Imagining the Future: Utopia,

Dystopia and Science Fiction

Centre for Comparative Literature
and Cultural Studies
Monash University, Clayton campus,
Melbourne, Australia
Conference website:
www.arts.monash.edu.au/lcl/conferences/utopias
Enquiries: utopias@arts.monash.edu.au
Keynote speaker: Fredric Jameson
Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University
67 December 2005
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All sessions will be held in Building 25
Tuesday
6/12
S1 S2 ST1 ST2

8:00
9:00
REGISTRATION
9:00-
9:15
WELCOME (S1)
Emeritus Professor Walter Veit, Monash University
9:15
10:45
Teeuwen: Sabotaging Utopia
Hwang: Utopia and Violence
in Late Capitalist Society
G. Davidson: Samuel Delany,
Post-Fordism and the Future
Vernay: Projections and
Utopianism in Contemporary
Australian Fiction
Cheater: Return to the
Dreamtime
R. Murray: The Australian
Dream Becomes Nightmare
Lu: Modernity as Utopia
Suslov: The Conservative
Utopia
Walton: Constructed Beauty,
Performed Terror, 1884/1948

11:00
12:30
Buchanan: Ideology and
Utopia in Jameson
Burgmann: Cognitive Mapping
and Anti-Capitalist Utopianism
Cevasco: Jameson and Science
Fiction
Panel: Perversely Persistent
Visions
Greenwood, McEntee, Crogan
Blackford: Rendezvous with
Utopia
Pritchard/Russell: Exploring
Utopias Through Star Wars
Kansal, Pratchetts
Understated Utopia


12:30 -
1:30
LUNCH
1:30
3:30
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: The Antinomies of Utopia (S3)
Professor Fredric Jameson, Duke University
4:00
5:30
Barnett: Gen(r)e Splicing:
Atwoods Oryx and Crake
Kelso: Writing a Feminist
Utopia
Baum: Becoming Men in
Herland
Norris: The Manga Effect
Wright: The Nature Vision of
Sci-Fi Anime
Moichi: Imagining Utopia in
Contemporary Japanese Novels
Salzani: Musils Utopia
Without Qualities
Sheehan: Beckett and the
Imagination of Disaster
Blanchot: The Proper Use of
Science-Fiction
Johnson: Scar Construction,
Progress in Architecture
Sala-Oviedo/Loo: Nanotechnology
and the Emergence of Architecture
A. Murray: Dystopia, Architecture
and the Persistence of Romanticism
Weds.
7/12
S1 S2 ST1 ST2

9:15
10:45
Pieris: The Nation on the Net
Younis: Towards (E-)utopia?
Dieter: Peer-to-Peer Pressure:
Filetrading, Multitude and the
Promise of Radical Democracy
Milner: Framing Catastrophe
Kawabata: Orwellian Mother
Goose
Vladiv-Glover: Russian
Dystopias

R. Davidson: Utopia and
Transformational Strategy
Rundle: Promethean politics
Whyte: Preempting Action

11:00
12:30
Chaffey: Uncharted Territories
and Common Ground
Holland: Utopian Thought in
Deleuze & Guattari
Mercer: The Utopia of
Permanence and the Internet
Bloul: From Utopia to
Terrorism
Ramos: The World Social
Forum
Spoors: Enlightenment as
Utopia?
Cooke: Can Children Dream
of Electric Adulthoods?
Savage: Space Opera
Vardoulakis: Politics of
Science, Fictions of the
Political
Welch: Marxist Utopia in
Zukofsky
Yang: Re-imagination of the Future
in Le Guin
Wheeler: Dystopian Futures in
Ryman and Gee
12:30
1:30
LUNCH

1:30
3:00
Boer: On the Legacy of
Primitive Communism
Goldsmith: Apocalyptic
Narrative and the Waco Siege
Garrett/Harding:
Deconstructions of Babel
Rigby: Utopian moments in the
creation of Canberra
G. Pritchard: Ecotopias and
Dystopias
Jorgensen: The Indigenous
Utopian
McNeill: Jameson, Cyberpunk
and Exhausted Realism
St. John: Rave Ascension
Briggs: Gibsons Meta-
Science-Fiction
Bot: Dystopian Urban Sublime
Cole: The Wall: Utopian or
Dystopian?
Wight: Not My Kind of Place
3:15
4:45
Benjamin: The Future as an
Illusion
P. Jones: Tragic Utopianism
Parekh: The (Science Fictional)
Future to Hegels System
Panel: Children in Dystopia
Dudek, Bullen, Parsons
Atkinson: Technology and the
Vision of Utopia
G. Jones: Imag(in)ing the
Simulacrum
Bagust: Flashing the Soul
Dutton: Five French Futures
Jack: Les Particules Elementaires
Henderson: The Australian Lesbian
Body

5:00
6:30
Marks: All-Seeing Eyes
Nansen: Medical Technologys
Utopian Imaginary
Sargent: Eutopias and
Dystopias of Science
ODonnell: Jamesons Concept
of Utopia
Bendle: Zarathustras Revenge
Fitting: Jamesons
Archaeologies of the Future
Hall: Lost Race Stories
Gurney: The Fall to Dystopia
Maxwell: Imagining a Future
Aesthetics of Human Beauty
C. Garrett: Possible Worlds
Gonzlez-Casanovas: Primitivist
Dystopias vs. Modernist Utopias
Soares: Altmans Quintet
6:30
6:35
CLOSING REMARKS (S1)
Dr. Kate Rigby, Monash University
IMAGINING THE FUTURE
ABSTRACTS


Paul Atkinson, Monash University
Technology and the Vision of Utopia

In this paper I will analyse the relationships between the concept of utopia and cinematic
plenitude in the films Gattaca and Minority Report. In both films the utopic ideal is not
the dream of a perfect society but the repression of contingency which is achieved by
making human behaviour conform to the laws of the machine. In Gattaca the repression
of contingency occurs through the increasing refinement of the genetic code according to
an unarticulated ideal. In Minority Report the repression of contingency correlates to the
eradication of crime through the predictive capacities of new technology. In both films,
the utopia is inverted as a dystopia because of the inability of technology to accommodate
the vagaries of the human will. In the filmic representation of utopia the repression of
contingency also takes place on the level of the visual, where the plenitude of the screen
image is reduced to an optical purity and a delimited future is transformed into a panoptic
future for both the protagonist and the audience.

Phil Bagust, University of South Australia
Flashing the Soul: USB Memory Sticks and Iain M Banks Soulkeepers

One of the intriguing aspects of the alternative universe of Iain M Banks culture novels
is the soulkeeper device. In the culture universe the barriers between the biological and
the electro-mechanical have long since been breached. In spite of the high-tech and
artificially extended lifespans however, for flesh and blood citizens of Banks universe,
physical death from old age or trauma remains part of life. Except there are a variety of
ways that some culture universe species choose to cheat death. One of these techniques
utilises a soulkeeper device, a tiny, incredibly dense memory module normally worn on
the body. The soulkeeper is capable of sensing impending physical death in its owner and
uploads their most recent mind state for storage in the soulkeeper or transmission to a
remote location. Individuals who have experienced physical death can then have their
biological bodies cloned and this most recent mind state downloaded into the new body.
This raises classic ontological questions about whether subject number two is actually a
complete copy of subject number one, but necessarily also questions about mind/body
dualism and even the possible quantum nature of consciousness itself. Jump to the
present day real world and we see an interesting phenomenon unfolding: the
proliferation of increasingly dense, cheap USB flash memory sticks as more than just
utilitarian file sharing devices, but as increasingly important markers of personal identity,
distinction and even digital citizenship. Combine this with tentative research being
carried out on both biological and solid state human neural implants and the question
must be asked are we seeing the first stages of the penetration of soulkeeper
subjectivity into the realm of consciousness and pseudo-immortality imagined by
Banks?

Tully Barnett, Flinders University
Gen(r)e Splicing: Margaret Atwoods Use of Information Technology and Genetics
in Oryx and Crake

Isnt it interesting that biologists so routinely use metaphors and imagery of Information
and Communication to describe and discuss their ideas and understanding about
molecular biology? The idea of a four letter DNA alphabet which creates three-letter
words from a 64 word dictionary permeates and mediates our understanding of our
bodies. Margaret Atwood inverts this trend in her 2003 dystopian nightmare of a novel,
Oryx and Crake, by employing the genetic technologies inherent in her imagining of the
near future to represent information culture. The rise of the numbers people and the
dwindling of the word people leads to the end of the human, in Atwoods vision, just as
clearly as it leads to the end of the book in so many hotly debated cultural
texts. Atwoods particular dystopia is one of both science and information and
incorporates many of the essential themes of contemporary information culture, virtuality
and posthumanism.

Rob Baum, Monash University
Becoming Men in Herland: Gender Dystopia & Lesbian Alterity

Charlotte Perkins Gilmans 1915 serialisation of Herland, locates three male adventurers
in a fully functional female world, and scrutinises the search for men essential to
civilisation. Where other feminist utopias struggle with the Amazonian endgame, Herland
handles procreation with parthenogenesis. Female utopias are not, as many writers
demonstrate, inherently utopic for males, who may be utilised as manual labourers,
domestic slaves, and sex workers. Even men fondly permitted to enjoy utopic fruits
(marriage, desire) may find difficulty in accommodating absence of a privilege culturally
ordained and religiously maintained. With the continuing development of new
reproductive and sexual technologies, slowly altering the course and appearance of
postmodern society, gender dystopia is theoretically and somatically interrogated, science
fiction becoming science. The Patricia Califia who composed lesbian utopias has
emerged as Patrick Califia, operatively male. Is this radical alteration of lesbian alterity
utopic, or the manifestation of cultural dystopia, like men in Herland?

Mervyn Bendle, James Cook University
Zarathustras Revenge: The Sordid Utopia of Contemporary Science Fiction Films

This paper applies a Nietzschean-Heideggerean approach to an analysis of Fredric
Jamesons new book Archaeologies of the Future to address the question of whether and
how we can imagine the future and whether or not such imaginings remain open to the
unforeseeable. It proceeds from Jamesons observation in his essay on The Politics of
Utopia that utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena
whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its
representation. It notes that this is equivalent to the ontological proof of God and asks
whether it follows that Nietzsches celebrated death of God has been replicated in the
20
th
century with the death of utopia, and then goes on to explore this issue through an
analysis of prominent science fiction films, including, Metropolis (1926), Things to Come
(1936), War of the Worlds (1953 & 2005), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), On the
Beach (1959), Failsafe (1964), The Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Omega Man
(1971), Rollerball (1975), Dawn of the Dead (1978 & 2004), Mad Max (1979), Mad Max
2 (1981), Blade Runner (1982), The Day After (1983), The Terminator (1984), Mad Max
3 (1985), RoboCop (1987), Running Man (1987),Total Recall (1990),Terminator 2
(1991), Demolition Man (1993), Twelve Monkeys (1995), Independence Day (1996), The
Fifth Element (1997), Gattaca (1997), Starship Troopers (1997), Deep Impact (1998),
Armageddon (1998), Fight Club (1999), The Matrix (1999), Minority Report (2002),
Imposter (2002), 28 Days Later (2003), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), The Core
(2004), Category 6: Day of Destruction (2004), and Land of the Dead (2005). The paper
concludes that the history of contemporary SF cinema shows a relentless tendency
towards dystopian and apocalyptic themes, with little evidence of the unforeseeable or
the novum as envisaged by Bloch and Suvin.

