The View From The Masthead

Journey Through Dystopia Towards an Open-Ended Utopia

First Edition: March 2010

Bülent Somay offers a journey without an end, that is, a journey through dystopia towards an open-ended utopia. He discusses not only well-known examples of the genre but also new utopian science fiction. In that journey, utopia is located in the endless process of self-deconstruction, or what Trotsky would have called a ‘permanent revolution’. Permanence in revolution is the only guarantee against the lure of the ever-unreachable object of desire, the primordinal lack. Since this lack is structural, the desire for wholeness or completion will never be satisfied. The problem is, we never had completion: there never was a ‘Golden Age’, except in our imaginations…