Zone Theory: Science Fiction and Utopia in the Space of Possible Worlds

This book elaborates a structure for the general family of utopian genres with marvelous clarity, and with it established, Popov can pursue all kinds of further insights about the relationships between these texts. As the world’s situation becomes more desperate, and the need for a new political economy more obvious, this complicated canon is becoming increasingly important: no longer just a minor literary genre, but rather a crucial aid to thinking about our social systems. The better we understand utopian narrative strategies, the more fully we can put them to use, so Popov’s excellent study is timely and interesting.

(Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy and The Ministry for the Future)

Alexander Popov’s Zone Theory deftly guides us through the thickets of utopian theory and shows us why we should care, with fresh and convincing readings of a variety of science fictional texts. The writers explored here range from the usual suspects--Le Guin, Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson--to some not usually classed as utopian or dystopian, such as John Crowley and Brooke Bolander. Popov builds on the work of Tom Moylan and Fredric Jameson while adding important perspectives such as considering utopia as a hyperobject and using utopian theory to read the incongruous, unresolvable Zones of science fiction such as the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. I am happy to do as Popov suggests: to read utopias not only as ongoing processes rather than finished blueprints, as Moylan has taught us, but also to see them as a way of learning about the world. Utopia, says Popov, is ＂an apparatus for registering difference at the level of societal organization＂ and thus is always open to new discoveries and new antinomies: anti-utopias lead to anti-anti-utopias and so on without end.

(Brian Attebery, Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy at Idaho State University, author of Stories about Stories: Fantasy & the Remaking of Myth)

Zone Theory reinterprets utopia as an unceasing dialectic between totality and novelty which keeps on discovering new subjectivities and genres. Through close readings within a wide corpus of SF works, it meditates on utopian forms such as critical utopia, critical dystopia, heterotopia, atopia and ecotopia, ultimately tying them to the notion of anti-anti-utopia a form of forms capacious enough to house a permanently open multiplicity of beings.

Alexander Popov is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Sofia University ＂St. Kliment Ohridski,＂ where he teaches linguistics, science fiction and utopian studies. He holds a PhD in computational linguistics. He recently completed an interdisciplinary project which explores the specificities of artificial intelligence narrators in science fiction literature and film. His recent publications include papers in the journals Fantastika and Paradoxa, as well as a chapter in the edited volume Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene. Zone Theory is his first monograph.