As current events and sf stories are becoming harder to tell apart and we repeatedly see capitalistic concerns trump environmental ones, the hope for humanity having a future at all falls to our young people. The education system, seeing this, has responded with increasing inclusion of sf texts in the curriculum, often to show dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic imaginaries. The intention is to send the message that if humanity keeps going as it is, this is the future they will inhabit. For these students, sf is not a literature of hope, but of despair. Science fiction sf could instead encourage utopian thinking, however, imagining a better future and illuminating possible paths to it. Graham B. Slater takes up this potential, asking how the utopian imagination in science fiction might change education. He believes that education has a political role in transforming the real now into the imagined then, a role in the fight for sustainable egalitarian futures. Slater’s intention is to explore sf as a tool for educators to resist the call to adapt to and accept the way things are, and instead to imagine utopian futures that could be.
In his introduction, Slater begins by noting the contradiction at the center of education: the site where students are learning how to shape the future is itself shaped by forces that resist threats to the status quo. Educators need to understand that pedagogy is a mode of cultural criticism, so that they can help students understand how knowledge and culture are produced. These are political sites because they are where the battle for the present and the future are fought. Slater argues that only with a strong understanding of cultural politics can students challenge the norms of the present and imagine alternatives.
In Chapter 1, “A Precarious Future,” Slater begins with a summary of the opening of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future (2020), contrasting the death of 20 million people in a heat wave in the novel with the reality that “temperatures that endanger human life are becoming more common, with instances of wet bulb temperatures of 34°C having been recorded on five continents” (20). In connecting an sf plot to recent meteorological events, the distance between fact and fiction shrinks, but the way forward in the story is quite different from the direction in which humanity is heading. What Ministry does, Slater argues, is offer a utopian future in which the ecological crisis leads to social change and political, scientific, and technological action—acting “as though it is possible to create a better future despite the threatening conditions of the present, thus making such a future possible” (25). Slater argues that sf has the potential to “reinvigorate a much-needed pedagogical synthesis of utopian imagination and educational politics” (31) and to encourage the creation of post-capitalist futures. He acknowledges that this line of thought is resisted by the forces of the status quo who want education to serve the interests of capital and maintain the existing social order, rather than critically to analyze capitalist power relations. Instead, he argues, the education system, following the lead of Silicon Valley techno-capitalists, has embraced solutionism—the belief that any problem can be solved by market-driven technological fixes, ignoring the importance of critical and ethical thinking. The result is an education system that has one purpose: the creation of problem solvers who are either “creative entrepreneurs or depoliticized technocrats” (32) who will protect futures of capitalist growth without interrogating its role in economic inequality and ecological crisis. Solutionist ideology dictates that education is responsible for addressing social problems, but it must not foster critical thinking to find the source of those problems nor encourage the political agency to resist them. He repeats his belief that sf can be used to reinvigorate utopian imagination and resist the foreclosure of possible futures imposed by capitalism, the process of which he explores in the next chapter.
In Chapter 2, “The Fate of the Imagination,” Slater begins with the definition of Hannah Arendt’s term natality, “the human capacity to create social novelty,” and he traces how she “identified the entanglement of youth, education, and politics in the social production of the future” (37). This entanglement is central to his purpose for this book—that an education that does not cultivate the agency of youth prevents the transformation of society, and that sf can be used to resist the forces that would prevent that. Slater argues that education in capitalist societies has “functioned primarily as a mechanism of social reproduction, corporate-state hegemony, and the political enclosure of utopian imagination” (37). He argues that this is the result of capitalist realism, a foreclosure of the idea that any alternative to capitalism exists or could exist. Slater argues that without utopian imagination to resist it, capitalist realism has generated a dystopian structure of feeling, “collective affects that often exist in inchoate forms, discernible in cultural texts, but unspoken in official discourse” (42). He notes that these dystopias are not resistance-generating social critiques of the future humanity is heading toward, but instead are an “exhausted recognition of the grim realities of an endless present” (42).
