Resources for a Journey of Hope: Raymond Williams on Utopia and Science Fiction

Introduction

Raymond Williams was a key figure in the making of contemporary cultural sociology. In his Towards 2000 (1983), he famously identified the new social movements, the peace movement, the ecology movement, the feminist movement, and also what he termed the movement of ‘oppositional culture’, as major ‘resources for a journey of hope’ (Williams, 1983: 249–250). Here, he referred in only very general terms to ‘new work in theatre, film, community writing’, but it seems reasonable to suppose that specifically utopian and science-fictional texts might have significantly contributed to this kind of oppositional culture. Certainly, Williams himself had an enduring interest in utopia, dystopia and science fiction: he wrote two articles specifically addressed to these genres, both eventually published in the scholarly journal Science Fiction Studies; there is a wide range of reference to them in more generally familiar Williams texts; and, finally, he wrote two ‘future novels’, The Volunteers (1978) and The Fight for Manod (1979b), the first clearly science-fictional in character, both arguably utopian. This article has three main aims: first, to summarise Williams’s own work in the field; second, to explore how two of his more general theoretical concepts – structure of feeling and selective tradition – can be applied to science fiction; and, third, to suggest that the ‘sociological’ turn – by which Williams sought to substitute description and explanation for judgement and canonisation as the central purposes of analysis – represents a more productive approach to utopian and science fiction studies than the much more prescriptive criticism deployed by other leading ‘neo-Marxist’ critics, such as Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson.

Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) is still widely regarded as the classic text of academic science fiction (henceforth SF) criticism. As Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint recently observed: ‘disagreeing with him [Suvin] is a considerable part of SF scholarship … he … set … the terms by which SF has subsequently been studied’ (Bould and Vint, 2011: 17). Suvin argued that science fiction was best understood as an ‘estranged’ genre, distinguished by the narrative dominance of a fictional ‘novum’ validated ‘by cognitive logic’ (Suvin, 1979: 63); and that the much older genre of utopia had been retrospectively ‘englobed’ by science fiction, such that it has now become ‘the socio-political subgenre of science fiction’ (Suvin, 1979: 61). Suvin defined a fictive utopia as an ‘imaginary community … in which human relations are organized more perfectly than in the author’s community’ (Suvin, 1979: 45). This insistence on the comparative – ‘more perfectly’, rather than ‘perfect’ – allowed him to accommodate Saint-Simon, Wells and Morris as well as Bacon and Fénelon. It also in principle allowed for an understanding of dystopia as the negative variant of the same genre, although in practice Suvin concluded that ‘SF will be the more significant and truly relevant the more clearly it eschews … the … fashionable static dystopia of the Huxley–Orwell model’ (Suvin, 1979: 83).

Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005) is arguably the single most influential theoretical text in SF studies since Metamorphoses. It followed Suvin both in its understanding of utopia as a subgenre of SF (Jameson, 2005: xiv, 57, 393, 410, 414–415) and in its assessment of the ‘anti-Utopia’ as an inferior variant of the genre, which functions by excluding ‘whatever threatens the system’ (Jameson, 2005: 205). Equally important, both Suvin and Jameson each deploy an essentially literary-critical method, which, despite their interest in social contexts, nonetheless aims primarily to evaluate and pass judgement on the ‘worth’ of literary and other texts.

Williams himself had shared many of Suvin’s and Jameson’s presuppositions, not least an initial distaste for the ‘Huxley–Orwell model’. But, as we shall see, he proceeded towards a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between SF and utopia; towards what might well be considered a more ‘balanced’ reading, not only of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but also of dystopia as a general form; and towards a more sociological, and thereby less literary-critical, approach to the valuation of texts.

The Two Essays on Science Fiction

The first of Williams’s two major essays, entitled simply ‘Science Fiction’, was published in the Workers Education Association magazine, The Highway, in December 1956, and later republished with an introduction by Patrick Parrinder in Science Fiction Studies (Williams, 1988 [1956]). Here Williams begins by observing that stories of ‘a secular paradise of the future’ had ‘reached their peak’ with William Morris and thereafter had been ‘almost entirely converted into their opposites: the stories of a future secular hell’. He proceeds to distinguish three main types of contemporary literary SF, which he termed respectively ‘Putropia’ (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Mi), ‘Doomsday’ (A.E. van Vogt’s Dormant, Philp Latham’s The Xi Effect, John Christopher’s The New Wine and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids), and ‘Space Anthropology’ (Williams, 1988 [1956]: 357). He confesses to an intense dislike of most examples of the first and second, seeing them as instances of the then dominant forms of English cultural pessimism – ‘less warnings about the future … than about the adequacy of certain types of contemporary feeling’ (Williams, 1988 [1956]: 358). The third SF mode, however, inspired Williams’s admiration precisely for its capacity to move beyond cultural pessimism. So he found in James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, with its ‘beautifully imagined tribe’ of eight-foot tall, reptilian Lithians, ‘a work of genuine imagination, and real intelligence’ (Williams, 1988 [1956]: 360). Moreover, Williams’s preference was for Blish, not only against Orwell, but also against Morris. For if dystopianism as putropia constituted an important part of the problem, utopianism was not thereby the solution. Rather, it was the less than utopian plausibility of Blish’s ‘human voice, … far away, among the galaxies’ (Williams, 1988 [1956]: 360) that Williams found interesting. For the young Williams, utopia was still about perfection, dystopia about radical imperfection – secular heavens and secular hells – and neither allowed for the distinctively human voice present in the best space anthropology.

The second essay, ‘Utopia and Science Fiction’, was published in Science Fiction Studies in 1978 and later republished in Problems in Materialism and Culture (Williams, 1980 [1978]). It clearly represents Williams’s major theoretical statement on the two genres. Here, he argues that SF represents a distinctly modern equivalent to earlier forms of utopia and dystopia, but that they are nonetheless non-identical as genres. There are four main types of alternative reality, he argues: the paradise or hell; the positively or negatively externally-altered world; the positive or negative willed transformation; and the positive or negative technological transformation. SF can and does deploy all four modes, but in each case drawing on ‘science’, in its variable definitions (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 196–199). SF may be utopian or dystopian, and utopias and dystopias may be science-fictional, but the genres are analytically distinguishable, nonetheless, by virtue of the presence or absence of science (and technology). Williams is also clear that utopia and dystopia are comparative rather than absolute categories, dealing respectively with ‘a happier life’ and ‘a more wretched kind of life’ (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 196).

Comparing utopia and SF, he insists that they are cognate but nonetheless analytically distinguishable forms: ‘the presentation of otherness appears to link them, as modes of desire or of warning in which a crucial emphasis is obtained by the element of discontinuity from ordinary “realism”’ (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 198, original emphasis). But this element of discontinuity is itself ‘fundamentally variable’: it is more radical in non-utopian/non-dystopian SF, since the utopian and dystopian modes require for their political efficacy an ‘implied connection’ with the real (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 198). The willed transformation and the technological transformation are thus the more characteristically utopian or dystopian modes, because transformation is normally more important to utopia than otherness per se. Later in the same essay, he argues that ‘it is part of the power of science fiction that it is always potentially a mode of authentic shift: … a reworking, in imagination, of all forms and conditions’ (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 209, original emphasis). Describing SF as ‘at once liberating and promiscuous’, he concludes that ‘as a whole’ it ‘has moved beyond the utopian; in a majority of cases … because it has also fallen short of it’ (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 209). Here Williams’s position seems much more nuanced than that of either Suvin or Jameson.

Borrowing Miguel Abensour’s distinction between ‘systematic’ and ‘heuristic’ utopias, that is, those focussed respectively on alternative organisational models and on alternative values (Abensour, 1973), Williams casts new light on the old controversy between Morris and Edward Bellamy. If the latter’s Looking Backward had been essentially a systematic utopia, Williams observes, then News from Nowhere is a ‘generous but sentimental heuristic transformation’ (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 202–204). What is properly ‘emergent’ in Morris, however, is ‘the crucial insertion of the transition to utopia’ as something ‘fought for’ (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 204, original emphasis). At this point, the heuristic becomes distinctly unsentimental. Much the same occurs in Wells, Williams continues, and it is in relation to these willed transformations to utopia that the dystopias of Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell need to be situated. Orwell’s 1984 is neither more nor less plausible than Morris’s 2003, he concludes, but the latter’s fictional revolution of 1952 is more plausible than either: ‘because its energy flows both ways, forward and back, … its issue … can go either way’. For Williams, this kind of openness – when the ‘subjunctive is a true subjunctive, rather than a displaced indicative’ – calls into question the ‘dominant mode of dystopia’ represented paradigmatically by Nineteen Eighty-Four (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 208). This pairing of Morris and Orwell is a recurring trope in Williams’s work. But Williams also finds a parallel openness in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Her anarcho-feminist Anarres is a getaway, rather than a transformation, he observes, but ‘an open utopia’, nonetheless, ‘shifted, deliberately, from its achieved harmonious condition’, thereby ‘depriving utopia of its classical end of struggle, its image of perpetual harmony and rest’. Such openness represents a ‘strengthening’ of the utopian impulse, he concludes, which ‘warily, self-questioningly, and setting its own limits, renews itself’ (Williams, 1980 [1978]: 211–212).

