Call it a tome or call it a pan-gloss of science fiction, myth, philosophy and political theory. In "Archaeologies of the Future," the fictional status of the former two blurs into the real, immediacy of the latter. From "The Alien Body" to "The Barrier of Time" from More to LeGuin, Fourier to Philip K. Dick, Jameson digs up works that are now relics of the past and reevaluates their relevance to our contemporary struggles. Dated by our own passage through "the future" that was once predicted, annihilated, feared and hoped for, Jameson's perspective is appealing to me, a philosophy nerd who has read little Orwell or Asimov, but it will be just as appealing to those who have yet to read Marx, Freud and Gramsci...just as soon as their done with "Brave New World."

The leading, influential contemporary philosopher Frederic Jameson looks to the literary genre of science fiction for gleanings of the notion of utopia and utopian yearnings in late Modernism. With the failures of Marxist/Communist ideologies and the apolitical mood throughout Western culture, what remains of the idea of utopia which once played such a strong role in modern culture is to be found mostly in the science-fiction literature. Jameson takes on this latest topic with his characteristic thoroughness, exceptional acuity, and masterful synthetic capacity. The voluminous work with elements of literary critique, political/cultural analysis, and philosophical thinking is a survey of science fiction over the century of the 1900s and its shifting relationship to society. Jameson's approach is to focus on one major science-fiction writer (with science-fiction somewhat loosely defined) such as Philip K. Dick or Ursula Le Guin as representative of the topic is wants to take up; and then range through the topic by many references to other science-fiction writers and inclusion of respective aspects of the concept of utopia and relevant political, social, and scientific conditions to result in illuminations and renderings about the persisting, yet protean, idea of utopia. "Archaeologies of the Future" is one of Jameson's most wide-ranging and illuminating works on modern culture and its distinctive factors and idiosyncratic ways.