Andrew Benjamin, Monash University
The Future as an Illusion. Freud and the Utopian Symptom

Russell Blackford, Monash University
Rendezvous With Utopia: Two Versions of the Future in the Rama Novels

Arthur C. Clarkes Rendezvous with Rama paints an attractive picture of how a future
space-going society might operate. Despite its diplomatic squabbles and machinations,
Clarkes Solar-System-wide society of 2130 is close to being a utopia. After Rendezvous
with Rama, Clarke wrote three sequels in collaboration with Gentry Lee (actually
authored mainly or entirely by Lee). These are set farther in the future, and they form a
trilogy with a new cast of characters. They reveal that the society depicted in Rendezvous
with Rama has since been destroyed by economic collapse. The social arrangements
portrayed are closer to our own, while the characters and their motivations are far more
conventional. Though successful in their own terms, Rama II and its sequels rely on
formulaic best-seller elements. They retreat from the utopian impulse behind Clarke's
original novel.

Maurice Blanchot
The Proper Use of Science Fiction

Blanchots essay Le Bon Usage de la Science-Fiction, which appeared in the Nouvelle
Revue Franaise in 1959, will be presented for the first time in English translation.
Blanchot addresses the question of whether we can imagine the future by examining
science fiction as a form of prophetic speech. Science fiction does not predict what is to
come; rather, it expounds an impossible present that has already broken upon us. Our
day-to-day situation is in and of itself prophetic: we know this and forget it constantly.
Science fiction helps us to remember. The paper will be read in the authors absence by
its translator, Robert Savage, who for reasons of piety will not be answering questions on
Blanchots behalf.

Rachel Bloul, Australian National University
From Utopia to Terrorism: The Case of Radical Islam

Has radical Islamism lost its utopian vision? Or is the recourse to terrorism yet another
case of the totalitarian tendencies of utopian visions, la Karl Popper? This paper
discusses the evolution of radical Islamism as a utopian vision. Arguing against Popper
that utopian movements are not a priori totalitarian, it explains that it is the conjunction of
a utopian political vision (of an autonomous Muslim community) with eschatological
Islamic theology which best explains the recourse to terrorism. The Islamist leadership
may be motivated by political failure but the martyrs they groom are more responsive to
the sublime apotheosis of death which is integral to the politics of hate their leaders
preach.

Roland Boer, Monash University
On the Legacy of Primitive Communism

Through a comparison of two key ancient Near Eastern texts, I explore the way
primitive communism is both the enabling cause and systematically blocked by these
texts. The texts are Enuma Elish and the Torah (Genesis to Joshua in the Bible). Both are
very close to each other and both mobilise various strategies to show why primitive
communism is not a viable social and political option. They are, in other words,
dystopian texts whose very structure is determined by blocking a utopian possibility.

Krista M. Bot, University of Alaska Anchorage
The Dystopian Urban Sublime in Fin-de-Sicle American Literary Naturalism

The scientific and technological innovations of the industrial revolution age represent
humankinds capacity to understand and control nature. Yet at the same time, the
industrial revolution also alienated, dominated, and controlled the modern human,
exposing human weakness and limitation. The mid-nineteenth centurys utopian promise
of a technological future soon developed into a fin-de-sicle skepticism about the future
of the sublime urban paradise. Within this turn from utopian idealism to dystopian reality,
American literary naturalism emerged to reveal the sordid aspects of the new industrial
society. Authors such as Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Upton
Sinclair present determined fictions infused with social Darwinism and a dystopian
projection of the future. Drawing connections between the American naturalist urban
landscape and the alienation of modern human experience, this paper traces the
subversive currents of dystopian thought as it is realized in the often violent and tragic
lives of modern naturalist characters.

Robert Briggs, Monash University
The Future of Prediction: Speculating on Gibsons Meta-Science-Fiction

Bruce Sterlings introduction to the celebrated cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades is
notable for its depiction of that SF movement not in terms of the traditional debate over
the allegorical versus the predictive functions of SF but rather in terms of its blend of
a particular literary style with a speculative approach to ideas. Cyberpunks connection
with the visionary, on this account, lies not in its credible insight into the future, but in
its speculative willingness to take an idea and unflinchingly push it past its limits.
Speculation understood as an opening to the future through a prizing of the
unthinkable, a reassessment and reinterpretation of the old notions is thus
counterpoised to the work of prediction, of narrowing down the possibilities by
determining the most likely of scenarios. It is in this context, and in the context of more
general debates about whether and how we can imagine the future, that recent work by
William Gibson cyberpunks pre-eminent writer takes on a strange kind of
metafictional quality. For in the so-called post-cyberpunk novels published by Gibson
since the early 1990s, the function of prediction itself seems displaced from the level of
narration and onto particular objects and characters appearing within the diegetic world.
Thus the narratives appear to speculate on the very activity of prediction that is
sometimes said to define the work of SF. Examining Gibsons post-cyberpunk stories
with a metafictional eye to how they imagine the future of prediction, therefore, may
enable us to reconsider not only SFs capacity to imagine the future but also the
worldly uses of SFs predictions.

Ian Buchanan, Charles Darwin University
Ideology and Utopia in the work of Fredric Jameson, or, The Counter-Revolution in the
Revolution

Ideology and Utopia are intricately linked in Fredric Jamesons work. On the one hand,
he calls upon Marxists to reinvent Marxism as an Ideology, that is, as a vibrant,
prophetic, Utopian call to a radical and systemic transformation of our world; and, on
the other hand, he argues that even the most degraded (his word) art forms such as
schlock airport thrillers must offer a certain utopian impulse (he calls it a fantasy bribe)
as their means of soliciting our interest, which is to say the works of mass culture cannot
be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as
well. This ambiguity is the structural condition of ideology itself; indeed, Jameson will
go so far as to say the very usefulness of the term is intimately related to its
ambiguousness rather than vitiated by it. At its best ideology is synonymous with the
utopian, it is the rousing cry of the revolutionary at the barricade; at its worst, however, it
is the counter-revolution in the revolution. It contains revolutionary ardour and reduces
the utopian to a screen for commodity fetishism, becoming simply a reason for buying
something that isnt as banal as merely wanting to own it. This still begs the question:
What is utopia? What is it that ideology cannot function without? What is it, in other
words, that is so powerful an attractor it can compel us to submit willingly to a social
system, namely capitalism, that is by definition so utterly iniquitous?

Verity Burgmann, University of Melbourne
Cognitive Mapping and Anti-Capitalist Utopianism

In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson
anticipates the emergence of cognitive mapping of a new and global type and
explains this as a code-word for class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of
kind. This paper explores Jamesons concept of cognitive mapping to suggest that, at
the end of the 1990s, the world witnessed the first glimmerings in radical political
practice of precisely such mapping in the efforts of the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate
globalisation movement. The utopian dimension to this movement is explored through
examination of the declared aims in its rhetoric and the euphoric responses to its potential
by its participants. The practical significance of utopian extremism in political agitation is
then investigated through consideration of the impact of the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate
globalisation movement on the institutions and systems it confronted.

Maria Elise Cevasco, University of So Paolo
Producing Criticism as Utopia: Fredric Jameson and Science Fiction

From wherever you look, committed cultural criticism seems to be in crisis. Its time
honored tradition of a negative hemeneutics no longer seems to satisfy the needs of a
time in which, to use Zizeks adaptation of Marx, people know what they are doing, but
do it anyway. In the past, there were clear allegiances to be made with revolutionary
social movements. Nothing of the kind seems to be on the horizon for the time being.
What is left for us to do? The works of Fredric Jameson constitute a whole field in
contemporary cultural theory. My paper aims at examining his essays and new book on
science fiction as ways of constructing a positive hermeneutics at these times of darkness
for committed cultural critique.

Lucian Chaffey, University of Melbourne
Uncharted Territories and Common Ground: Becoming Anomalous and Being
Homogenised in Buffy and Farscape

Using Deleuze and Guattaris notion of becoming-anomalous and Georges Batailles
study of heterology, this paper will compare Buffy and Farscape as examples of two
distinct approaches to alterity in sci-fi/fantasy serial television. In exploring other
possible worlds and selves, both Buffy and Farscape encounter the strange and unheard-
of, the repulsive and horrifying, the perverse and erotic, the transformative and
transgressive. Each show however deals with these encounters in very different ways.
While it has received much critical acclaim for its challenging content and style, Buffy
in fact resoundingly re-draws the lines between the normative and the anomalous,
restoring liberal but homogenised and highly moralised modes of identity and social
order. Farscape however, embraces the heterogeneous experiences and becomings-
anomalous of its characters. While a genre television text will inevitably butt up against
the limits of representation and the ideological context of its production, Farscape makes
a noble and persistent effort to sustain these challenges and navigate uncharted future
territories.

Christine Cheater, University of Newcastle
Return to the Dreamtime: Archie Wellers Land of the Golden Clouds

Archie Weller is one of Australias leading indigenous writers who won the Vogel Prize
for his first novel, Day of the Dog. In Land of the Golden Clouds Weller narrates the tale
of a band of misfits and outsiders who join together to defeat a common enemy. Set 3,000
years in the future in an Australia where present social boundaries have been destroyed
by nuclear war, Wellers novel has been described by critics as a saga of mythic
grandeur. But this novel also has political intent, a feature recognised by the Human
Rights Commission in 1998 when it awarded the novel the Human Rights Medal for
Literature for promoting the ideals of reconciliation. In this paper I will argue that while
Land of the Golden Clouds may read like fantasy according to western conventions, it
also displays the dual elements of mythic narrative and socio-political commentary found
in traditional Australian Aboriginal storytelling. As such, Wellers novel can be regarded
as an indigenous Australians attempt to imagine a future utopia where all men and
women respect each others beliefs and customs.

Amanda Cole, University of Sydney
The Wall: Utopian or Dystopian?

At its most general level, this paper will consider representations of the walled or gated
community in the utopian/dystopian literature of the past three decades. I will
contemplate how authors of such works have intended such walls to be understood
whether they have a utopian or dystopian aspect. In some cases, it will be seen, the wall
exists as both; the consequences of such will be explored. Particular attention will be paid
to Octavia E. Butlers works, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. The final
element of this paper will include an investigation as to how the use of walls affects
contemporary life in 2005, focussing specifically on the apparent surge in popularity of
the gated community, particularly throughout the poorer parts of wealthier cities of the
world.

