Here he argued that the new American science-fictional utopias of the 1970s were 'critical' in the double sense of Enlightenment critique and of the 'critical mass' required to produce an explosion.
[1] Moylan's examples included Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground, Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines and Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You.
But his primary focus fell on Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Samuel R. Delany's Triton.
In Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000) Moylan developed the parallel concept of the 'critical dystopia'.
They are thus 'stubbornly' utopian, in the sense that they do not move easily toward their own better worlds: 'Rather, they linger in the terrors of the present even as they exemplify what is needed to transform it'.