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- Title
Utopia and Science Fiction in Raymond Williams.
- Authors
Milner, Andrew
- Abstract
Raymond Williams was a pioneer in the early history of what is now known as cultural studies and also a central inspiration for the early British New Left. There is an extensive commentary on his work, none of which makes anything of his enduring interest in science fiction. This essay argues that there are three main phases in Williams's thought, each explicable in terms of its own differentially negotiated settlement between the kind of literary humanism associated with the English critic F. R. Leavis and some version or another of Marxism. In each of these phases, Williams formulated a relatively distinct definition of the interrelationship of sf, utopia, and dystopia. In thirty years of occasional writing about sf, he learned to substitute the complex seeing of analysis for moralistic criticism and to situate texts in their material and intellectual contexts. He came to understand the kind of honorable personal motives and socially effective structures of feeling that underpinned both utopian and dystopian forms, and to realize that neither was antithetical to the "space anthropology" he admired in James Blish and Ursula K. Le Guin. But his suspicion of radical dystopia remained essentially unchanged: without resistance, he concluded, without "realism," without the "true subjunctive," dystopia will kill hope as surely as an unrealistic utopia will fail to inspire it.
- Subjects
WILLIAMS, Raymond, 1921-1988; UTOPIAS in literature; FEMINISM in literature; SCIENCE fiction
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 2003, Vol 30, Issue 2, p199
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism