"In Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Tom Moylan delivers a critical investigation of the history, aesthetics, and politics of dystopia. To situate this work, he recaps the methodological paradigm that developed within the interdisciplinary fields of science fiction studies and utopian studies as they grew out of the oppositional political culture of the 1960s and 1970s (the context that also produced the project of cultural studies). He then presents a new and comprehensive account of the textual structure and formal operations of the dystopian text. From there, he focuses on the science fictional dystopias that emerged in the context of the conservative restoration and corporate restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s, and he closely examines the "critical dystopias" of Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, and Marge Piercy."--BOOK JACKET.