Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation by Tom Moylan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation by Tom Moylan De Witt Douglas Kilgore Can We Be Utopian? Tom Moylan. Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 312 pp. $120 hc, $39.95 pbk, $35.95 ebk. [End Page 576] Tom Moylan publishes his latest book at a time of widespread disquiet in Western democracy. He does not sugarcoat his judgement that we live in a dystopia, a neoliberal capitalist world order in which "fascistic politicians, regimes, and mass movements are gaining ground and feeding official and individual rage," fattening on a bottomless pit of "virulent xenophobia" (1). Even as he mounts a Leftist utopian response to this emergency, Moylan speaks to widespread fears of the racist kleptocratic nationalism that has gained mainstream power. As a result, Becoming Utopian sits comfortably with other recent diagnoses such as philosopher Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018) and historian Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Moylan's project, however, is not simply to tell us that we are in trouble; he seeks to show us a way out. It is, perhaps, comforting that the path he blazes takes us through more than a half-century of his work in the imbricated fields of sf and utopian literature. The comfort comes from the familiarity of the path—we are not starting in the dark—and his trenchant belief that the philosophers, theorists, writers, and activists who labor in these fields have formulated ways of thinking and acting that are helpful for meeting the current emergency. At base, he argues that if we are to save ourselves from a dystopian world order, we must become utopian. Becoming Utopian may be read on its own, but it is also a valedictory text, assembled from more than three decades of publications in other venues. For those of us who have been following along, the book is most usefully read as the third volume of a trilogy. The first volume is Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986), in which Moylan links science fiction with the utopian tradition and identifies the critical utopia as an important modality within it. The second work is Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (2000), in which he introduces the critical dystopia as a forensic tool for understanding science fiction's engagement with the sociopathologies of the late twentieth century. These volumes influenced how a generation of sf scholars read and understood paradigmatic writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler. Rounding out the trilogy, Becoming Utopian reminds us of that earlier work while reconnecting us to its theoretical architecture in Marxism, feminism, liberation theology, and political activism, all of which inform the author's life and scholarship. The result is not only an overview of critical debates around utopian desire and method but also a defense of contemporary science fiction as a medium through which we might model liberatory futures that are more than easily coopted prescriptions for lucrative media franchises. Being Utopian is not a book that you can consume in one sitting. While it reveals more of the writer than one generally expects from a technical treatise—I appreciated, for example, learning that Moylan comes from a Roman Catholic background similar to my own—it is densely packed and copiously footnoted, necessarily so. While his coverage of Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Darko Suvin, Donna Haraway, and Kim Stanley Robinson is familiar territory for an sf or utopian studies scholar, [End Page 577] some of what he considers may not be. Moylan's deep engagement with the philosophical ground of liberation theology (and why it matters), for example, is revelatory, for this reader at least. It forced me to pay attention, to put the book down and seek further acquaintance with the Left of a Christian tradition overshadowed by the aggressive rise of white evangelical nationalism. As a valedictory text that is deeply retrospective, Becoming Utopia does not follow traditional monograph structure. It includes ancillary material that frames the central chapters, establishing its author's influence in sf...