Bryan Cooke, University of Melbourne
Can Children Dream of Electric Adulthoods?: Kazuo Ishiguro and the
Sanctioning of Imagined Futures

As a contested space of Utopian longings and dystopian realities, childhood is accorded
a special place in discussions about whether (and to what extent) it is possible to imagine
the future. This privilege comes not least from the fact that childhood is frequently
defined as a time in which such imaginings of the future are specifically sanctioned (at
once permitted and prohibited). Childhood is curiously demarcated as time set aside for
imagining the future (in the sense that this connotes boundless possibilities) and at the
same time for imagining the future, in the sense of learning to expect and thus deal with a
future that insofar as it is prepared for is regarded as inevitable. In this paper, I want to
explore some of the consequences of the idea of childhood as a space for the socially
sanctioned imagining of the future. I will do this through an analysis of Kazuo
Ishiguros recent novel Never Let Me Go. I will also explore the cluster of ideas revolving
around childhood and Utopia through a juxtaposition of the themes of Ishiguros novel
with Gnther Grasss reproach (in The Tin Drum) to ideas of childhood innocence, and
his critique of fascism as what happens when the future is no longer imagined except as a
suspension of the future in the permission to be an eternal child.

Guy Davidson, University of Wollongong
Samuel Delany, Post-Fordism, and the Future

Delanys novel Trouble on Triton (1976) describes a world in which social identity, and
even the ostensible ground of social identity, genetic being, are rendered profoundly
protean through the combination of a radical-democratic political order and futuristic
technologies. Taking their cue from Delanys own identification of the novel as an
ambiguous heterotopia, critics have read Triton, in accordance with Foucaults account
of the heterotopia, as proffering a disruption of an episteme (supposedly our own)
premised on reified identity forms. Drawing upon these readings, but also qualifying
them, in this paper I historicize Delanys disruptive project by relating it to the transition
to post-Fordist commodity culture, in which a proliferation of niche consumer
options intensify the fragmentation and lability of the person inherent within capitalism.
In arguing this, I do not propose that the novel simply iterates the politically regressive
tendencies of the post-Fordist historical moment but rather that it presents a potent
imagining of future post-capitalist possibilities through a critical engagement with the
actualities of capitalist development.

Rjurik Davidson, RMIT
Utopia and Transformational Strategy

Utopian fiction has a particular relationship to politics: in its images of desire it implies a
critique of the contemporary world and a call for some form of transformational politics.
It is thus a specifically political case of cognitive estrangement which implicitly invites
the reader to reconceptualise and transform the current social arrangements. Yet how do
we understand this polemical impulse in the context of the so-called end of history and
the current blockage of any transformational strategy? Is utopian fiction simply idle
dreaming utopian in Engels pejorative sense? If not how do we theorise its role? This
paper will examine these questions, as well as utopian science fictions own answers to
them. It will also feature original recorded interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin and
Norman Spinrad.

Michael Dieter, University of Melbourne
Peer-to-Peer Pressure: Filetrading, Multitude and the Promise of Radical
Democracy

As a critical inspiration, the Internet has continually animated utopian thought with
earlier images of the posthuman subject now coalescing into the metaphysical conception
of decentralized networking as a model of political transcendence under globalization.
With the Induce Act and the aftermath of MGM v. Grokster in the United States
currently generating significant political controversy over intellectual property rights
online, the legitimacy of peer-to-peer (P2P) filetrading has become a key political flash
point in the development of Internet technology. What can filetrading tell us about
collaborative networking and political mobilization in the new economy? In recent work
by Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the feasibility of non-representative
democracy has been introduced through the philosophical concept of multitude - a
postmodern consideration of class as singularities acting in common, as an irreducible
multiplicity. Functioning like a distributed social network, this aggregate collective is
characterized as being the equal opportunity of political resistance to Empire.
Conveniently, the concept also directly invokes Net protocol: mistrust authority, promote
decentralization. In this paper, I will consider the mass use of P2P in relation to the
utopian promise of multitude. Via comparative analysis of digital exchange over Napster,
Gnutella, Freenet and BitTorrent, the formation of collectivity will be contrasted with the
constitution of a digital gift economy - specifically, in relation to the influence of cultural
capital on collaboration and the ongoing precariousness of connectivity as the source of
underlying social tension.

Jacqueline Dutton, University of Melbourne
Five French Futures: Australia, Antarctica and ailleurs

The last decade, spanning the turn of the Millennium, the war on terror and cataclysmic
environmental phenomena all over the world, has produced a substantial body of
literature offering alternative futures to counteract the current apocalyptic trends.
Frances contribution to this literary movement provides a particular vision of the future
which may be located in either real places or imaginary spaces, representing various
points along the spectrum between utopia, dystopia and science-fiction. The five French
texts selected for this study take us progressively toward the outer limits of the French
perspective - both geographically and chronologically - beginning in Australia with
Claude Olliers Outback, ou larrire-monde (1995) set in 2003, and Michle Decousts
Le Rve de White Spring (2004) with an almost contemporaneous setting. We then
venture to Antarctica with Marie Darrieussecqs White (2003) set in 2015, and even
further into the future with Michel Houellebecqs most recent novel, La Possibilit dune
le (2005) encompassing action from the present to the year 4000, before returning to
France for Robert Sabatiers Le Sourire aux lvres (2000) set in 2040. Through reference
to these five examples, we will explore the association of real places, such as Australia
and Antarctica, with imaginary islands and interplanetary idylls in order to demonstrate
the inherent links between the different projections. In addition to the permanent figures
of deserts and islands, distance and isolation, the novels may also reveal new hopes for a
more integrated and fertile future in France.

Peter Fitting, University of Toronto
On Anti-Anti-Utopianism: Fredric Jamesons Archaeologies of the Future

Craig Garrett, RMIT
Possible Worlds Postmodernist Representations of Fictional Worlds

This paper discusses the postmodern literary theory of possible worlds by analysing
fictions that use alternative methods of representing the actual world (or worlds) we live
in, in an effort to challenge and critique notions of the actual world. I will discuss Lewis
Carrolls Alice In Wonderland, Jorge Luis Borgess Labyrinths, and my unpublished
novel Dreamriders, and examine how these texts create dystopias where the
unforeseeable happens, but still manage to encompass elements of the actual world in
order to question that world. These texts redefine peripheral parts of our real world as
dominant elements. The act of reconfiguring the margins by foregrounding them
reinterprets reality and raises significant questions about the world (or worlds) we
inhabit. As such, these texts use possible worlds to analyse the past, present and future of
the actual world without entering into the polemic.

Frank Garrett and Stephen Harding, Collin County Community College
Utopian Time and Space: Deconstructions of Babel

Throughout both history and literature, one can find two types of utopia: that as mode of
being and that as mode of becoming. The Garden of Eden, insofar as Western tradition is
concerned, serves as the paragon if not the original model of the first type of utopia.
We offer the Tower of Babel as the model of the latter utopia and interrogate the ways in
which this Babylonian construct serves as an archetypal analogy of manmade utopias
ever since, including Sir Thomas Mores Utopia. Finally, we analyze how this type
interacts, problematizes, interposes, and contaminates not only both modes of utopia but
the converse that is, apocalypse as well in its concurrent attempt for historicism and
drive toward atemporality.

Timothy Goldsmith, University of Melbourne
We are Now in the Fifth Seal: Apocalyptic Narrative and the Waco Siege

If the utopian community expresses a withdrawal from history, that is, a desire to create a
localised preview of the Millennium, how then are we to understand the apocalyptic
redoubts of survivalists in rural areas of the United States? These are often armed
religious groups who see themselves in terms of projected narratives (Khachig Toloyan).
They have not withdrawn from history; indeed they imagine themselves as playing
pivotal roles in the events by which the Apocalypse unfolds. Yet they have isolated their
communities from a society that they perceive as dystopian and soon to make war on
them. This worldview can historically be seen to develop in fundamentalist religion, with
its distinctive hermeneutic of reading apocalyptic prophecy as being fulfilled in ones
own time. My paper will examine this issue in relation to the Branch Davidians, a cult
notorious for its violent confrontation with US authorities near Waco in 1993.

Roberto Gonzlez-Casanovas, University of Auckland
Primitivist Utopias vs. Modernist Dystopias in Latin American Fiction: Cultural
Time Travel as Myth and Parable in Borges, Carpentier, Fuentes

This paper considers the cultural politics and poetics of the crisis of modernity in pivotal
works of 20
th
-century Latin American literature that deal with crosscultural time travel:
Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones (1944), Alejo Carpentiers Los pasos perdidos (The Lost
Steps 1953), and Carlos Fuentes Terra Nostra (1975). It reexamines modernity in terms
of utopian/dystopian discourses of progress and decadence, and analyses metaphors of
primitivism in relation to precolonial and postcolonial ideologies of indigeneity/hybridity
and First/Third Worlds. It also engages myth criticism of Frye and Campbell along with
postcolonial historicism of Mignolo, Pastor, Todorov et al. Such a comparative reading of
the three works shows how they question cultural evolution and crisis through aestheticist,
typological, and/or historicist models. In the process they come to challenge literary
realism, transcend ideological dualities, and establish new mythologies in Latin America
as a renewable frontier culture beyond the historical constructs of the primitive or modern.

Shelley Gurney, University of Otago
The Fall to Dystopia: The Nmenore Effect

Platos model society, Atlantis has epitomized the idea of utopia for millennia, and has
been mentioned as examined in literature throughout the Ages. J. R. R. Tolkien, however,
takes the Atlantis story and modifies it to illustrate a perfect societys fall to dystopia
through greed, pride and fear in his version called the Akallabth or The Downfall of
Nmenore. This story is worth examining as it looks at the human influence rather than
the technological influence which is usually associated with a societys fall into dystopia
in science fiction and fantasy literature. In this paper, I wish to examine how Nmenore
fell into ruin, the reasons why this came about, and how it is a successful twentieth
century retelling of the Platonic myth.

Karen Hall, University of Western Australia
The Rape of the Solar System: The Technological Past and Future in Lost Race
Stories, 1920-1950

While lost race stories are often seen as anachronistic returns to the past, lacking
scientific novum or interest in technology, I argue that in the first half of the twentieth
century, lost race stories participated in a complex dialogue about the future. Lost race
stories published in the science fiction pulp magazines depicted technologically advanced
societies, frequently of Atlantean origin, and expanded from the blank spaces of Earth
to an interplanetary scale. These stories provided a venue in which to imagine a
technological past that validated the technological future prophesised in the pulps. They
provided the same validation for human colonisation of space, familiarising space by
mapping it into the ideological framework set up in the earlier lost race tradition.

