Science Fiction and the "Emergent" Potential of the Pastoral

I've found Raymond Williams' categories "dominant," "residual," and "emergent" very useful in conceptualizing and writing about cultural and social modes and values. And every time I read his discussion of them, whether in Marxism and Literature or Culture and Materialism, I come to a new (and hopefully clearer) understanding of the three categories. In much of my own critical work thus far, I've attempted to identify and describe the pastoral as a residual mode, one surviving from an earlier social organization but still periodically appropriated and "incorporated" by dominant and alternative cultural and social orders. The consensus is usually, and I think Williams' himself makes this point at least somewhat in The Country and the City, that the pastoral as a residual mode attempting to express alternative values usually ends up only either masking dominant and exploitive social relations or creating new ones.

But does science fiction provide a path to avoid these two projected pitfalls of the pastoral as an alternative cultural and social mode? Could we view the pastoral as an emergent rather than residual value through science fiction, especially since it has the ability to far remove us from the particularity of our world while still allowing us, according to Williams, "a reworking, in imagination, of all forms and conditions" (209)? I'm thinking that it actually could, that the pastoral could become a viable emergent mode. This was suggested to me by the film Dark City (1998). In the film the pastoral is just an artificial memory created in a laboratory that the main character eventually stops trying to remember and instead attempts to create. I've only just started thinking about this so it's not fully formulated in my mind yet. But I think it would make a good research project and interesting article.