"Symposium: Marxism and Fantasy." (Historical Materialism 10:4 (2002)) (Periodical Review‪)‬

Edited by China Mieville. Historical Materialism 10:4 (2002): 39-316. The special issue of Historical Materialism dedicated to "Marxism and Fantasy," a lively symposium edited by noted fantasy-sf writer China Mieville, engages the topic of fantasy across a wide range of possibilities. As Mieville defines it in his editorial introduction, in its broadest sense "fantasy" in this volume refers to the basic human capacity to imagine a goal--the capacity that, according to Marx, separates the labor of humans from the marvelous but merely instinctual architecture of bees or ants. In a slightly narrower application of the term, Mieville writes of fantasy as an integral part of everyday life in contemporary society where commodity fetishism and consumerist propaganda exacerbate and inflame the non- or anti-realist tendencies of imagination and desire. Fantasy thus puts into play another classic Marxist theme that a number of the writers in this volume dwell upon, the tension between utopia and ideology, or, as Ernest Mandel puts it in his newly translated essay "Anticipation and Hope as Categories of Historical Materialism," between revolutionary hope and mere wishful thinking. By the same token this symposium on fantasy explores the vexed intersections of the public and the private, the social and the psychological, and Marxism and psychoanalysis. More narrowly, but always in connection with these previous senses of the term, most of the essays in this volume take fantasy to refer primarily to non- or anti-realist practices in contemporary literary and cinematic narrative fiction. Finally, the narrowest sense of "fantasy" offered here is to name a specific genre (e.g., The Lord of the Rings or LeGuin's Earthsea tetralogy). It is perhaps at this narrowest end of the spectrum of approaches to fantasy that the yoking together of Marxism and fantasy becomes most controversial, given, on the one hand, the checkered history of association between Marxist literary theory and realism (its glory in Lukacs, its debasement in the Stalinist endorsement of social realism), and, on the other hand, the more recent but, for most readers of Extrapolation, more pressing issue of the relation between fantasy and science fiction, fueled as it has been by Darko Suvin's condemnation of fantasy in the highly influential opening section of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction as a "subliterature of mystification" starkly opposed to sf's practice of cognitive estrangement.