... of the city as a natural system contrasts with conventional dystopian visions of future cities as scenarios of exploitation, crisis, and disaster. Science-fiction novelist, Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 uses high-modernist literary strategies to create a narrative of cities and planets as humanly transformed...

...David Sergeant Abstract This essay examines the relationship between novelistic form and a historical moment shaped by new technologies in Dave Eggers's The Circle (2013) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Moon (2018). In both, the novel form is itself positioned as a major counterforce against...

... that is seemingly destined to extinguish it. Consequently, both novels turn to a formal modeling in which individual and collective can supposedly blend without either suffering reduction—a maneuver also characteristic of many theoretical discussions of planetarity. Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora (2015), in contrast...

... nothing that science fiction itself has not done before. Kim Stanley Robinson, mentioned in Jameson's essay (and his book's dedicatee), has given us some powerful examples. Robinson's 2312 (part of a longer sequence, including the Mars trilogy [see Archaeologies of the Future 393–416 ], last...

... of the utopia as blueprint, as an adventure in actual social engineering. (For a recent and uplifting example, see Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future .) In the sixties-influenced period since the end of the Cold War, utopian discourse has tended to be more provisional and nondogmatic as well...

... the relationship between new technologies and economic and political forms as these manifest themselves in novels by Dave Eggers and Kim Stanley Robinson. The extent to which the novel is able to position itself as a counterforce—what Sergeant describes as “the constructive potential of aesthetic form in relation...

... of Thrones ), or as talky and Weberian as Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars , Green Mars , and Blue Mars (endlessly inspiring or simply endless, depending on one's political passions). A casual aside in a book about Star Trek speaks volumes: the show “did not come fully into its own until the third...

... fiction that Traub dubs “funny cli-fi” ( 86 ). Despite this seemingly new and “irreverent” approach to a presumably serious topic, Traub argues that “funny cli-fi” has clear antecedents in the fictions of Octavia Butler, David Brin, Kurt Vonnegut, Kim Stanley Robinson, and John Brunner ( Traub 90 ). While...

... , Fredric . The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981 . Kurtz , Stanley . “Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint.” Policy Review . April/May 2003 . 3 –20. Kipling , Rudyard . Kim . 1901. Ed. Edward Said. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992...