Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions is a major work of literary and cultural criticism by Fredric Jameson, published by Verso (London and New York) in 2005. ISBN 1-84467-033-3. At 431 pages, the book represents Jameson's most sustained engagement with science fiction as a genre and utopian thought as a political and philosophical category.
Jameson is one of the most influential Marxist literary critics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His earlier essay on Philip K. Dick, published in the 1970s and engaging with novels like Dr. Bloodmoney, was one of the first major interventions by a prominent literary theorist in Dick studies. That essay helped legitimize Dick as a subject of serious academic and theoretical inquiry, particularly within postmodern and Marxist critical frameworks.
Archaeologies of the Future extends Jameson's engagement with science fiction to encompass the broader utopian tradition, examining how science fiction functions as a vehicle for imagining alternative social and political arrangements. The book's inclusion in this archive reflects Jameson's foundational role in bringing Dick into the discourse of high literary theory and his continuing influence on how Dick's work is understood in relation to capitalism, ideology, and the political imagination.