Description: "Scientific progress is usually seen as a precondition of modern utopias, but science and utopia are frequently at odds. Utopian Literature and Science traces the interactions of sciences such as astronomy, microscopy, genetics and anthropology with 19th- and 20th-century utopian and dystopian writing and modern science fiction. Ranging from Galileo's observations with the telescope to current ideas of the post-human and the human-animal boundary, the author's re-examination of key literary texts brings a fresh perspective to the paradoxes of utopian thinking since Plato. This book is essential reading for teachers and students of literature and science studies, utopian studies, and science fiction studies, as well as students of 19th and early 20th-century literature more generally"--
Review Quotes:
"This book presents an always absorbing clutch of essays, full of illumination and interesting sidelights on the utopian tradition, from which every reader will learn something new." (Roger Luckhurst, English Literature in Transition, Vol. 60 (3), 2017)
"From Martians and moon-men to utopian inhabitants of a variety of species, Patrick Parrinder's monograph is rich in the early history of speculative writing. The book is particularly notable for showing the centrality of science fictional utopian speculation to the mainstream of Western imagination from Kepler, Bruno and Galileo through to the mid-twentieth century. ... In reframing the historical relationship between utopian thinking and science, Parrinder also offers important challenges to the scholarly community of utopian studies." (Adam Stock, Review of English Studies, Vol. 67 (281), September, 2016)