This article discusses N. K. Jemisin's Afrofuturist utopian short story entitled “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” the opening story of her 2018 collection, How Long 'Til Black Future Month? As is suggested by its title, Jemisin's story is a direct reply to Ursula K. Le Guin's “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and this article discusses the ways in which Jemisin, one of the most prominent members of a new generation of SF/Fantasy writers, pays homage to, replies to, (...) and reimagines Le Guin's 1973 story in the twenty-first century. In particular, drawing on utopian scholarship, scholars of Afrofuturism, and the work of African American studies scholar-activists, it argues that Jemisin's utopia builds a world that embodies the “revolution of value” as well as the intersectional Black feminist praxis at the foundation of contemporary activist groups such as Black Lives Matter. It also argues for the ways in which Jemisin's text confronts common criticisms of utopia as well as the limits of the utopian imagination. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article discusses the politics of hope in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. Drawing on scholarship in utopian studies, science fiction studies, and Africana studies, it discusses the ways in which Jemisin uses two intentional community experiments depicted in the trilogy as “critical utopias” in order to work through problems involved in collective living, including the potentially anti-utopian aspects of these communities’ shortcomings. Ultimately, despite the apocalyptic setting that has attracted the most attention from critics, this article argues (...) that The Broken Earth ultimately affirms the necessity of utopian hope, even amid anti-utopian circumstances, and as such is an important and timely political statement. In a historical moment marked by social and racial strife and, in the literary realm, by what Sean Guynes calls “dystopia fatigue,” Jemisin’s trilogy does not promise utopia, but insists on the need for hope in seemingly hopeless times, the “anti-anti-utopian” orientation described by Fredric Jameson. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Samuel R. Delany is among a group of authors who revivified the utopian imagination in science fiction during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article discusses Delany's novella “We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line”. It revisits scholarship on Delany and on utopia to offer theoretical and historical perspectives concerning how this text, which has been lauded by reviewers but overlooked by scholars, represents an early contribution to the then-nascent genre of the “critical utopia,” (...) one that bears many of the genre's hallmarks and prefigures later works. “We, in Some Strange Power's Employ” narrates a mid-twenty-first-century clash between two fully articulated utopian visions. This article details how the tension between these diametrically opposed “worlds” foments critical scrutiny of both in order to gesture toward a utopian horizon beyond them. It also demonstrates how Delany's novella performs a critical utopian intervention in the cultural politics of its present. Through the “play of worlds” in the narrative's “possible future” Delany advances evenhanded critiques of both sides of the 1960s “culture war” while retaining the decade's utopian zeitgeist, a desire for an impossible “something else” beyond the culture/counterculture dichotomy. (shrink)

It would be difficult to overstate the impact of the work of Samuel R. Delany on the often-overlapping fields of science fiction (sf) studies and utopian studies. In his well-known 1982 essay, “Progress Versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Fredric Jameson argues that Delany, along with Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, and Joanna Russ, is among a socially engaged group of visionary authors who revivified the utopian imagination in sf during the 1960s and 1970s, and he cites Delany’s (...) Triton (1976), Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Russ’s The Female Man (1975) as “the most remarkable monuments” in this rebirth of utopia.1 Following Jameson and others, Tom Moylan .. (shrink)