This text presents essays on the dystopian turn of late 20th-century science fiction. Leading scholars discuss major dystopian traditions including cyberpunk and feminist utopian/dystopian narratives as seen in works such as Octavia Butler's novel Xenogenesis and the film Fight Club. These essays draw out the ways in which contemporary science fiction literature and film has served as a prophetic vehicle for writers with ethical and political concerns.

This text presents essays on the dystopian turn of late 20th-century science fiction. Leading scholars discuss major dystopian traditions including cyberpunk and feminist utopian/dystopian narratives as seen in works such as Octavia Butler's novel Xenogenesis and the film Fight Club. These essays draw out the ways in which contemporary science fiction literature and film has served as a prophetic vehicle for writers with ethical and political concerns.

Dystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging...

In both the USA and Britain, Ernst Bloch's subtle philosophy and cultural criticism is attracting a new generation of readers and his utopian thought is finding a new resonance. This volume of essays engages with Bloch's thought across a wide range of contemporary contexts.