Slater presents Robinson’s heuristic for resisting the dystopian structure of feeling, suggesting that, in addition to utopia (things will get better) and dystopia (things will get worse), there exists another pair of opposites: anti-utopia and anti-anti-utopia. He explains that anti-utopia rejects utopia as a threat to progress while anti-anti-utopia counters this with the belief that change is possible and utopia is achievable. The pedagogical function of utopian sf, he argues, is political and educational: to show that the foreclosure of possible futures is the result of capitalist realism and that we thus need to explore “pathways toward the future that reflect critically on the present” (46). Slater notes that arguments for utopian imagination are often challenged over claims that it presumes perfection, but this is incorrect. These “anti-utopian critiques of utopian perfectionism react to a problem that does not exist, leading political discourse to a dead end of disimagination that stabilizes capitalist realism” (47). Slater counters this critique through a comparative reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) and N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” (2018). The former, he argues, is a critique of utopia and a reflection on capitalist ideology, while the latter is a confrontation of capitalist ideology’s anti-utopianism. While Le Guin’s characters decide to “walk away” and give up their privileged lives although the suffering continues, Jemisin’s characters choose to stay and resist. This seems especially relevant in the light of the recent US election when many people threatened to leave the country if their “side” did not win.
In Chapter 3, “Foundations of the New,” Slater examines the relationship between science fiction and critical pedagogy, making the argument “that there is compatibility between critical pedagogy’s mode of demystification and science fiction’s potential to denaturalize present conditions by contrasting them with alternative futures” (57). Slater makes a connection between the sf novum and the work of critical pedagogy to understand the world. He also proposes that cognitive estrangement provoked by sf can be used in service of critical pedagogy to defamiliarize the present and help students understand the social forces that brought us to this point. Slater argues that the astonishment generated by the novum is “akin to the radicalization provoked by the awakening of critical consciousness, the collective formation of which requires a pedagogical intervention,” making sf “the cultural form best equipped to promote historical consciousness and inspire utopian hope” (61). Slater claims that sf and critical theory are connected by their shared commitment to analyze how social worlds were brought about, rather than taking them as natural phenomena. Likewise, sf’s cognitive estrangement can create defamiliarized contexts that, he argues, “should be a central element of critical pedagogy, because so much that is familiar is the product of reification” (71).
In Chapter 4, “Learning at the End of the World,” Slater introduces the idea of the adaptationist imaginary, a form of denial of the threat of climate change that acknowledges the threat but resists the necessity for sweeping changes to global systems of production or consumption. Those who subscribe to this ideology are more concerned about mitigating changes to existing systems than to protecting those impacted by things remaining as they are. Slater argues that this adaptationist imaginary informs global education policy and promotes “forms of education that are deeply at odds with the social, economic, and environmental futures that youth face” (78). This has led to positive language such as “resilience” being used to maintain the status quo and the attitude that “education should primarily prepare youth for the coming wastelands and war zones of the hypermodern era” (81). Countering this, Slater proposes apocalyptic modes of study that do not “only historicize how present conditions have come into formation, nor do they only extrapolate what futures they might create: they act upon both in order to create alternative futures” (85). Thus, he argues, apocalyptic education can catalyze hope through the creation of alternative futures and make education the site of radical possibility instead of resignation and adaptation.
In Chapter 5, “Troubleshooting the Future,” Slater explores how the integration of digital technology in all aspects of life (“postdigitalism”) has linked education and “the social reproduction of capitalist futures” (95). He explains that in education, postdigitalism is expressed as the belief that more technology automatically improves teaching and learning. This solutionism in education can be resisted with the utopian thinking that Slater has been championing. He argues that what is needed is education that constructs political subjects who can think critically and imagine different possibilities. He notes that “science fiction can create new possibilities for thinking politically about work, technology, and education” (112). In his conclusion, Slater reiterates that sf is a source of utopian imagination and can orient political movements in education towards alternative futures. It can be used to counter attempts to reproduce the existing social structures and allow new futures to be imagined: “science fiction brims with pedagogical catalysts and political tools to transform society” (124).
Through Horizons of the Future, Slater makes a compelling argument for the use of sf to encourage utopian imagination as an educational pedagogy. The book has a strong line of thought that runs through the chapters, showing how change is resisted by systems created and reinforced by the status quo and how the resulting capitalist realism forecloses the ability to even imagine a different reality. He concurrently considers how this can be resisted by sf’s utopian imagining. While there are examinations of sf texts throughout the book, however, Slater’s study may be too theoretical for practicing teachers, which is a shame because adding sf to their practice is centered as a primary impetus of the text. Despite this, the work Slater does to show how sf can be used to resist capitalist ideas of what education should be is wonderful and this book is a valuable addition to the field.
University of California Press