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Hope is our desire for a better, different future a hope both personal and political that appears on a scale that is sometimes commonplace and sometimes magnificent. According to Bloch hope drives the utopian imagination, and as such it has been installed as the active principle producing the speculative futures of science fiction. Science fiction as ‘cognitive estrangement’Įven the most cursory glance at the academic field of ‘science fiction studies’ will see that it is a genre built on hope – more specifically, on Das Prinzip Hoffnung by Ernst Bloch. Such films therefore embody the stakes of the future, offering either a political commentary on our current conditions or exploring another type of politics, one that seeks to overcome these conditions in incendiary inventions and so define a new future for ‘political art’. In doing so, this essay will focus on ‘dystopian’ films, as these constitute the currently dominant sub-genre of sci-fi, a sub-genre defined by its somewhat political ‘critique’ of the present. It will also be necessary to examine some science fiction films that do (and others that do not) echo these philosophical debates in a more artistic way. In order to stage this confrontation over the future, or even ‘the future of the future’, it will be necessary to rehearse the respective arguments of our protagonists. It can also be found in certain rare but invaluable science fiction films that escape their conditions of possibility to give us visions of…something else. Such an understanding of the future can be found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘untimely’ and in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari that follows and makes use of it. This would be a future that was not simply a reflection of current modes of being, but the eruption of a becoming capable of producing something genuinely ‘new’. However, there is an alternative future, a future undetermined by the present – a future that explodes in an event that changes the conditions of life and takes us beyond the merely existent. As we will see, science fiction futures in this sense express our utopian hopes and dystopian nightmares, distilling in often spectacular visions what we see as best and worst about our present.īoth Darko Suvin and Frederic Jameson have argued for a science fiction future in this sense, as a ‘critical’ exploration of our present conditions and their limits. Science fiction generally takes the future to be self-evident the future is ‘the day after tomorrow,’ or another day more distant, but in any case a day on which the human struggle continues. This is an obvious thing to say, though its obviousness conceals a debate that has perhaps not yet taken place – a debate over the nature of this future.