Margaret Henderson, University of Queensland
The Australian Lesbian Body as the Flesh made Word made Utopia

New social movements need their utopias, and the womens movement is no exception.
This paper traces one particular form of feminist utopianism, namely that embodied in the
figure of the lesbian. The lesbian has always been a highly charged category for the
modern womens movement, on one hand producing anxiety and ambivalence with its
supposed divisive and alienating quality, as typified by Betty Friedans phrase, the
lavender menace; and alternately being source of revolutionary hope when positioned
as vanguard of womens liberation. I analyse the emergence of the lesbian as utopian in
two sites: Australian academic feminism, and Australian lesbian pornography. In the late
1980s onwards, and after a period of relative silence, the eroticised lesbian becomes a key
way in which Australian feminism and one of its significant others, non-radical feminist
lesbians, attempt to negotiate the changed political, intellectual, and social context
signified by the term postmodernism, and hence to replenish its utopian imaginary.

Eugene W. Holland, Ohio State University
History, Time, and Utopian Thought in Deleuze & Guattari

There are significant differences between Deleuze and Guattaris concept of utopia and
the vision of empire and multitude presented by Hardt and Negri despite the clear and
profound influence of the former on the latter. The aim of this paper is to show how the
concept of utopia in Deleuze and Guattari is linked to the vocation of philosophy, which
is the creation of concepts. The papers trajectory moves from the concepts of time and
the virtual/actual distinction presented in Difference and Repetition, through the very
different views of history presented in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
and concludes with an examination of What is Philosophy, where Deleuze and Guattari
discuss utopia most explicitly.

Enju Hwang, University of Essex
Utopia and Violence in Late Capitalist Society: J. G. Ballards Detective Thriller
Trilogy of Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Millennium People

As a science fiction writer, J. G. Ballard writes about the future, but the near future. The
settings of Ballards novels are Utopian gated communities in suburbs where residents
enjoy their wealth. The places are luxurious and relaxing; however, Utopian dreams soon
turn out to be nightmare-like Dystopia which is full of perverse behaviours, violence and
crimes. In these three novels, violence is regarded as a therapy to survive in late
capitalist society: In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom (Super-Cannes,
264). The victims of the crimes seem to have nothing to do with the original purpose of
the crimes. However, it turns out that the real target of the crimes is late capitalist society
itself, not the victims. I would like to show that the main cause of the meaningless crimes
in Ballards novels is psychological problems such as boredom and discontent in the
modern world. Here, what is at stake is to understand the relation among late capitalism,
super-modernity and violence. In my paper, I would like to discuss what actually causes
Dystopia which is at first regarded as Utopia, focusing on the psychological effect related
to modern architecture and topography, and the socioeconomic network of power in the
late capitalism. I will use theories of Anthony Vidler, Marc Aug and Deleuze to support
my viewpoint.

David Jack, Monash University
Les Particules Elementaires: Science Fiction as Historical Novel

The Utopian moment in Michel Houellebecqs Les Particules Elementaires coincides,
within the novel, with a third metaphysical mutation the first being Christianity, and the
second, empiricism. The result is a race of post-humans who through this transvaluation
of values and a little genetic modification, achieve a perfect society free from suffering
and desire. This mutation itself is stages as the inevitable montee en puissance des
scientifiques, in the wake of the failure of the so-called human sciences to come up with
a new paradigm. The imperative at the end of the novel, LA MUTATION NE SERA
MENTALE MAIS GENETIQUE, omits, however, a third possibility, namely, the social.
I want to argue that the exclusion of the social from the narrative horizon of
Houellebecqs novel is to be read as a symptom of something else, something Fredric
Jameson has called a reality paralysis in late capitalism. Houellebecqs novel resolves
this deadlock by way of an interesting formal development.

Craig Johnson, Macquarie University
On the Subject of Scar Construction, Progress in Architecture, and the Aesthetic of
Impossible Buildings

It is widely acknowledged that utopian thought is in parenthesis today, which means, if it
is true, few people have thought seriously in utopian terms. The most productive cultural
site for this kind of thought is SF, but there is also a tradition outside of this mode
practised by architectural innovators, some of whom have never had any of their designs
realised; indeed, in many cases this impossibility is what motivates their aesthetics. The
aim of this paper is to trace the aesthetics and politics of architectural fantasy in the work
of Lebbeus Woods (postwar reformations), Friedrich Kiesler (endless house), and Tacita
Dean (bubble house), with a view to locating a new ways of conceiving the often well-
worn paths of the desire called Utopia.

Graham Jones, University of Melbourne
Imag(in)ing the simulacrum: Gattaca and the dystopian future-past

This paper will examine the depiction of the subversive double in the science fiction
film Gattaca. In the films narrative the protagonist Vincent Freeman, through his
imitation of astronaut Jerome Morrow (and in pursuit of his unsullied dream to reach
the stars) infiltrates the elite institution of Gattaca and potentially threatens the
oppressive hierarchy on which it is founded. However, more careful examination of the
text reveals contradictory investments in the notions of authenticity and self-
determination that it invokes as an alternative to the constraints stemming from State-
sanctioned ethical, social and genetic engineering. I will use Deleuzes critique of
Platonic mimesis and his notion of the simulacrum to open up and critique these aspects
of the film, whilst also contrasting it with another rival approach founded upon
Baudrillards similar, yet different, account of simulation.

Paul Jones, University of New South Wales
Tragic Utopianism and Critique in Raymond Williamss Sociology of Culture

This paper draws on some of the arguments of my recent Raymond Williamss Sociology
of Culture: a critical reconstruction (Palgrave, 2004). The role of utopianism in Williams
does seem to be constantly balanced by that of modern tragedy. While the sense of the
tragic is undoubtedly informed by historical crises such as Stalinism, there is also a
recurrent theme of a tragic self that cannot imagine an alternative future and so is inclined
to act in highly predictable conformist ways. Interestingly, this thesis informs not only
Williamss overtly literary and political writings but also his ventures into critiques of
the key neo-conservative post(?)-utopian sociological figure, Daniel Bell, as well as that
of perhaps the template figure for his new conformism thesis, Marshall McLuhan.
Utopianism thus provides one means of linking Williamss work on means of
communication with his broader sociology of culture and sociology of intellectuals. At
the heart of this body of work, however, is a continued effort to maintain the practice of
critique immanent critique in something like the Frankfurt sense via strategies for
revitalizing the very cultural forms that might bear immanent transformative values.

Darren James Jorgensen, University of Western Australia
The Indigenous Utopian

Indigenous societies have often been represented as utopian, as people living in an
authentic and communitarian way. While they sublimate the desire for such a life, these
representations also contain the discomforting stasis of utopian space, their timelessness
opening the gap between desire and its impossible fulfilment in a past that lacks a future.
This paper thinks through utopian primitivism in science fiction with such indigenous
representations. In both cases, the inauthentic reveals itself, and is sometimes affirmed,
by an authenticity that is in decline. This is supplemented by a generally more recent
imagination of the unforeseeable that locates the indigenous in the future rather than in
the past. This dialogue between past and future, stasis and the unforseen, configures some
of the tensions of utopian thought and opens it to questions about the historical structure
of its imagination.

Reema Kansal, Nehru University, New Delhi
I would quite like to see us continue: Pratchetts Understated Utopia

Terry Pratchett is the creator of the Discworld a flat, circular planet which is carried
through space by a giant turtle and four elephants and has written 34 Discworld novels
since 1983, the 34
th
titled Thud awaiting release in October, 2005. The Discworld shares
all the beauty and sordidness of our own world so that one might feel, at first glance, that
Pratchetts vision is neither utopic nor dystopic but a masterly comic (and at times darkly
satirical) representation of our past and present as we know it. The standard tropes of
fantasy fiction such as a quest, adventure, war, revolution, mystery and so on are all there
in the Discworld novels and yet, everything seems to be there to be made fun of and
mocked. This paper proposes to show how the Discworld novels really aim to point
towards the future of humanity, with the authors central concern that our species should
continue to inhabit this planet and not be wiped out like so many others. And that is in
itself a utopia, considering all the present possibilities of doom for the human race.

Yasuo Kawabata, Japan Womens University
Orwellian Mother Goose: Dystopian Use of the little chunks of history in Nineteen
Eighty-Four

This paper aims to re-evaluate George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by studying
the effective function of Oranges and Lemons, the nursery rhyme which Orwell used in
his story-telling. In spite of the important role the old rhyme plays in the plot, its use has
been curiously underestimated or, to be more correct, has been almost overlooked in most
studies on the novel. This neglect is, it seems, due to the general inclination to see the
novel exclusively as a political message or a prophecy and to close ones eyes to the
technical skill with which Orwell constructed his story. His skill deserves, I believe, more
attention and, by taking heed of it, an alternative reading might become possible. It is in
this prospect that I attempt to examine the authors skilful handling of the rhyme in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sylvia Kelso
Or Failing That, Invent: Writing a Feminist Utopia in the 21
st
Century

Though convergences of SF and Utopian fiction now site Utopia in the future, Samuel
Delany considers SF makes the future a device for significantly distorting the present.
Fredric Jameson terms this failure to imagine the future, but agrees with Will Wright that
(all popular) narratives are a form of reasoning about current society. The past, too,
though another country, is accessible only through contemporary views. Thus, though
Jameson calls the historical novel an empty form, like modern fantasy, it uses the past
to reason about and potentially re-imagine the present. The SF sub-genre of alternate
history has produced dystopias like Kim Newmans Anno Dracula, but its revised pasts
might also posit Utopias whose futures would be a very different Now. This paper reports
on writing a (feminist) Utopia in the 21
st
century, set at one moment when history [was]
moving (Raymond Williams): the still enigmatic upheaval at the end of the Aegean
Bronze age, where an alternate history now begins as Greeks lose the Trojan War.

Duanfang Lu, University of Sydney
Modernity as Utopia: The Chinese Peoples Commune Revisited

This paper explores an intriguing aspect of Third World modernismthe utopianisation
of modernitythrough an investigation into the complex relationship between the
peoples commune movement and Chinese modernity (19581961). Concurrent with
sweeping institutional changes, the state mobilised peasants, architects and planners to
make proposals for the newly established communes. Built on fantasies of industrial and
social modernity, commune modernism was directed by a faith in the possibility of
overcoming the past to create a brand new world. Yet with various inflicting elements
within a Third World context, the mass utopia only left a history of disasters in its wake.
By looking into the curious combination of modernist and utopian elements in various
visions of the commune, this paper proposes seeing the Chinese commune movement as a
project to articulate an alternative modernity that had much in common with modernist
programs in other parts of the world.

Dougal McNeill, University of Melbourne
Jameson, Cyberpunk and Exhausted Realism

Fredric Jameson recently suggested that cyberpunk is sending back more reliable
information about the contemporary world than an exhausted realism and that
cyberpunk and Science Fiction now operate with real epistemological value as
inventories of the modern system. Instead of viewing science fiction as a way of knowing
the future, these comments suggest a way of understanding the form as an aufgehoben
realism, the new totalizing form with which to approach globalization. Realisms, for the
Marxist at least, suggest dystopias of the present; could they instead be read to assist in
constructing archaeologies of the future or, as Jameson seems to suggest, is realism a
reified form drained of utopian potential by the rhythms of late capitalism and the
penetration of representation? Tracking the relationship between Science Fiction and
realism in Jamesons work, this paper suggests ways that each form implies potential
political futures through the reliable information they send.

