This dissertation follows Jameson’s “Antinomies of Utopia” as a discursive model for thinking through the conceptual displacement from utopia to speculation and what happens with their attendant theories and ideologies in cultural critique when such a displacement is followed through. As a figure of the dynamic relation between form and content, Jameson’s text advances by turns practically and theoretically, at one moment treating matters separately and in the next leaping toward ever provisional systematization. The three main chapters that follow each foreground textual reception. However, where chapters three and four examine the critical reception of a novel and a film, respectively, in the way of case studies, chapter two examines the broader conceptual reception of utopia and speculation, primarily in the Marxist tradition. The second chapter of this dissertation follows Jameson’s text as it attempts to set a framework for the subsequent case studies. As a series of “Theses on Utopia and Speculation,” it develops an understanding of the two concepts progressing from relative isolation to greater complexity, interference, and incoherence. Across the contexts of literary genre, etymology and rhetoric, Marxism, theory, technology, and social life as such, the chapter endeavors to show how speculation displaces utopia in the historical present. The third chapter, “Climates of Speculation,” turns to contemporary literary fiction to see this displacement in action. Jenny Offill’s 2020 Weather provides its case study for the intersection of climate fiction and autofiction, two “genres” which, when combined, problematize what Juha Raipola refers to as the “utopian propensity of speculative fiction.” Through a close reading of Offill’s novel as well as its critical reception, the chapter argues that the very distinction between the speculative and the so-called realistic mobilized to assert the powers of the former actually conceals what may be most utopian about it. The fourth and final chapter, “On Not Taking it Literally: Notes on Civil War,” also takes as its case study the critical controversy about a cultural text: Alex Garland’s 2024 speculative, or dystopian action film, Civil War. In contrast to chapter three’s focus on genre, this chapter instead descends into what Jameson’s refers to as “the strangeness, the unnaturalness, of the hermeneutic situation.” In so doing, it examines the contested reception of the film—its narrative content but more specifically its absent content—to inquire into the broader stakes for meaning and interpretation in the context of the so-called “post-truth” or “post-ideological” historical present. As in the previous chapter, the controversies turn on (a version of) the distinction between the realistic and the speculative. And as in the previous chapter, the distinction itself is symptomatic of a deeper displacement concerning the relations among criticism, textual interpretation, utopia, and dystopia. In conclusion, the chapter makes an argument for what critical speculation might mean after utopianism.