(Re)Writing Canadian Space: Dystopian Geographies in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia

This paper examines how dystopian fiction opens up a productive space for disrupting naturalized assumptions, and shifting our understanding of taken-for-granted spaces. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s (2005) proposal that space must be seen as the product of constant interrelations, I argue that dystopian literature can similarly prompt us to reconsider our relationship to the spaces we inhabit. Using the concept of the “critical dystopia,” I examine how dystopian frameworks are operationalized in the Canadian context through a comparative analysis of two novels that speculate distinctly Canadian dystopian futures: Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia (2016). By applying Massey’s theorization of space—its multiplicities, complexities, and political potentialities—to an examination of how Canadian spaces are transformed in the dystopian context, I then analyze how those representations challenge the spatial ideologies associated with globalization, and resist the neoliberal view of space as a surface to be crossed and conquered (Massey, 2005).

(Re)Writing Canadian Space: Dystopian Geographies in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia

This paper examines how dystopian fiction opens up a productive space for disrupting naturalized assumptions, and shifting our understanding of taken-for-granted spaces. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s (2005) proposal that space must be seen as the product of constant interrelations, I argue that dystopian literature can similarly prompt us to reconsider our relationship to the spaces we inhabit. Using the concept of the “critical dystopia,” I examine how dystopian frameworks are operationalized in the Canadian context through a comparative analysis of two novels that speculate distinctly Canadian dystopian futures: Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia (2016). By applying Massey’s theorization of space—its multiplicities, complexities, and political potentialities—to an examination of how Canadian spaces are transformed in the dystopian context, I then analyze how those representations challenge the spatial ideologies associated with globalization, and resist the neoliberal view of space as a surface to be crossed and conquered (Massey, 2005).

The Contemporary Dystopian Reality of Slavery and Modern Capitalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels

Critical dystopia as an analytic category for historical enquiry explores contemporary reality and its specificities in time and space. It functions as anagnorisis or recognition of the dystopian realities in the present through its generic mode of familiarising the heightened dystopian elements of the text as possible evolutions of current oppressions. This paper suggests that this anagnorisis through comparison and extrapolation is limited and needs to consider how the text ironically reveals the absence of historical specificity through its comparison of the contemporary present and the imagined future. Instead, specificity is replaced with a linear historical trajectory where dystopia occurs cyclically in metamorphosed forms within a fixed, yet evolving power-structure. This projects the nature of the dystopia in the text part of an evolutionary process, not a product of its historically specific period. Through the interrogation of how the legally abolished system of slavery is historically shifted into the future hyper-capitalist market system in Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, this paper will reveal how the anagnorisis of the novels functions to locate dystopia as present and evolving in a historical trajectory of cyclical structural repetition. This familiarisation of the historical event of slavery in the novels posits the dystopian text’s anagnorisis as not simply the recognition of dystopian elements specifically in the present but broadens it to the recognition of the historical evolution of those same human atrocities that appear to ‘resurge’ in dystopia.

Global cyberpunk

This article examines the connections between 1960s student protests, particularly the occupation of the University of Tokyo in 1968-9, and 1980s cyberpunk film in Japan. I argue that these films, while critical of the student movement, aim to reclaim and transform the utopian spirit that motivated them. Using the global 1960s framework, I situate Japanese cyberpunk film within the wider debates of this decade, particularly those concerning personal liberation and affluence. Using Tom Moylan’s concept of the critical dystopia, I demonstrate that utopian thinking does not disappear after 1968 in Japan but undergoes metamorphosis in these films.

The Problem of Fatalism in Dystopian Climate Fiction

This chapter explores the logics of fatalism in climate fiction as they variously function in the classical dystopia, the critical dystopia and the time-travel story. For the classical dystopia, the examples are Maggie Gee’s The Flood, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods and Antti Tuomainen’s Parantaja. For the critical dystopia, the examples are Emmi Itäranta’s Teemestarin kirja, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and James Bradley’s Clade. For the time-travel story, the examples are Ben Elton’s Time and Time Again, Wolfgang Jeschke’s Das Cusanus-Spiel and Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia. The chapter concludes by observing that time travel, whether physical or psychic, is perhaps the most improbable novum in the whole of the SF repertoire, and that it might therefore seem strange to worry about its real-world implications. But the fatalist conclusion that there is little we can do to offset anthropogenic warming, and that our efforts might even make matters worse, does have such implications, and these might well be regretted.

The Critical Dystopia in Climate Fiction

This chapter develops an account of critical cli-fi dystopias that exhibit, by turn, each of five ideal-typical responses to climate change: denial, mitigation, negative adaptation, positive adaptation, and Gaian deep ecological anti-humanism. The texts analysed include Ian McEwan’s Solar, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and Aurora, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jean-Marc Ligny’s AquaTM, David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy and Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm.

Gra w Orwella

The article presents an interpretation of Orwell video games in context of available analytical tropes in Orwellian research. The paper touches on various problems described by academic readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four and tries to answer the question whether games provide innovations in the way they problematize socio-political issues in comparison to Orwell’s classic novel. In the introductory part, the author discusses the possibility of utilizing the notion of critical dystopia in the analysis of Orwell video games. The following chapters touch on the subject of cultural references, realistic styles, biopolitics and class representations.