Chapter 2 sets the stage for the analysis of my three cases, by delineating an account of utopianism that manages to withstand the objections raised by anti-utopian critics, both from the Left and the Right. I hold that these detractors miss their target insofar as they fail to acknowledge the actual complexity of utopianism. While utopias can, under specific circumstances, turn out to be impractical or dangerous, it is wrong to assume that this is necessarily and always the case. Drawing on groundbreaking work in utopian studies, I thus claim that anti-perfectionist utopias set into motion forms of social dreaming that productively educate our desire for things to be otherwise. The chapter then continues by investigating what can be considered utopianism’s paramount function: the production of estrangement. In a further step, I scrutinize the other two purposes that utopian visions of the Anthropocene cater to, namely galvanizing (eutopias) and cautioning (dystopias) an audience. Chapter 2 ends with an intermezzo elaborating on utopian practices – social experiments that perform collective life “against the grain.”

Chapter 5 turns to a much bleaker vision of the Anthropocene: the widely shared suspicion that catastrophe is all but inevitable. In this part of the book, I attend to various dystopian visions of our climate-changed world, by first delivering a historical overview according to which the apocalypse's construal in public discourse has recently undergone significant transformations. Dystopias perform one major function in this context - they warn an audience about existential threats that are imminent, but whose true causes still remain concealed from public purview. In the case of climate change, we ought to distinguish more specifically, I suggest, between cautionary and post-cautionary narratives. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy navigates this divide by probing where grave dangers might erupt from within the status quo, without suffocating the desire for alternative ways of being and living. Atwood’s books are so insightful because they move back and forth between a storyline that traces how the environmental catastrophe came about and another one that unravels the surprising ways in which the surviving humans collaborate with other species to build a common future.

Can we regain our humanness? Considering the massive loss of the natural world, the impending effects of climate change, staggering inequality, and the power of the elite, it may be impossible to avoid a dystopian future. Nevertheless, many scenarios for the future are possible, including a prolonged or sudden collapse, a new optimist paradise, or a decentralized golden age of barbarism. I argue that a plausible future is a return to a hunting and gathering way of life as the coming climate instability and the exhaustion of accessible fossil fuels make agriculture impossible. If there is cause for optimism, it lies in our deep evolutionary past. Selfishness and exploitation are no more a part of human nature than cooperation and caring about others and the natural world. If we are to avoid a dystopian future, we need a collective political movement to challenge the ultrasocial status quo and its defenders. Individual action is not enough.

Discusses long-term patterns of thought surrounding the social role of technology and its implications for democracy.

This chapter considers the central place of dystopia in Atwood’s work since 2000 in its discussion of the MaddAddam trilogy, The Heart Goes Last, and The Testaments. The focus is on the contrasts between the trilogy with its epic dimensions of postapocalyptic speculation and the two later dystopias that return to the network of human relations in situations close to our contemporary world. Analysis of the trilogy traces its narrative arc across three volumes from global disaster to futuristic vision, while The Heart Goes Last is darkly comic social satire addressing anxieties around threats to human freedom in the age of corporate capitalism, high-tech surveillance, and biomedical experiments. In The Testaments Atwood reclaims her story in real time with its update of Gilead, focusing on patriarchal tyranny and women’s strategies of resistance, ending with a glimmer of hope. An emphasis on Atwood’s storytelling with its genre-crossing strategies establishes connections between these dystopias, identifying the distinctive Atwood idiom.

Presents Margaret Atwood as a Canadian and international literary superstar, introducing students and general readers to the many different and evolving facets of Atwood’s work across all genres, up to and including The Testaments. This revised edition is both a revisiting of Atwood’s earlier work and a charting of new directions since 2000, with emphasis on her increasing engagement with popular genres, especially dystopias and graphic novels, and her influential online presence. The focus is on Atwood’s topicality, with The Handmaid’s Tale and its recent television adaptations now center stage. Atwood engages with a new generation in response to profound changes in reading practices and changing conditions in publishing and marketing. Atwood’s often controversial feminism and her urgent environmental concerns with survival are treated in the brief overview of her work and Atwoodian criticism since 2000, including discussion of the Atwood archives at the University of Toronto.

Thinkers opposed to the increased dominance of technological progress have continued to express a fear that the result will be disaster or dehumanization. Their opposition to the utilitarian reconfiguration of the idea of progress has been all the more effective because even the technophiles cannot agree on which innovations will gain control of society or on what the results will be. In the absence of a clear-cut goal which progress is supposed to achieve, it is always possible to disagree about the benefits and dangers of what is being developed. As other cultures take up the focus on technological innovation, it is no longer clear that the West will shape the future. Diversity and innovation remain the key factors, just as the Darwinian perspective on progress would imply.