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  • Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination by Tom Moylan
  • Darren Jorgensen
Tom Moylan. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014. xxx + 328 pp. Paperback, $51.95, ISBN 798-3-0343-0752-9

An expanded new edition of Tom Moylan’s Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination includes a heated if polite debate over the “critical utopia.” This takes place in a new introduction and additional chapter to the book, as well as in a series of reflections on Demand written by some of the more influential scholars in the field. The new introduction reminds us of the political context of the critical utopia, this being the feminist and New Left underpinnings of four novels in particular: Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Samuel Delany’s Triton (1976). There are others too: Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971), Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), Suzy McKee Charnas’s Mother-lines (1979), and Sally Gearhart’s Wanderground (1979), all American novels published in the 1970s; but Moylan’s definition of the critical utopia is not American. As he makes clear in a new, polemical introduction, these narratives are tied to the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s and 1970s and crucially to the experience of this time and its politics, refracted in these speculative time-traveling and multiworld fictions. As Lyman Tower Sargent writes, Moylan is interested in a politics not only of form but of content. These novels are tied to a generational experience of “equality for minorities and women, the growth of feminism, the drug culture, the changes in sexual behaviour, the intentional community movement, and the civil rights and antiwar movements” (245).

The test of Moylan’s ideas lies in a new chapter of Demand on Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962). This is a novel that scholars such as Ruth Levitas have argued is an early critical utopia, but for Moylan, the hero or antihero of Island is not self-critical enough, nor is its heterosexist utopia equal enough, for it [End Page 419] to really contain the kind of political punch that the later 1960s will demand. It is, like Le Guin’s Dispossessed, a failed critical utopia because it plays out a heroic rather than a revolutionary narrative amid utopian and dystopian worlds. Revolutionary narratives will instead transform the experience of the 1960s and 1970s into novels that are about personal transformation. Moylan’s argument against Island also has the effect of excluding this English novel from the critical utopian canon, tying this canon once again to the national, American experience of the long 1960s, its politics, successes, and failures. Yet, from the antiwar movement to demands for gendered, racial, and sexual equality, the cultural revolution was hardly an American phenomenon. Much of its impetus came from European ideas, as well as decolonization movements in Africa, Asia, and South America. The contradiction is captured by Moylan’s choice of cover photograph for the new Demand. This is the famous photograph of U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos doing the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics. Yet beside them stands the Australian Peter Norman, and as Andrew Milner reminds us here, his support of the two winners on that day would cost him in future Olympic selections in Australia. So a utopian image for an American who is sympathetic to civil rights is for Australian viewers a dystopian reminder of their own country’s conservatism.

It may be that the critical utopia is also bound to this particularity, bringing up questions about the relationship of the utopian imagination to internationalism and to comparative utopianism, as well as to American social history. This, especially as the very notion of revolution upon which Moylan stakes the critical utopia, becomes something very different toward the end of the twentieth century, as it responds to a world politics of economic globalization and looming environmental disaster. In this sense, the absence of Kim Stanley Robinson from the new introductions, chapters, and afterwords...

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