Extrapolation

Possible Fictions: Blochian Hope in The Scar

Extrapolation (2009), 50, (2), 276–292.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2009.50.2.8
Language
English
Pages
17

Abstract

Miéville's The Scar is best understood as a novel that is utopian in form rather than in content. Through its portrayal of the community on Armada as the struggle to negotiate an always-shifting utopia, the novel keeps alive utopia-as-impulse and avoids the limitations of a rigid utopia-as-program, making it an idea example of the sort of fiction Jameson discusses in Archaeologies of the Future. Drawing on Ernst Bloch's ideas of the utopian trace, this paper argues that the images of the Possibility Sword and the Possible Letter in this novel are emblems of the need to keep the materiality of other possible worlds alive in this one, something also achieved by Radical Fantasy

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Author details

Vint, Sherryl