Cognitve (re)mapping: Superseding Utopian and Dystopian Space in Notes from a Coma

I suggest in this essay that affiliated cultural work can be found in the residual corners of the Western imaginary, such as Ireland, especially as Irish culture and politics has confronted the onslaught of disciplinary neoliberalism and xenophobic fascism in a series of rapid turns in the last two decades. From within a diverse project of tracking and tracing Irish science fictionality, I turn my attention to Mike McCormac´s Notes from a Coma (2005). Clearly a work of sf, but one contesting the Irish literary heritage and Irish society as well as the boundaries of utopian form, the book is not so much a utopian novel as much as it is a fictive meditation on the reality and the process of the utopian impulse.