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Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005).

Without “the persistence of the dialectic” (Jameson’s phrase), the triumph of postmodern reification would be genuinely universal. It is with no careless hyperbole that Horkheimer ... goes so far as to insist, “The future of humanity depends on the existence of the critical attitude.” -- Carl Freedman (2000: 194)

Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, eds. Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003).*

Sheree Thomas, ed., Dark Matter I: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (New York: Warner Books, 2000).
Sheree Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (New York: Warner Books, 2004).
Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, eds., So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004).

According to SF critics Alexei and Cory Panshen, Science Fiction fulfills a human need to transcend our normal consciousness and to enter, via the imagination, worlds of marvel, wonder, astonishment and amazement. Though Darko Suvin states that SF's supposed "sense of wonder" is a "superannuated slogan... ready for retirement" and jaded SF fans mockingly scoff at it as a "sensawunna," no one can deny the wonderful childhood memories associated with SF.

In his introduction to the 1989 re-issue of Invisible Man Ralph Ellison provocatively notes, “a piece of science fiction is the last thing I expected to write” (xv). Both this claim and the way Ellison phrases it are striking. Literary scholars usually talk about Invisible Man as a prime example of the Great American Novel, but throughout his career Ellison carefully distanced himself from that phrase. Indeed, when he accepted the National Book Award for this work in 1953 he rather cheerfully described it as a failed example of the Great American Novel.

The clouds floating above the building were like hard clumps of dirt from a vacuum cleaner no one ever cleaned. Or maybe more like all the contradictions of the Third Industrial Revolution condensed and set to float in the sky. -- Murakami 2005: 324

In his novel The Savage Girl (2002), Alex Shakar introduces the concept of trans-temporal marketing (15f, 277). Marketers from the future have traveled back in time to “advertise their products” to us in the present.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
-- Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto (76)

Rebecca Ore’s Outlaw School and Nicola Griffith’s Slow River both describe near-future worlds in which class stratification, sexual politics, and a globalized economy have become dystopically exaggerated. The novels highlight the ways in which class and sexual politics intersect to produce alienated and estranged subjects. “Alienation” and “estrangement,” familiar terms for Marxist theory, take on added significance for a feminist critique of Marxism. These terms are likewise significant for literary-critical and theoretical approaches to science fiction.