of the Most Desired of Workplaces,” Shaw sets Thomas More’s Utopia as an analytical framework for comparing the characteristics of management consultancy firms today with Utopians’ attitudes toward work and wealth, governance, and the “value” of the Utopian way of life. Drawing from research on business education, the essay asks “how alternative, perhaps better, visions [of consultancy work] might be imagined.” Labor and/in society is also one of the concerns in “Annie Denton Cridge’s Healthy Utopia: The Associative Underpinnings of ‘Man’s Rights; or, How Would You Like It?’” by Ashley Garcia (University of Texas at Austin). This article traces the influence of the American Associationist movement on Cridge’s writing and utopian-socialist political activities—and argues as well that her work is evidence of Associationism’s persistence even after the Civil War, contrary to historical consensus up to now.The ARTICLES section closes with readings of two well-known novels. In “Maps and Lives: H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes,” author Michael Titlestad (University of the Witwatersrand) proposes that a more general conflict in Wells’s notion of utopianism is evident in a specific comparison between the text of the 1899 novel, and the preface to the 1924 edition of The Sleeper Awakes, where Wells’s “strident, if misguided” comments instructing readers to consult his 1901 proposal of a “World State” in Anticipations betrays an important ambivalence in his thinking. Finally, Carmen Laguarta-Bueno’s (Universidad de Zaragoza) essay, “Surveillance Capitalism and the Normalization of Digital Surveillance: An Analysis of Dave Eggers’s The Every,” responds to critiques of the novel’s character and plot development by bringing to bear on the text new developments in research on surveillance and social compliance or “normalization.” Laguarta-Bueno argues that Eggers’s narrative strategies leave the reader with a sense of unease that stands in contrast to the lack of resistance by the novel’s characters.This issue’s CRITICAL FORUM considers the relationship of the subgenre of speculative fiction called solarpunk to the concept of utopia, and to utopian narratology. For those who have wondered about the recent proliferation of punk literary denominations, Alexa Weik von Mossner (University of Klagenfurt) clarifies, in “Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Utopian Community in Contemporary Solarpunk,” what solarpunk is and is not, and how we might distinguish it from climate fiction more generally. Her article anchors a set of three scholarly responses: from Tobias Skiveren (University of Copenhagen), who advocates a deliberate bridging of literature to activism by considering solarpunk as an affective pedagogical strategy; from Phoebe Wagner (Lycoming College), a familiar name to solarpunk readers as a solarpunk author herself, as well as editor or coeditor of three solarpunk anthologies (the most recent is Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales [Android Press, 2023]); and from Associate Editor Christian Haines, who also wrote the introduction to the FORUM.THE CRITICAL FORUM is followed by an AUTHOR-CRITIC INTERVIEW with two individuals Utopian Studies readers are likely to recognize: the Asian-Canadian novelist Larissa Lai (University of Calgary) and the prolific SF critic Sherryl Vint (University of California Riverside). The writer-scholars were interviewed late last spring (2023) by Rocío Carrasco-Carrasco (University of Huelva) and Irene López Rodríguez (University Complutense of Madrid), during a plenary session at a conference jointly organized by the University of Huelva (Spain) and the University of Calgary (Canada). The transcribed interview is presented here as “The Theory and Practice of Utopia in Our Troubled Times,” a wide-ranging discussion that opens up a variety of avenues for four respondents, whose thoughts follow.This double issue also includes our inaugural FIRST-BOOK AUTHORS COLLOQUIUM. The idea for this section, which we hope to include each year, came out of the Society for Utopian Studies Annual Conference in Austin, Texas, organized by Assistant Editor Stephanie Tavera (see the conference briefing on this event in this issue!). A panel of first-book authors (also organized by Tavera) turned out to be so engaging that we invited these authors to submit their remarks on their own books—and then to comment on the work of the other two. This “conversation,” featuring K. Allison Hammer (Southern Illinois University), Anne Stewart (University of British Columbia), and Patrick Whitmarsh (College of the Holy Cross), with an introduction by Stephanie Tavera, is the result!This issue’s DESIRE LINES explore the impact of lesser-known books and communities that demand the spotlight for their ability to give us hope in the wake of past and present, globalized and localized, political struggle. In her essay, “Between Dystopia and Utopia in Catalonia: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Manuel de Pedrolo’s Mecanoscrit del Segon Origen,” Sara Martín (re)introduces readers to forgotten Catalonian SF author and translator, Manuel de Pedrolo, whose dystopian work explores the trauma of ethnic cleansing. Mecanoscrit del Segon Origen (1974) tells the story of human survival following the alien “Volvians’” destruction of Earth, in order to occupy the planet themselves. Pedrolo intended his novel as an allegory for political cleansing under Francisco Franco’s regime, which overlaps the Nazi regime’s extensive project of ethnic cleansing across Europe. It might also eerily remind us of such recent, even contemporary, efforts. Through her piece, Martín explains the significance of Pedrolo’s Mecanoscrit del Segon Origen to her personal and professional life, from reading the novel in the original Catalan at age fourteen, to her translation of Mecanoscrit into English in 2018.As mentioned above, the discussion of “-punk” literature continues, with hopepunk author Su Sokol offering a primer