Editorial

This special issue of Colloquy contains seven papers from the “Demanding the Impossible: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction” conference held at Monash University in December 2007. A companion publication, Demanding the Impossible: Utopia and Dystopia, previously published as a special issue of Arena Journal, also brought together papers from the conference. The Colloquy papers engage with the figures of utopia and dystopia as they appear both in literary forms and in political activity. A variety of theoretical approaches are deployed, including concepts from the field of Utopian Studies associated with the work of Fredric Jameson, Tom Moylan, Lyman Tower Sargent and Ernst Bloch. However, other names also appear that are not so readily associated with utopia or dystopia: Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Macherey, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben. The scope of these theoretical sources is an index of the con-tributors’ innovative analyses and also an indication of just how productive a field of investigation is provided by the topoi of utopia and dystopia.