Utopian texts are seeds for society to evolve and change.

For revolutionaries, visionaries, and malcontents, utopian texts illuminate alternatives to the stultifying and suffocating realities of their present. The best of these utopian works engage in ‘the persistent attempt to imagine alternatives to the present state of affairs while remaining assiduously of the world’.4 They not only construct and envisage such alternatives, but educate their readers, showing them the ways in which alternative futures might become concrete utopian presents. In utopian theorist Ernst Bloch’s work, this core quality of utopian literature is described as docta spes, ‘comprehended hope’, while for contemporary utopian critic Tom Moylan, utopian literature forms the ‘seeds for changing the present society’ through ‘willed transformation’, serving ‘to stimulate in its readers a desire for a better life and to motivate that desire toward action by conveying a sense that the world is not fixed once and for all’.5

This attachment of utopias to their present is a double-edged sword. The instantiation of a utopia is necessarily always coupled with the question ‘utopia for whom?’. As readers and theorists, we must consider who in the late capitalist present is seeking most desperately to create better societies, and who the ultimate subjects of historical change will end up being. With social inequality exposing more of the planetary population to a variety of contemporary crises from within which the creation of a better world seems impossible, these two groups are by no means bound to intersect. Utopian literature is well placed to address the concerns and desires of a diverse range of readers, and in so doing, help shape social transformation, even in a speculative mode. And yet, while utopias can be uniquely immediate and powerful in their transformational, pedagogical energy, as society and culture change, their relevance invariably decreases. This is particularly apparent at times of crisis which violently shift societies from their tracks, including global protests, natural and anthropogenic disasters, and, indeed, global pandemics. So, Marge Piercy’s utopian classic Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) can still be appreciated for its literary style and historical value, but both the social issues with which it grapples and the utopian alternatives it proposes now seem notably outdated. The US government no longer incarcerates people with mental health conditions in asylums whole- sale, yet the American prison-industrial complex has expanded to transform these and many other minority segments of the US public into a cheap labour force to an extent beyond what could be imagined possible in the 1970s. There is little argument that tiny electronic devices broadcasting radio waves can be used to manipulate people’s behaviour, although the way in which smartphones and the corporations operating through them effect such manipulation is very different from what Piercy had in mind. Finally, a future utopian society would have to contend not with a state military presence entrenched in Antarctica and on the Moon, but with the arguably far deadlier threats of global climate change and a host of deadly viruses.

To function as seeds for the transformation of society, utopias must continually be written from within the ongoing now, and must continually work to faithfully represent and sharpen the utopian desires of those most vulnerable and desperate for change. Jameson’s critique – that it is no longer possible to imagine a world fundamentally distinct from the everyday, familiar one of late capitalism – is a response to the unmooring of utopian literature from the everyday struggles of real-world political conflicts, as a result of which such literature no longer offered a clear answer to the question of ‘utopia for whom?’. This diminishment of utopian literature’s political acuity, ongoing for several decades, began hand-in-hand with the establishment of neoliberal late capitalism as the dominant form of economic governance worldwide. Contemporary utopias again bring a focus on political transformation to the forefront of their imagined worlds. It is to their emergence as an evolution of earlier traditions that this essay will now turn.

Transformations of Utopia

In the five centuries since Thomas More’s Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth, and the New Island of Utopia (1516) neologised the term, utopian literature has undergone a set of shifts in style and subject matter. Much valuable work has been done in the field of utopian studies to periodise these shifts and place them within the social and cultural contexts of their emergence; I aim only to bring this lineage of critical work up to date with the most recent developments in the primary literature. From the second half of the twentieth century, a number of key tendencies have emerged in utopian literature, which I delineate as critical (1960s-70s); late (1980s- 2000s), and commons (2010s to the present) utopias. Commons utopias, the new periodisation I offer in this essay, share features with both critical and late utopias. They return to the powerfully articulated political demands of critical utopias, but push back against the distance which these texts placed between the real worlds of their authors and the utopian worlds of their texts. In their refusal to escape from the precarities of our present, they are more akin to late utopias, but they lack the cynical, postmodern unease with political commitment which Jameson noted in these texts.

The science fiction utopias of the 1970s, undoubtedly some of the best known works of utopian literature in the Anglophone world, were concep- tualised as critical utopias by Tom Moylan post hoc in the 1980s. These texts, of which the best-known examples, by way of Moylan’s historicising work, are Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton (1976), were immanent to the major oppositional movements of the 1960s and 70s: second wave feminism; the Civil Rights Movement; the Vietnam War protests; and the global student and worker demonstrations of 1968.

In line with the profoundly transformative political energies of these movements, critical utopias returned to an ‘Enlightenment sense of critique – that is expressions of oppositional thought, unveiling, debunking, of both the genre itself and the historical situation’, rejecting utopia ‘as blueprint’ while preserving it ‘as dream’.6 Critical utopias rendered the concept of utopia pro- visional and porous, offering to their readers multiple competing better worlds rather than the single ideal world of previous utopian texts like More’s Utopia and William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890). In these texts, for the first time, the utopian explorer often travelled between utopias and dystopias, or between the real world and multiple alternative worlds. In the process, the utopian imaginary was rendered as increasingly plausible and achievable; for the first time, too, these texts offered a range of realistically grounded processes, strategies, and tactics for oppositional action, which could be employed in the present to transition it towards a utopian imaginary. Like the texts which came before, however, critical utopias continued to locate their utopian worlds in spaces or times separate from the realist present; this alterity was primarily a consequence of their emergence within the booming mid-century science fiction tradition, which offered a panoply of wildly imaginative worlds to its readers. The Dis- possessed forms one entry in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle of books, in which the Earth is but one member of a developing interstellar community. Connie, the protagonist of Woman on the Edge of Time, visits a utopian community in the year 2137, but even this future Earth-bound vision is contrasted with an equally possible future which is a hyper-capitalist dystopian hell.

In some ways, this anti-utopian vision from Woman on the Edge of Time was materialised between the social liberation struggles of the 1960s-70s and the 2008 GFC, a period ‘marked by anti-utopian deprivation rather than utopian achievement’ in the shape of globalisation, neoliberalisation, post- modernism, technocracy, and financialisation.7 To these processes we can add, from the early 2000s onwards, the expansion of border regimes as a con- sequence of the War on Terror, the rise of asymmetrical warfare, increasing precarity for global populations, and the effects of anthropogenic climate change. In this recent period ‘the vision of a completely different future, based on the annihilation of the present ... was replaced by a focus on a slower but effective change of the present’.8 I name the key textual fruits of this period late utopias in acknowledgment of Jameson’s work in analysing these decades as the period of the emergence of late capitalism. Key utopian texts of this time are Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias trilogy (1984- 1990) and Mars trilogy (1992-1996) and Octavia Butler’s unfinished Parable trilogy (1993, 1998). In late utopian texts, the multiple competing worlds common to the critical utopias are reduced again to a single world - Mars and the very different Californias of Butler and Robinson - but rather than presenting this world as an ideal and authoritative vision of society, these works use it as the setting for a range of utopian debates and experiments, highlighting, at the same time, the political stagnation of a present which has no sense of progress and no end in sight.