Peter Marks, University of Sydney
All- Seeing Eyes: Looking at the Future of Surveillance

Even before September 11, surveillance entailed not merely scrutinising and recording
what is happening, but also predicting what might happen. From Platos Guardians
through Orwells Thought Police and beyond, surveillance has been a recurrent concern
in utopias and dystopias, many of which have tried to speculate on, as well as alter or
even arrest its development. Today, new surveillance technologies as well as government
and public responses to real and imagined dangers challenge our understanding of
privacy, identity, security, authority and freedom. Are we moving towards a world of
hypersurveillance, where simulated surveillance achieves perfect control, or further
along the path of digital discrimination, where our digital identities are sorted and
classified using categories unknown to us? What do utopias and dystopias predict about
the future of surveillance? By examining recent literary and cinematic works, this paper
explores what they teach us about potential surveillance worlds, and about the politics of
acceptance and resistance.

Anne Maxwell, University of Melbourne
Imagining a Future Aesthetics of Human Beauty: Philip K. Dicks The Golden
Man and Ursula Le Guin's The New Atlantis

In her article Future Perfect: the Elusive Ideal Type (2004), Christine Codgell makes
the observation that in their bid to improve both the intelligence level and the physical
appearance of the human race, designers and anthropologists attached to the old eugenics
movement exhorted the ideal of beauty embodied in sculptures like the Apollo Belvedere,
but they also turned to the sorts streamlined designs to be found in nature, such as those
characterising birds, fish and predatory animals. This paper explores the role that
classical ideals of beauty, including the notion of streamlining, have played in recent
science fiction and utopian writing. Taking Philip K Dicks The Golden Man and
Ursula Le Guins The New Atlantis as somewhat paradigmatic of recent science fiction,
I ask whether classical notions of beauty and efficiency continue to hold sway in the
present moment despite the decline of the old eugenics, and if so why this might be.

Nick Mercer, University of Western Australia
Postmodern Social Assemblages and the General Intellect: The Utopia of
Immanence and the Internet

...it is to posit revolution as a plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute
survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here and now in
the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is
betrayed. The word utopia therefore designates that conjunction of philosophy, or of the
concept, with the present milieu - political philosophy - Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari in What is Philosophy?
How can the internet be situated in the context of Deleuze and Guattaris formulation of
utopia? That is, how, as a site of struggle between the cyberutopian ethos that guides the
open-source initiatives and to a more radical extent, piracy, and the more overtly
capitalist propagators of a closed system that seek to patent and control the source-
codes of operating systems and software, such as Microsoft, does the internet imagine the
future of human/social communication in the present day conflicts in communicational
propriety? My paper addresses these questions in reference to Hardt and Negris
particular formulation of Deleuzian philosophy and Marxist politics, specifically, by
locating powerful social assemblages that provide alternative aggregates to the hegemony
of capital. Utopia thereby resides in the forces of social production, of the internet as
Marxs general intellect, to actualise new collective bodies through the currents of
communicative media.

Andrew Milner, Monash University
Framing Catastrophe: The Problem of Ending in Dystopian Fiction

Margaret Atwood recently claimed that the Appendix on Newspeak in Orwells Nineteen
Eighty-Four and the Historical Notes to her own The Handmaids Tale are each framing
devices designed to blunt the force of dystopian inevitability. The paper assesses this claim
through an examination of how the problem of ending is handled in three dystopias that had
provided Orwell with a science-fictional generic context: the French translation of
Zamyatins My as Nous autres; Huxleys Brave New World; and apeks R.U.R.. The paper
develops an ideal typology of dystopian endings, arranged around measures of internality
and externality applied both to the formal question of narrative structure and to the
dystopian content of the imaginary worlds represented. It concludes with a discussion of
Williamss tenses of the imagination, arguing that the subjunctive future perfect is the
ruling tense in dystopia.

Yoriko Moichi, University of Edinburgh
Imagining Utopia in Contemporary Japanese Novels

This paper analyses three contemporary Japanese novels published after the 1950s and
considers how the writers explore forms and themes in the face of postmodern
consciousness. The juxtaposition of different cultures will show that utopia in Japan has
gained a new life, offering some unthought possibilities in the future of utopian
literature. The novels discussed in this paper are: Abe Kobos Inter Ice Age 4 (1959),
Inoue Hisashis Kirikirijin (1981) and Murakami Harukis Hard-boiled Wonderland and
the End of the World (1985). Abes novel brings the concept of the everyday into utopian
literature, depicting a future far removed from our imagination. Inoues novel manifests
the possibility of creating a downsized, egalitarian utopia. Murakamis novel explores
utopia in the cultural styles of advanced capitalism.

Alex Murray, University of Melbourne
Tombstones to a Vanished Future: Dystopia, Architecture and the Persistence of
Romanticism in Contemporary British Culture

In Michael Moorcocks Mother London, the central character, Joseph Kiss, refers to the
public housing blocks that litter London as Tombstones to a vanished future, our single
chance at Grace. For Moorcock, as for a range of contemporary British authors and
cultural critics, such as Iain Sinclair, J.G. Ballard and Patrick Wright, the architecture of
postwar London, which they associate with the Modern Movement, represents the
spectacular failure of the postwar belief in rational, technological utopia. For these
writers the modern movement is instead synonymous with a form of social, aesthetic and
political devastation. In this paper, I will argue that this response to the modern
movement is the persistence of a Romantic ideology that, in rejecting the rationalising
nature of modern architecture as an aberration, persists in the fracturing of rationalisation
and subjectivation that Alain Touraine regards as the perpetual crisis of modernity, the
vanished future that denies any belief in the utopian.

Ross Murray, University of Western Sydney
The Australian Dream Becomes Nightmare Visions of Suburbia in Australian
Science-Fiction

However much Australia is associated with open spaces, the fact remains that the
majority of Australias population lives in crowded suburbs clustered around coastal
cities. This paper will undertake a critical examination of utopian and dystopian visions
of Australian suburbia as portrayed in a range of Australian science fiction short stories,
such as Frank Roberts It Could Be You and Greg Egans The Way She Smiles, The
Things She Says, written from the 1960s to the present. The cognitive space of
Australian suburbia in science fiction is a social, familial, technological, and
psychological nexus producing ideas which map the future in small and intense ways.
Using psychoanalytic theory, Fredric Jamesons theories of postmodernism, Foucaults
idea of panopticism, and urban planning and sociological frameworks, this paper will
explore how the portrayal of the suburb and its inhabitants in Australian science fiction
reflects anxieties about reality, identity, violence, and consumerism.

Bjorn Nansen, University of Melbourne
Medical Technologys Utopian Imaginary and the Comatose Limen

Idealist constructions of technological utopianism in Western discourses of progress
manifest in medical developments that transcend limits. From transplantation and
implantation to technological intervention and regulation of the bodys internal organs
and rhythms, medicine has practiced and imagined a future that transforms the body,
prolonging life, forestalling death and intimating towards immortality. However, the
development of these medical technologies has resulted in the unforeseen proliferation of
people connected to life-support machines, such as coma and persistent vegetative state
patients, who literalise a cyborg state, and contradict the liberating promise of medical
discourse, existing in a state of inertia and dependence. Lives mediated by technological
instruments exist on the boundary, intervening between taxonomies of life and death,
renegotiating the definition of death. These marginal lives generate both instability in
categorisation and anxiety in popular response, and conform to Victor Turners notion of
the liminal, or in-between state. I am extending his limited definition to acknowledge
emergent liminal existences in-between the human and nonhuman, as articulated by
Bruno Latours hybrid identities. Latour argues modernitys attempt to separate and
purify the subject and object has resulted in a proliferation of hybrid entities that do not
fit comfortably into neat categorisation, generating feelings of ambivalence and
confusion. Similarly Mary Douglas has argued that traditionally human culture has been
intolerant of ambiguity, and that our concept of dirt and pollution has been more
concerned with violation of our classification system than with hygiene. I will argue that
the anxiety surrounding these liminal or hybrid figures conforms to Douglas and
Latours theses, contra medical discourses of the utopian imaginary of technological
development and enhancement, as articulated in two science fiction films, namely
Michael Crichtons Coma and David Cronenbergs The Dead Zone. I am taking a broad
definition of science fiction, contextualising it as a literary genre involving the imagined
impact of science on society. These films also fall within the emergent popular genre of
the medical thriller. These films articulate popular cultural anxieties concerning
technological medicines intervention of the body, particularly fear in Coma of
commercial harvesting of organs, and revulsion in The Dead Zone of this state
transforming the human into something other.

Craig Norris, Monash University
The Manga Effect: Techno-dystopia in Japanese Animation

The manga effect was part of Manga Entertainments marketing campaign during the
1990s and included scenes of hi-tech weapons, karate violence, demon sex, and gun-
slinging girls, all set to loud heavy-metal music. The manga effects dystopic images of a
violent post-apocalyptic future summarised the dominant public image of manga and
anime (Japanese comics and animation) in the West during the 1990s. However, it was
within these images of techno-dystopia that fans in Australia considered and
experimented with new identities and combinations of identities. In this paper, I will
explore how the fans moved beyond the industry and popular medias sex and violence
dystopic vision of manga and anime to develop their own counter-discourse of manga
imagery that opened up new possibilities for imagining the future from an Australian
perspective. I will focus on the framing of Akira as a landmark techno-dystopic anime
that fans and critics used to broaden animes public image and then consider the
alternative appropriation of animes cyberpunk imagery by dance and nightclub culture.

Liam ODonnell, LaTrobe University
An Analysis of Fredric Jamesons Concept of the Utopian

In this paper I analyze Fredric Jamesons concept of the utopian, and I discuss the central
role of this concept in his overall theoretical system. This analysis proceeds via a
commentary on Jamesons essay, Modernity, Utopia and Death, which itself discusses
literary texts by Platonov and Kafka. Jamesons concept of the utopian will be placed in
its philosophical context through an examination of its relation to the thought of Bloch,
Heidegger, Schopenhauer and Marx. I will examine the claims that the utopian is the
desire to desire, and a moment of negativity that occurs via an experience of askesis, an
experience that only seems to be accessible through the aesthetic.

Surya Parekh, University of California
The (Science Fictional) Future to Hegels Philosophical System Utopia, Dystopia,
and Sexual Difference

Hegel closes his account of the New World in the famous Lectures on the Philosophy of
World-History by suggesting that America and he is not certain which one will be the
land of the future. In the Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel augments this account by
commenting that epic poetries of the future will probably write about the triumph of
living rationality in America over the withdrawal into particulars in Europe. In positing
such a utopia to not only his philosophy of history but also to his scientific philosophy,
Hegel needs to draw on the fiction of the inability of the original New World inhabitants
or Aboriginal to copulate. Thus, Hegels free future is one where the original inhabitants
need to have vanished. This paper analyses the use of these fictions in the construction of
a type of sexual difference between a historicised heteronormative family paradigm and
an atemporal and natural difference to it in imagining an aesthetic and historical future
to Hegels scientific philosophy.

