This book explores the deep utopianism of one of the most significant modern cultural practices: science fiction. It contends that utopianism is not simply a motif in science fiction – alongside technology, time travel, alien encounters, conspiracies, alternate histories or the post-apocalypse – but is fundamental to the genre's narrative dynamics.

Contents: The Modernisms of Science Fiction: Toward a Periodizing History – If Everything Means Something Else: Technology, Allegory, and Events in Roadside Picnic and Stalker – After the End of the World: Pseudo-Apocalypse and Universal History in Paradise and The Windup Girl – Recognizing the Patterns – Part Two: Possible Worlds – The Beat Cops of History: Or, The Paranoid Style in American Intellectual Politics – Popular Dystopias in an Era of Global War – Alan Moore, «Secondary Literacy», and the Modernism of the Graphic Novel – Ken MacLeod’s Permanent Revolution: Utopian Possible Worlds, History, and the Augenblick in the «Fall Revolution» – Alternate Histories, Periodization, and the Geopolitical Aesthetics of Ken MacLeod and Iain M. Banks – Learning to Live in History: Alternate Historicities and the 1990s in The Years of Rice and Salt – «An Unfinished Project that was Also a Missed Opportunity»: Utopia and Alternate History in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro.