Tom Foster
Course Description, Spring 2026
English 556A
Topic: Utopian Writing and Speculative Fiction
This course will provide a historical introduction to traditions of utopian writing, with a particular focus on their relevance to the development of genres of speculative fiction. Critics like Darko Suvin have shown how utopian writing is a central resource for socioeconomic and political speculation within science fiction, for instance. Equally important is utopian fiction’s historical experiments with alternate worldbuilding and the confrontation of readers with counterfactual settings designed to be compared and contrasted to actually existing social norms. At the same time, utopian writing develops alternate concepts of literary value and aesthetic form, defining itself as a thought experiment or what Donna Haraway calls speculative fabulation – that is, as literature that also argues a thesis or fictional hypothesis and which therefore treats literature as a site of knowledge production as well as aesthetic judgment.
At the same time, this course will also consider in various ways the status or place of utopian thought at the present moment of peak dystopia, market rationality, and capitalist realism, to use Mark Fisher’s term. The course will introduce students to the critical frameworks and vocabularies of utopian studies, including utopia, eutopia, dystopia, anti-utopia, concrete utopia, critical or ambiguous utopia, body vs. city utopias, utopian plans or fiction vs. utopian desire, wishes, or daydreams. As Ernst Bloch argues, utopian thought in the broad sense has been a site of reflection on the power of ideas and idealism, in both its political and its philosophical forms. Similarly, utopianism and speculative fiction represent sites of theoretical reflection on claims and critiques of universality and normativity, as embodied in practices of worldbuilding. Utopian fiction also has a complex relationship to histories of European colonialism and narratives of contact, which are the central historical referent for the contrastive structure of utopian reading, where the alternate societies imagined in the fiction implicitly or explicitly exist in dialogue with readers’ assumptions about realism.
The course will begin with a set of readings primarily drawn from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries (Bellamy, Griggs, Gilman). We will then turn to the moment of the 1960s and 70s, with the emergence of the idea of critical utopias, as well as the more direct emergence of environmental concerns and critiques of anthropocentrism (are utopias for people or plants, animals, and land, as well?), including works by Le Guin and Callenbach. We will then turn to more contemporary forms of utopian science fiction and fantasy, possibly including works by Killjoy, Oldbear, Vizenor, Tidhar, and Shawl. These examples may cover a range of topics and subgenres, from postcapitalist fantasy to indigenous futurism, decolonial steampunk, and the future of Israel/Palestine.
Primary readings have not been finalized, but will be selected from this list, along with some short stories and critical essays or book chapters):
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Sutton Griggs, Imperium in Imperio
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Margaret Killjoy, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion
Weyodi Oldbear, As Many Ships As Stars
Gerald Vizenor, Treaty Shirts: October 2034—A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation
Lavie Tidhar, Central Station
Nisi Shawl, Everfair
Suggested only : The Utopia Reader, 2nd edition
Students will have the option of writing a longer seminar paper or a series of shorter essays throughout the quarter.