Anoma Pieris, University of Melbourne
Urban Dystopias and their Utopian Imaginings: The Nation on the Net

Behind the dystopic disruptions of everyday life caused by acts of terrorism lie utopian
imaginaries, where relationships between ethnic groups, nation-states and global partners
are momentarily suspended to make way for other, alternative versions of reality.
Nowhere is this captured more successfully than on the web where virtual battles over
national geographies construct and deconstruct idealistic representations of imagined
communities and subject positions. For Sri Lanka, a country torn by ethnic conflict for
over twenty years, national life continues uninterrupted in virtual space, even as its cities
are torn by separatist bombs and military confrontations. This paper studies the emotive
and highly contested struggle over history, geography and alternative futures in the
nation on the net.

Greg Pritchard, Deakin University
Ecotopias and Dystopias: The Rift between Deep Ecology and Humanism

Ernest Callenbachs Ecotopia, published in 1975 but set in the imagined world of 1999,
posits a utopian world of environmentally sound West Coast Americans who have
seceded from the East Coast. Is it possible to imagine such a world, based on Deep green
principles, or is there something inimical to Western humanism that banishes this
possibility? Luc Ferry, in his work The New Ecological Order (1992), argues this case,
and sides with the latter. This paper will take an opposing view, that to imagine such a
utopian world as Callenbachs Ecotopia, an ecological science fiction, one must critically
examine the idea of humanism.

Stephen Pritchard and Lynette Russell, Monash University
I dont think the system works: Exploring Utopias and Dystopias through the
Politics, Ethics, Human Values of Star Wars

Prior to the release of Revenge of the Sith, the Star Wars movies could be read as a
moral narrative that represented a struggle of good against evil through a series of
oppositions between nature and machine, democracy and militaristic/technocratic
dictatorship. As such George Lucass series of five movies presented both utopic and
dystopic versions of a possible future (or as he would have it, a past). However, with the
most recent installment, what initially appeared to be the inversion of humanist good,
became a tragic narrative which was inseparably tied to its opposite. The empire, rather
than being the antithesis of the democratic principles that the republic is taken to
unproblematically represent, could be read as a subverted form of those same ideals; just
as the dark anti-hero who represented the transformation from human being to machine at
the physiological level, was in fact more human than the Jedi, the champion of the
republic. This paper will examine how through the problematisation of such oppositions
the Star Wars epic promotes a critical reading of contemporary ethics and politics and
poses significant questions about the meaning of human and human values, nature of
freedom, political idealism and democracy and good and evil.

Jose Maria Ramos, Swinburne University of Technology
Situating the World Social Forum in Historical and Modern Utopian Contexts

At the turn of the century social movements converged to contest and resist neo-liberal
globalisation. This has seen the emergence of the World Social Forum (WSF) and a
social forum movement over the last 5 years. Now, this veritable movement of
movements and open space for the exploration of proposals and alternatives to neo-liberal
globalisation proclaim that Another world is possible! What was once the anti-
globalisation movement has been re-dubbed the alter-globalisation movement. This
article asks whether this social forum movement is a utopian movement. How does the
WSF fit into existing frameworks for utopianism / utopian movements, and is alter
globalism indeed utopianism? Using perspectives from macrohistory, and literature on
civilisational change, this article examines both dystopia / eutopia and structure / agency
dualisms, in relation to the social forum movement, and contemporary science fiction.

Kate Rigby, Monash University
(Not) By Design: Utopian Moments in the Creation of Canberra

This paper addresses the uses and abuses of utopianism from an ecophilosophical
perspective and with respect to the (re)creation of the polis, understood both as urban
space and as locus of identity. My focus is on a particular place, namely Canberra, the
creation of which, as a new kind of capital for a new nation, manifests a distinct eco-
utopian impulse, above all in the vision of its principal architects, Walter Burley and
Marion Mahony Griffin, together with John Sulman, a leading proponent of the Garden
City Movement. The case of Canberra will be considered as exemplifying in particular a
central tension within the conceptuality of eco-utopianism, namely between the ambition
to remake the world and the ethos of attunement to the given. From this perspective,
design is disclosed as both absolutely necessary and necessarily problematic.

Guy Rundle, Arena
Promethean politics and the twenty-first century

Into the vacuum of the social imagination left by the collapse of the global left (as
anything other than a movement of refusal), a new spirit of prometheanism has
developed a celebration of the transformative capacity of technology, on the natural
world and the species genome. This is present in both everyday culture and in the work of
radical promethean writers and groups such as the London-based Spiked group. Such
Prometheanism has become a science-fictive utopianism in action handing over the
historical agency to the technosciences out of boredom and frustration with a failed
present. In this paper I will look at the roots of such trends within the Marxist tradition,
and argue that its promethean, rather than its socialist dimension has always been its key
driver, and that both past moments (the October revolution, Italian fascism, Maoism) and
likely future (a politics without a left) can be re-interpreted in this light. The paper will
draw on writers such as Furedi, Bauman, the Arena tradition, French postmodernism,
Jameson and others to sketch a radically rethought politics of the 21
st
century.

Graham St John, University of Queensland
Rave Ascension: Global Dance Culture and the Transhuman Dispensation

Transhumanist narratives are redolent within contemporary electronic dance music
cultures (EDMCs). From acid house, to drum n bass, to psy-trance, global dance cultures
are repositories for utopic fantasies and millenarian desires, anticipating the ascensionist
awakening into consciousness, facilitating the necessary dispensation in a troubled
world. Exploring quasi-scientific and extropian discourse, the presentation investigates
why EDMCs have become widely held catalysts for liberation, freedom and
transformation. Dance cultures appear to evince that which John Bozeman regards as a
technological millenarianism pervading Western popular culture whereby technological
innovation is expected to bring forth a better future beginning here and now. Frequently
promised contexts for delivery from the present human condition, EDMCs appear to
exemplify the techno-liberationist process Erik Davis outlines in his eloquent Techgnosis:
Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. As global (sub)cultures probably
unprecedented in their rapid absorption and repurposing of sophisticated (digital and
Internet) technologies, EDMCs actively encourage utopian claims of post-human
becoming.

Ana Sala-Oviedo and Stephen Loo, University of South Australia
Virtually Science Fiction: Nanotechnology and the Emergence of Architecture

Following Western epistemology, where occularcentrism constantly rejects overt
embodiment as seen in cyberpunk writers' descriptions of leaving the meat behind,
and in artificial intelligence theories stating that minds are better off without bodies the
metaphysics of Virtual Reality in science fiction, as in architecture, shortchanges its
ontological relevance. In reappropriating flesh and touch, nanotechnology challenges
the system providing an alternative logic of relations to space. The spatial qualities of the
nanoscale are as rich and varied as traditional anthropomorphic space, and encompass
familiar architectural raw materials such as texture, memory, history, gravity and
enclosure. In nanotechnology great changes can be brought by small manipulations of
material. Nano-spaces are ripe for architectonic instantiation and appropriation and they
could change our ontological relationship with our surroundings. The paper discusses
how the indexical materiality of nanotechnology is immanent with a virtuality that stems
from its ontogenesis. Taking cues from Antonio Negris constitution of the multitude
and Brian Massumis work on onto-topology, the paper discusses science fiction as
positing alternative logics of relation to materiality. Within a topological relationship to
bodies, what does it mean for social politics, manifest in architecture and urbanism, and
understood as lived events, to be conceptualised as ontogenetic and ontopoetic, namely
emergent? Just as the body lives between dimensions, designing for it requires operating
between logics (Massumi). This is a pragmatic practice where architecture and urbanism
enter into relations, and experiment with conditions whether literary, biological,
electronic, social or political as an utopia which cannot be pre-reflected, in order to see
what emerges.

Carlo Salzani, Monash University
Modus Potentialis: Robert Musils Utopia Without Qualities

The paper analyses the concept of Utopia in Robert Musils novel The Man Without
Qualities. Against an influential criticism by Lukcs, who branded Musil a nostalgic and
reactionary conservative, the paper argues that Utopia is the founding category of the
novel: beside a pars destruens, the deconstruction of all the traditional values and
categories, Musil proposes a pars construens, an endless recherche for a lost Totality.
Musils utopia, though, does not present a content, the picture of the perfect city; it is a
utopia without qualities, pure form, experiment, essay, error, not a state but a mode,
and therefore non-place, u-topia. Musils utopian mode is to be individuated in the
concept of possibility: the loss of all qualities in Musils anti-hero opens the way to
infinite possibilities, so that a man without qualities becomes a man-for-possibilities, a
man-for-utopia.

Lyman Tower Sargent, Victoria University of Wellington
Eutopias and Dystopias of Science

I propose to survey attitudes to science found in the English-language utopia from early
in that tradition to the present. While the Manuels correctly identified a strong pro-
science stream in early utopianism, and Nell Eurich in her Science in Utopia: A Mighty
Design (1967) noted a positive scientific utopianism, I argue that the tradition has been
more ambivalent about science. And, stressing the 20
th
century, I show how ambivalence
turned to negativity. My survey begins with a man who clearly believed that science
could bring about eutopia. Francis Bacons New Atlantis is an explicit statement of the
power of science properly used, and many other utopian writers in the 17
th
century made
similar arguments. But even in the 18
th
century, when the ability of human reason to
improve human life might seem unquestioned, Jonathan Swift inhabits his rational
eutopia with horses, not humans. In the 19
th
century, when science and technology would
seem to be driving all before them, there are many eutopias that question whether this is
the correct direction. In the early 20
th
century Francis Galton seems to believe that
eugenics properly applied can achieve a significantly better society, but almost
coterminous with Galton, there is the rise of the dystopia, which regularly sees science as
the culprit.

Robert Savage, Monash University
Space Opera. On Michael Tippetts New Year

Forget Tippett! was critic Norman Lebrechts advice to his readers at the beginning of
this, the composers centenary year. Forget who? was their probable response. Sir
Michael Tippetts hundredth birthday is nonetheless as good an occasion as any to revisit
his fifth and final opera, New Year (1989), which thematises precisely the utopian
potential of anniversary celebrations. Whether the opera is worth revisiting is another
matter: premiered to bored applause and lacklustre reviews, it gained a measure of
notoriety when its telecast attracted the lowest ratings ever recorded on BBC2. Tippetts
libretto, about a dashing space pilot from Nowhere Tomorrow who voyages to present-
day Terror Town in search of orphan girl Jo-Ann, was lambasted at the time for its sheer
daftness, while his music was accused of a bland eclecticism too trendy for its own good.
There have been no performances since, and it seems highly unlikely that Forget-Me-
Not, the operas flying saucer, will be sighted in the foreseeable future. So why not
forget Tippetts utopian space opera? As I hope to show, this question elides with another:
why not forget the utopian space of opera itself?

Paul Sheehan, Macquarie University
Annihilating Endgame: Beckett and the Imagination of Disaster

The works of Samuel Beckett imagine the future through its impossibility; the end of the
world topos is practically a given in his work, particularly the plays he produced during
the Cold War years of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this paper, I outline Becketts
problematic relationship with the science fiction genre through Endgame (1956), his most
concerted articulation of the impossible future. The nihilating tendencies in this work
are then set alongside theoretical speculations about nuclear apocalypse in writings by
Karl Jaspers, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. Using these reflections, I argue that
Becketts dystopian optic embeds him more deeply in the genre than most orthodox SF
writers, in such a way as to cast doubt on the viability of the genre and its ability to
imagine the future.

Marco Soares, University of So Paolo
Robert Altmans Quintet and the Regressive Side of Modernization

Robert Altmans worst film a story set in a distant future, sometime in the midst of
the Ice Age strikes an uncomfortable note in its depiction of a future dominated by
technology and its underside. The contrast goes beyond the depiction of dystopia in its
emphasis on the fact that someone must pay the price for the benefits of so-called
modernization. The theme has become more urgent since the 1970s, when the film was
made, and not only for those living in the periphery of capitalism under the aegis of
neo-liberalism. This presentation will explore the film and its possible political
implications.

Glen Spoors, Edith Cowan University
Enlightenment as Utopia? A Metaphor of Compassionate Agency in Industrialised
Cultures

This paper draws from aspects of Buddhist philosophy and practice to explore a metaphor
for utopian praxis that is defined not in terms of an immediate expectation of political
change, but rather the experience of, and motives for, compassion towards others. The
metaphor of flickering utopias describes evanescent moments of morally significant
acts or exchanges experienced as metonymic of what Buddhists call Enlightenment.
The theoretical implications of the metaphor are explored in relation to the discursive
construction of desire and subversion in Cultural Studies. It is argued that the
metaphor of flickering utopias complements traditional notions of utopian praxis by
foregrounding some theoretical aporia as well as providing a therapeutically valuable
model of moral and political agency in disaffected, secular mass culture.

Mikhail Suslov, European University Institute (Florence)
The Phenomenon of the Conservative Utopia: Imagined Empires in the Late
Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries

The conservative Utopia is understood as an ideology, which is able to overthrow the
existing order in the name of the traditional society. The hypothesis is that the
conservative Utopia can be a mitigated form of modernization in the semi-industrialized
countries, combining traditions and novelties in order to introduce more gradual path
towards the modernity. But this way out inevitably implies the military weakness. From
this point of view only huge empire can overweight the industrial might of the potential
enemies. That is why imagining the empire was an obsessive subject for many
conservatives, especially in Russia (pan-Slavism), in Serbia (The Greater Serbia) and
in Germany (pan-Germanism). So the ultimate aim of my work is to contemplate the
possibilities of mastering the alternative map of the Europe in the late 19
th
to early 20
th

centuries.

Rudolphus Teeuwen, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan
Sabotaging Utopia: J.G. Ballards Rushing to Paradise

With his concept of the degenerative utopia, Louis Marin has drawn attention to one
way in which utopias critical power its ability to point to realitys flaws as directions
for progress can be dissipated. A degenerative utopia is a utopia turned into myth, a
narration which fantastically resolves a fundamental contradiction in a given society.
This turn from utopia to myth can be considered a turn from discipline to relaxation.
Utopias are dreams of discipline, but degenerative utopias advocate relaxation because
the need for utopian work has supposedly been superseded by what is already, properly
perceived, realitys perfection. J. G. Ballards Rushing to Paradise (1994) is such a
degenerative utopia. But rather than being a utopian representation that is entirely caught
up in a dominant ideology, this novel engineers the degeneration of utopia. The narrative
voice sabotages the subversive power of utopia by turning it against utopia itself.
Ballards staging of sabotage is cynical in the sense that it questions utopias
transcendental premise, the belief in not-yet-present possibilities of societal fairness and
virtue.

Dimitris Vardoulakis, Monash University
The Politics of Science and the Fictions of the Political

In his novel Poor Things, Alasdair Gray describes the vitalization of a young womans
dead body. However, the ingenious scientist who performs the revitalization substitutes
the brain of the corpse with that of the foetus in her womb. The result is a creature named
Bella, and a novel which would fit the description of science fiction. However, the
situation is further complicated by the novels decidedly political bent. As Bellas mental
capacity develops, so does also her sense of politics. This paper will argue that Gray in
Poor Things puts into question two fictions of the political: namely, a politics of
autonomy based on rationality and a politics of automaticity emanating from a state of
nature.

Jean-Franois Vernay, Tolouse Le-Mirail University
Projections and Utopianism in Contemporary Australian Fiction: Toward an
Exploration of the Paranoid Mind

In our age of anxiety where protection from putative nightmare scenarios is offered as a
substitute for the dreams and hopeful promises of yesteryear, utopianism is waxing
fruitful in contemporary Australian fiction. A closer look at four narratives published in
the past twenty-five years (Gerald Murnanes The Plains, 1982; Peter Careys The
Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 1994; Christopher Kochs Out of Ireland, 1999 and
Rodney Halls The Last Love Story, 2004) will allow us to explore the paramount concept
of projection which lies at the core of utopianism. In their Meliora sequamur quest,
utopian thinkers appear somewhat as silent tyrants laying the foundations for the birth of
a totalitarian society.

Millicent Vladiv-Glover, Monash University
Russian Dystopias

As the literary canon which arguably generated the fist modern fictional dystopia
Zamyatins We, Russian literature provides a literary-historical context in which the
genre can be read not in political terms but in terms of the representation of modern
subjectivity. The dystopian world of mechanised and regulated social interaction is the
apparatus which kills desire, beyond ordinary repression. The object displaces the
subject, propelling the latter into alienation. Read in linear fashion, the plots of
Zamyatin's We, Mikhail Bulgakovs Master and Margarita, or Alexander Kabakovs No
Return may be seen as critiques of totalitarianism. However, read deconstructively, these
works militate not for social and political utopia but for the primacy of the real in the
imaginary. This real, represented as both 'beyond' the structured mechanised dystopian
world, as well as, tautologically, as a product of it, becomes the cornerstone of the new
(modern) ethical self. Such a reading is reinforced through a comparison with H G Wells
science fiction novels, which eulogise a technology of the future without a trace of
alienation. The real in the symbolic is parodied, in a doubled-up dialectic of alienation,
in the post-Soviet works of Vladimir Sorokin. His novel Four stout hearts (1992)
parodies the Kantian categorical imperative, read as the teleology of the sign, driven by a
(Hegelian) desire of the other as an object - the objet petit a represented literally as
four pressed meat cubes obtained through a process of voluntary self-mutilation and
reduction of the subject.

Robyn Walton, LaTrobe University
Constructed Beauty, Performed Terror, 1884/1948

If, in our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity or futurity, we
attempt to turn away from contemplating the frustrating ideological closure of the system,
in what direction can we look? If we want to avoid nihilism and neurosis, and want to fill
our minds with some finer vision, do we batter at the doors shutting us out from the
future, or at the tomb wall closing us off from the past? Or do we reach in some other
direction: making a vertical recourse to spirituality, for instance? This paper concentrates
on some conservative authorial minds which in periods of socio-political impasse or
crisis trended backward with a yearning, aesthetic nostalgia. It uses the metaphor of
archaeology to discuss public places that found their way into these writers works
places that were sites of constructed beauty (in the form of embellished building facades
and enhanced images of the human form) and of planned terrorism in the cause of reform.
In selected fiction and play texts from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods in Europe
I identify tensions between authors traditionalist, anti-democratic leanings and their
interest in those impressionable and idealistic little men willing to destroy persons,
property and themselves in the name of social improvement. A contrast is then drawn
with some writing published soon after the Second World War in Europe and North
America. In this time of rebuilding on sites of recent terror, and of dismantling and
realigning in other regions, expressions of beauty in facades and human images were not
always so readily differentiable from expressions of uneasiness. Under these conditions
the Old World saw renewed expressions of cultural nostalgia alongside austere,
doctrinaire social programmes, and the New World sought economic consolidation, while
much of the impetus for trying to envisage and achieve a new social order passed to the
decolonising nations. But would the decolonising peoples hopes amount to much more
than nostalgia for the idealised beauty of pre-colonial conditions?

Ariane Welch, University of Sydney
Offal and the Imagination: Marxist Utopia in Louis Zukofskys A-7 and -9

This paper explains movements in Louis Zukofskys long poem, A in relation to
Marxist Utopia. Zukofsky, a modernist and a communist, refuses both the protofacist
politics of Pound, and the dominant communist aesthetic of socialist realism. Using
linguistic analysis and Jamesons dialectical criticism as outlined especially in Marxism
and Form, the paper examines the ideology of form in A, arguing that poetic and
grammatical form is best understood as the final articulation of the deeper logic of
content itself. Zukofskys construction of art and/as labor transforms the content of
Marxs commodity relations into grammatical form in his poetry, operating dialectical
transformations of content/form and subject/object to present an architecture for a world
which is dynamic rather than static, immanent rather than reified, and in which artists and
workers (and artists as workers) labour, transform and interact with the object world
through the lens of an unalienated subjectivity.

Pat Wheeler, University of Hertfordshire
Metaphor or Prophecy? Dystopian Future in Geoff Rymans The Child Garden and
Maggie Gees The Ice People

One of the most significant trends in science fiction writing at the end of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty-first century is the pre-eminence of dystopian
futures and the virtual disappearance of utopian fiction. This paper will discuss two
novels, The Ice People and The Child Garden, both written at the end of the twentieth
century, both reflecting that impulse towards a dystopian future and both speculating on
the continuing evolution of human beings in futures that offer very different social and
public environments. In doing so, the paper will also explore Patrick Parrinders
argument that womens science fiction tends towards the metaphorical, rather than the
prophetic (that their narratives move more towards analogies or parables) and that male-
authored texts tend towards the prophetic, rather than the metaphorical. The paper will
explore whether science fiction, in imagining future worlds, does indeed move away from
the prophetic to the mythic. It will argue that women writers such as Gee (amongst others)
use analogy and parable, but that they frequently use these allegorical representations to
highlight very specific political positions including those of gendered social and sexual
relationships. I will argue that both texts use prophecy and parable to offer speculative,
transformative and highly politicised readings of contemporary society, through their
imagined futures.

