Atrás da redoma, ou o que fazer com esta utopia?

Abstract

In “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?”, Fredric Jameson discusses the possibility of representing utopia. For him, both utopia as a literary genre and science fiction achieve their success through their failure: both fail in their attempt to represent the future, but, in doing so, they de-familiarize the present and show it to the reader from a new point of view. The aim of this paper is to discuss the problem of representing utopia in science fiction through a brief analysis of two works published in widely different contexts: the shoert story “Men of the Ten Books”, by Jack Vance, published in the magazine Startling Storiesin 1951, and the novel Iron Council, by British author China Miéville. In both narratives, utopia reveals itself as a static structure, limited to a set of visual images. I will examine how this choice affects the issue of the representation of utopia and its relation to the social world in which each text was written.