Andrew Milner, ed., Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia.

Abstract

In it, Williams sketches a typology of contemporary versions of SF that comprises “Putropias” (narratives that testify to the “corruption” of the “Utopian romances” [15], and their effective inversion into anti-utopian valences), “Doomsday” narratives (ones focusing on a devastating, planetary catastrophe) and “Space Anthropology”, a category that includes literary texts that update a residual anthropological language of cultural thick description in SF terms. The first is Williams’s keen insight into the treacherous principle that informs Orwellian anti-utopianism, one which consists in the active projection on the future of subjective anxieties in the guise of objective trends which then “confirm” one’s worst fears in spectral retroaction, thus engendering a series of paradoxes: a humanism that is only capable of expressing itself via fantasies of “inhuman terror”, a subjective attachment to decency that turns out to obsess with moral and physical squalor, a socialism whose most passionate means of expression is anti-socialist invective, a commitment to equality that ends up surrendering to a desperate acceptance of “inherent inequality, inescapable class difference” (34). Particularly significant here is Williams’s dynamic understanding of “realism” as a mode committed to the “living tension” (50) that arises out of continual collective efforts to establish “reality”, ones that in periods “of exceptional growth” may include “characteristic” kinds of “failure and breakdown” (49). Williams rails against the novel’s identification of totalitarianism with socialism (59) (without thereby identifying the former with “communism”, as Milner does [58]—he simply admits its relevance for the Soviet authoritarian state of the 1930s); he accuses Orwell of neglecting to register any of the global instances of democratic socialist resistance and of failing to see the possibility of an “affluent capitalism” wherein the multinational corporation plays as significant a role as the national state (60); he charges him with a “stale revolutionary romanticism” that reduces future hope to a section of the population that Orwell himself actively dehumanizes into the proles (61); he blames him for succumbing to a provincialist and effectively nationalist idealization of an immaculately “English” life threatened by the excesses of totalitarian theorizing (65); he takes him to task for his singular incapacity to imaginatively “realize the full life of another” except by absorbing such an other back into the solipsism of a “private landscape” (68); finally, he highlights Orwell’s astounding failure to understand the complex and ambiguous dynamics of the relationship between a capitalism he prematurely saw as doomed and a democracy whose ability to subsist—however contradictorily—far beyond the pastures of socialist egalitarianism he severely underestimated (69-71).