Jessica Whyte, Monash University
Preempting Action: The Future as Permanent Emergency

In George Bush's words, the 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human
progress, based on non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on
the power of the state, respect for women and private property and free speech and equal
justice and religious tolerance. This model of progress is conceived as the spread across
the globe of freedom and democracy, in the limited forms of the free market and the
ballot box. In much of the Bush Administrations rhetoric this progress appears as the
inevitable product of a capitalist economy, which is leading us steadily towards the end
of history (a notion Jacques Ranciere has referred to as a Marxism in reverse). This
paper will therefore examine the conflict between this notion of the inevitably
progressive nature of capital, and the Bush Administration doctrine of preemption, which
conceives of the future as a realm of danger which can neither be planned for nor simply
allowed to unfold but must be acted on in the present. It will argue that despite the
rhetoric of inevitability that accompanies neoliberal and neoconservative discourses,
every prediction for the future, as Arendt points out, is a prediction of what will occur if
people do not act. Thus it will locate the importance of preemption in the US
administrations desire to ensure that no act is possible, no contingency remains, nothing
can prevent the extension of the market which will enable the future to unfold according
to its telos. To do this it will examine the conception of history as inevitable yet
threatened that is epitomized in the statement that ends Bushs most recent State of the
Union Address: The road of Providence is uneven and unpredictable yet we know
where it leads: It leads to freedom.

Linda Wight, James Cook University
Not My Kind of Place: Imagination of an Alternative Future in Carol Emshwillers
Critical Dystopia

Rejecting the goal of imagining a concrete, realistic future, critical dystopias engage
with the future by focusing on the process of imagination, alerting readers to the
dystopian vision of where we might be headed, and that we have the opportunity to
choose otherwise. Carol Emshwillers Boys (2003) demonstrates this ability to both
critique the present, and engage readers in the process of imagining an alternative future
by warning of the dystopia that awaits if we do not. Boys denaturalises contemporary
Western assumptions about masculinity, warning of its dystopian consequences. Any
warning, however, necessarily implies the possibility of alternative choice. Boys
highlights this with the colonels choice between accepting his societys gender
ideologies, or pursuing an alternative. His incapacity to grasp an alternative within his
dystopian context, however, reveals the capacity of critical dystopias to warn readers to
imagine an alternative future while the choice is still available to them in the not-yet-
dystopian present.

Lucy Wright, University of Melbourne
Spirits and Insects: The Nature Vision of Sci-Fi Anime

Much of the sci-fi anime that emerges from Japans booming animation industry displays
a persistent concern with postmodern spiritual questions and ideas. With a culture steeped
in Shintoism and Buddhism, many Japanese anime (and manga and video games) carry
with them tropes of animism, Gaia-like ideologies and syncretic philosophies that
transcend Judeo-Christian style dualism. At the same time, technology in Japan is
ubiquitous and symbiotic. This project will explore the holistic visions of the future
offered by two sci-fi texts Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (dir. Hironobu Sakaguchi, 2001), particularly
looking at the use of spirits and animals as signifiers of a simultaneously modern and
ancient worldview.

Wei-Yun Yang, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan
Science and Myth: Re-imagination of the Future in Ursula Le Guins The Left Hand
of Darkness and The Dispossessed

Ursula Le Guins The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed were published in
1969 and 1974 respectively, presenting ambiguous visions of the future world. Re-
imagining the future, Le Guin creates different constructs of strange societies that
represent critical revisions of the traditional utopia. Both novels employ the framework
of journey between the two worlds to enable the two protagonists, Genly Ai and Shevek,
to recognize the deficiencies of their original perception. The shifting between the two
worlds expands the travellers consciousness; moreover, through two modes of
discourses science and myth, the perception into the truth of Reality changes the future
direction of the original worlds. Reading two novels as complementary opposites forming
a whole, the reader can gain insight into the nature of the mind, in which science and
mythology are essential to our understanding of the true Reality.

Raymond A. Younis, Central Queensland University
Towards (E-)utopia? (At the End of the Information Superhighway)

Science fiction, it may be argued, has engaged increasingly with the possibilities offered
by the emergence of the internet and cyberspace (the Matrix Trilogy is perhaps the most
notable example). And some of the most important and interesting recent debates
concerning cyberspace have focussed on the utopian or dystopian implications and
possibilities. On the one hand, some have argued that cyberspace will increase choice and
promote democratic or egalitarian values and principles more broadly even as it ushers in
a new age of unprecedented global co-operation and cross cultural cohesion; on the other
hand, some have argued that the local will be eclipsed by the global, that
knowledge will be eclipsed by information and that a population will emerge which
will be information-rich but knowledge-poor, that unprecedented divisions will
appear across the globe as the digital divide persists and expands and utopian hopes
become increasingly distant and inaccessible . This paper will focus on the utopian and
dystopian imaginaries in such debates, how science fiction films incorporates these
elements, and what such works suggest about utopian and dystopian imaginaries, our
futures, the things that are believed to be fated or necessary, and the unforeseeable.

PANEL: Lost Things: Children in Dystopia
Children are emblematic of imagined futures by virtue of the lives ahead of them. In the
popular imagination they are an impetus for change and their very existence offers a
sense of hope for the future. This conception of the child militates against the dystopic
impulse in ways that significantly refigure the genre in its childrens literature
manifestation, particularly by contesting assumptions about intended child audiences.
Through the analysis of an Australian picture book, a British childrens novel, and an
American young adult novel, this panel reads critical dysopias for children as
prototypical texts of risk society. The books examined here all telescope their cultural
critiques into futures that challenge current ideological agendas including: incarcerating
refugees, predatory global politics, and capitalist excesses of consumption. This panel,
then, addresses the question: In the absence of a happy ending for western civilization,
what kind of children can survive in dystopia?

Debra Dudek, Deakin University
Glimpsing Utopia: The Child, the Artist, and the Hybrid Custodian in Shaun Tans
The Lost Thing

In Shaun Tans multi-award winning Science Fiction picture book The Lost Thing, the
child narrator lives in an industrialized homogeneous world where buildings and people
echo each other in their rectangular uniformity. When the boy finds a lost thing on the
beach, he searches to find a place for this monstrous tentacled red being, who defies the
ethos of the boys repetitive world. Seemingly, the only place of belonging for the lost
thing is a misspelled utopia, which exists behind closed doors at the end of an anonymous
alley. In this paper, I shall interrogate the differences between an on-the-streets dystopia
and a behind-closed-doors utopia and shall argue that The Lost Thing criticises conditions
under the Howard government, which do not allow for the expression of radical
difference.

Elizabeth Bullen, Deakin University
Mortal Engines: Predatory Cities and Municipal Darwinism

In Phillip Reeves dystopic future, cities like London move on traction rollers traversing
the world as hunting ground in relentless pursuit of other cities to devour. Such
borderless territory is emblematic of globalization especially as the captured prey cities
are cannibalised for everything of value while their inhabitants are made slaves. This
dystopic depiction of insatiable greed is arguably emblematic of the abuses inherent in
late capitalisms exploitation of impoverished countries and their workers. The novel
calls the process Municipal Darwinism in order to coopt the natural principal of
survival of the fittest into an extreme capitalist model. As destructive to community as
social Darwinism, the outcomes of this ideological monstrosity are holocaustic for the
weak and oppressed. The subjugated child protagonists of the text are a case in point.
They must balance their own happiness against the weight of moral righteousness,
mobilizing political rhetorics that will be at the crux of this reading of the novel.

Elizabeth Parsons, Deakin University
Feed: The Dystopia of Eleventh-Hour Capitalism

Set against the backdrop of America in its dying days, the teenagers of M. T.
Andersons Feed have been blue-toothed to the internet through an implant in their brains
and bombarded by direct-line advertising and propaganda from infancy. Their synaptic
pathways have formed according to the laws of the Feed corporation while at School
they learn how best to shop with their cyborg technology. This unequivocally dystopic
novel for adolescents graphically illustrates David Harveys contention that the age of
disposable goods produces an environment of equally disposable relationships and values
(1990, p.341). Drawing on Zygmunt Baumans Society Under Siege (2002), this paper
will interrogate reader subject positions constructed in Feed as fluctuating between the
activist and the bystander. Readers are then forced to mediate between these alternative
perspectives, in both cases faced with the horrific logical conclusion of contemporary
western capitalism.

PANEL: Perversely Persistent Visions
This panel explores a range of dystopian texts and films including The Matrix,
versions of The Thing and Dark City which share recurrent anxieties about the
cinematic and textual figuration of the future. These anxieties emerge through the formal
and thematic modalities of the remainder, the excessive, the grotesque and the
sickening. These will be seen to emerge precisely out of the graphic, cinematic and
textual figurations of the future in the works under consideration. In each paper, these
paradoxical figurations will be examined for their protean persistence, from the cluster of
edge of the construct films in the 1990s, to the continuing inability of the cinematic
image to body forth the post-human other body, to the iterations of a persistently flawed
vision of the technological things to come across the history of a classic SF story.

Katherine Greenwood, University of Adelaide
The Unbearable Vastness of Being: Ambivalent Renditions of the Real in Popular
Dystopian Film

The decade approaching the new millennium saw an increase in popular films that
questioned the authenticity of reality, and speculated about what lies beyond it. This
proliferation of dystopian films (including The Matrix and Dark City) indicates a
fascination with the idea of being on the border between a constructed reality and the real
it conceals. The ability these films have to capture the social imagination could rest on
the desire to confront the remainder, or to be confronted with that which is in excess of
signification (Doane 236). This paper will consider the central paradox of giving form to
the ineffable represented in these dystopian visions, in light of Jamesons suggestion that
the attempt to render a complete utopian (or dystopian) future is belied by our
fundamental incapacity to do so (1982), and how this suggestion is particularly pertinent
for the cinematic medium.

Joy McEntee, University of Adelaide
Residual Self-image and the Problem of Theorising the Cinematic Grotesque

The Matrix suffers from one signal failure of imagination in showing us the shape of
things to come. In the Construct, free of the restraints of corporeality, Neo could be
anything, but he so resembles his real self that this has to be explained: Residual self-
image. Perhaps this failure to realise the possibilities of the CGI body represents an
intrinsic difficulty cinema has in figuring forth the grotesque but perhaps there are also
problems in applying some existent theorisations of the grotesque to cinema.
Theorisations that take the grotesque to represent that which is becoming, that which is
without finished form, do not account for the insistent realistic completeness of the
photographic image. This paper asks: What are the possibilities for the cinema of
figuring the grotesque as concept without form?(Drew) and what are the limitations
of existing theorisations of the grotesque for thinking through its cinematic
manifestations?

Patrick Crogan, University of Adelaide
being technical: 3 moments of technological being-sick from Who Goes
There? to John Carpenters The Thing via The Thing from Another World.

This paper will explore a micro-history of anxiety concerning the technological future
the technological as futurein the three iterations of the thing story. In each can be
glimpsed both a vivid vision of a dystopian technofuture and the limitations of that vision.
In Who Goes There? the scientist Blair is being technical when he alerts the crew to
the disturbing sub-atomic life of the thing-corpse. The 1951 film turns Blair into the
bloodless Carrington who admires the new vegetable order of the alien super-carrot. In
Carpenters film, Blair sits at his computer, modelling the thing as a sickening, viral-
esque contagion. Through elaborating this science fictional micro-history, I will reflect
on Bernard Stieglers insight that being human is being technical, and being technical is
being-sick. That this being-sick is constituted precisely in the indeterminacy of the
future of being technical is something these things envision across this historical
trajectory.