Not Yet…?

Abstract

277 BOOKS IN REVIEW to bend and strain around war and waste as they entwine their way through history, repeatedly asking how the world might untether them” (286). No doubt I sound pedantic, but problems like the above examples are not isolated; they riddle the whole book, spoiling the experience of a reader (myself) who is in almost entire sympathy with Cole’s overall desire to give H.G. Wells more respect in academia. I can only conclude that her manuscript has not been copyedited rigorously—frankly, whole sections do not seem to have been copyedited at all. The unfortunate result is that her book is presented to the public in a way that does not do justice to its intention: to be that long-awaited comprehensive study of one of the greatest but most unfairly neglected writers of the earlier twentieth century.—Nicholas Ruddick, University of Regina Not Yet ... ? Caroline Edwards. Utopia and the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 2019. x+267 pp. $99.99 hc, $80 ebk. Postmodernism is dead, all hail … what? Late Capitalism, the socioeconomic context that Fredric Jameson tells us was the compost from which postmodernism grew, has died of old age. It was not up to the task of the new century, battered down by plagues (SARS, Swine Flu, Ebola, Coronavirus); by environmental collapse; by financial blows that saw the poorest in society having their resources squeezed by a decade or more of austerity while the richest saw their wealth increase exponentially. In consequence, trust in traditional forms of governance evaporated, allowing the rise of populists with no principles of their own other than an appeal to the most base instincts of their constituents, who could therefore somehow present themselves as being free from the swamp of modern democratic politics. Given that Late Capitalism has been thus exhausted over the last twenty years, its cultural efflorescence has been deprived of nourishment. But what is to provide our cultural response to this radically changed social, environmental, and political landscape? For Caroline Edwards, the answer is an old idea that in over 500 years has never quite gone away, though it has undergone some drastic transformations in that time: Utopia. By Utopia, we are not talking (or not primarily talking) about More’s or Bacon’s remote island state; or the political or religious wish-lists of various would-be teachers and theorists; or Wells’s dream of a future world state; still less are we talking about the dystopia that was the default reaction to the monolithic totalitarian states of the twentieth century. Utopia now, in this current cultural moment, is more a state of mind, a personal sense of place rather than a place being presented to us. And it is always a process, never complete and sometimes as nebulous as hope. This new Utopia is defined by the other key word in Edwards’s study: non-contemporaneity. Caroline Edwards is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, but she is also someone very well aware of science fiction and its study (she has, among other things, co-edited a book on China Miéville). Consequently, the theoretical underpinning of this new work may come as less of a surprise 278 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) to students of science fiction than it might to those who concentrate on the more mainstream aspects of modern literature. Her work draws heavily, indeed exhaustively, on the theories of Ernst Bloch, although it has to be said that his idea of the Novum, which has played so crucial a part in the theorizing of science fiction, receives no more than a passing reference here. Edwards concentrates, instead, on Bloch’s ideas of utopia, his messianic leanings, and in particular his notion of the Noch Nicht, the “not yet,” which she expands into fictions of the not yet (always italicized, as though it is itself a title). Fictions of the not yet, which are here examined through ten representative works, form, Edwards argues, a characteristic movement in twenty-first century British fiction. The works that are central to this study—though with enough others mentioned in passing...