on hopepunk, a genre of speculative fiction that tells “gritty, challenging, and realistic” stories but—unlike cyberpunk—insists upon “the possibility of light at the end of the tunnel.” Like utopian, dystopian, and solarpunk narratives, hopepunk stories are inherently political, a platform for social criticism that “resist[s] authority, capitalism, and the disintegration of our human and social rights” without giving in to nihilism. Sokol’s own relationship to hopepunk started with their early introduction to the work of Ursula K. Le Guin and Marge Piercy. This DESIRE LINE, “Light in the Interstices between Dystopia and Utopia, or Why I Love Hopepunk,” documents for us the journey from that first reading experience of speculative literature, to the publication of Sokol’s first hopepunk novel, Cycling to Asylum (2014).As the DESIRE LINES contributions in this issue represent a celebration of books that have shaped our individual and collective identities, it is appropriate we conclude the section with a collaboratively written contribution—“What If We Move Not in Lines But in Circles?”—from the Utopian Book Collective, a reading group/book club based in the city of Bristol, UK. The editors of Utopian Studies first encountered the Collective on Facebook, having received an invitation to join virtually, in the aftermath of pandemic quarantine. While the Collective has resumed in-person meetings, we receive regular updates from founder and organizer Sheryl Medlicott on the group’s regularly screenings and book discussions. The Utopian Book Collective’s co-authored contribution of short essays, meditations, and a transcript segment from one book discussion seeks to recreate one of these physical, oral events in print form. Yet “What If We Move Not in Lines But in Circles?” further demonstrates the importance of being a member of a like-minded community here individuals can discuss the political concerns of the present in a conversation facilitated by pop culture artifacts of the past.The vibrancy of utopian studies and adjacent fields is also reflected in this issue’s BOOK REVIEWS section, with twenty reviews covering new work ranging in topic from American architectural reform to community-building, from the Black cooperative movement to postcoloniality, and from sustainability to global futurities. This section begins with Irene Cheng’s study of nineteenth-century American architectural utopias, The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), reviewed by Nathaniel Robert Walker. It then turns to recent book publications dealing with intentional communities in the past as well as the present: Mark S. Ferrara’s American Community: Radical Experiments in Intentional Living (Rutgers University Press, 2019), reviewed by Jennifer Wells; and Suryamayi Aswini Clarence-Smith’s Prefiguring Utopia: The Auroville Experiment (Bristol University Press, 2023), reviewed by Karen T. Litfin. Anne Stewart reviews Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Gregory Claeys, which presents a far-reaching discussion of intentional communities, utopian literature, and social theory before submitting its own blueprint for collective living in the face of environmental breakdown. Raphael Kabo’s Utopia Beyond Capitalism in Contemporary Literature: A Commons Poetics (Bloomsbury, 2023), reviewed by Florian Wagner, also tries to come to terms with the crises of the capitalist present by exploring a specific form of social organization, “the commons,” which is based on communalism and sharing. Mark A. Allison’s Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918 (Oxford University Press, 2021), the subject of Owen Holland’s review, looks at the history of socialist thought and aesthetics to find imaginations of a form of collective life that has not yet been realized.The next three reviews, beginning with Burcu Kayışcı Akkoyun’s review of Patricia McManus’s Critical Theory and Dystopia (Manchester University Press, 2022), take the concept and genre of dystopia as their critical focus. While McManus interrogates the ideological work that dystopian fiction has performed since the early twentieth century, the authors gathered in Scott Donahue-Martens’s and Brandon Simonson’s coedited essay collection Theology, Religion, and Dystopia (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), reviewer Jonathan Kaplan explains, approach the study of dystopia from the fields of theology and religious studies. Dreamworld or Dystopia? The Nordic Model and Its Influence in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2021) by Michael A. Livingston, in contrast, presents an approach from socio-legal studies and comparative politics, which Eric S. Einhorn has reviewed for this issue.The short story collection Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (The New Press, 2023), which contains a foreword by adrienne maree brown and is reviewed here by Britta Colligs, envisions radically different futures while being firmly rooted in the present and its crises. In Alternative Futures and the Present: Postcolonial Possibilities (Routledge, 2023), reviewer Patricia McManus notes that Ranabir Samaddar argues that alternatives to our present condition—with different futures—are already available in our current colonial moment. Irvin J. Hunt’s Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (University of North Caroline Press, 2022), reviewed by Verena Adamik, also suggests a reconsideration of the possibilities of the present, as it traces the Black cooperative movement’s fight—led by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, and others—to free their movement from the logic of progress. In Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone (Northwestern University Press, 2020), reviewed here by Robert LaRue, Madhumita Lahiri shows the effectiveness of print media and the English language to forge alliances against racism and colonialism. In his review of Utopías Hispanas. 2022) by and J. 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