Williams’s interest in Le Guin warrants three further observations. First, it should be apparent that his enthusiasm for ‘realistic’ utopias and utopian ‘realism’ clearly rehearses his earlier sympathy for space anthropology. In 1956, he had conceived the latter as quite distinct from utopia and dystopia. By 1978, however, he had come to realise that utopian plausibility required something very much like it. It is a truism, but nonetheless true, that Le Guin’s Hainish novels exhibit an extraordinary richness of such ‘anthropological’ detail, in their treatment of myth and language, kinship, child-rearing, and so on. If this is perhaps less true of The Dispossessed than of some of her other novels, it is still clearly the quality that makes Anarres so believable. Second, Williams’s sense of what was different about The Dispossessed interestingly prefigures what Lyman Tower Sargent, Raffaella Baccolini, Tom Moylan and others would later write about the ‘critical dystopias’ of late 20th-century SF (Baccolini, 2000; Moylan, 2000; Sargent, 1994). Third, we might note that Anarres is unambiguously feminist, if not unambiguously utopian. This matters if only because Williams’s own sexual politics had often seemed anything but feminist. In his later years, however, he had begun to make rather more sympathetic noises. No doubt the wider feminist movement had compelled some of this belated attention. It is possible, however, that Odonian Anarres also played some small part.

Discussions of Utopia and SF in Other Key Texts

There is also a wide range of reference to utopia, dystopia and SF in other more familiar Williams texts, especially Culture and Society 1780–1950, The Long Revolution, the different editions of Orwell, and The Country and the City.

Though not his first book, Williams’s intellectual and political reputation was clearly established by Culture and Society (Williams, 1963). As his biographer, Fred Inglis, observed, it was one of the two ‘sacred texts’ of the British New Left (Inglis, 1995: 157). Utopia and dystopia figured prominently in the new movement’s intellectual preoccupations. For the ex-communist intellectuals associated with The New Reasoner, such as E.P. Thompson, the key theoretical problem was the legacy of Stalinist Marxism, and one possible solution a recovery of older utopian socialist traditions, especially as represented in Morris (Thompson, 1955). For many of the younger radicals intrigued by the new popular culture and appalled by the threat of nuclear warfare, both Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to offer a more directly contemporary alternative to Stalinism. As Williams himself would later recall, the ‘New Left respected Orwell directly, especially in its early years’ (Williams, 1971: 87). One might have expected Culture and Society to echo something of this interest in Morris and Orwell. And, to some extent, it did. The book is famously organised into two main parts, dealing respectively with the years 1790 to 1870 and 1914 to 1950, linked by a less substantial treatment of a turn-of-the-century ‘Interregnum’. And it is worth stressing that each of the main parts concludes with a discussion of political writing, the first with Morris, the second with Orwell.

As we have seen, the Morris/Orwell pairing is a recurring trope in Williams. But in Culture and Society neither News from Nowhere nor Nineteen Eighty-Four excites Williams’s positive interest. He sees Morris’s significance in the attempt to attach the general values of the ‘culture and society’ tradition to ‘an actual and growing social force: that of the organized working class’ (Williams, 1963: 153). But this is more apparent in the expressly political essays, he argues, such as How we Live, and How we might Live or A Factory as it Might Be, than in the utopian novel, where the weaknesses ‘are active and disabling’ (Williams, 1963: 159). As for Orwell, if the man had been ‘brave, generous, frank, and good’ (Williams, 1963: 284), his dystopia nonetheless fully replicated the very minority culture/mass civilization topos which propelled Williams away from T.S. Eliot and Leavis. ‘Orwell puts the case in these terms’, Williams concluded, ‘because this is how he really saw present society, and Nineteen Eighty-Four is desperate because Orwell recognized that on such a construction the exile could not win, and then there was no hope at all’ (Williams, 1963: 283). Hence, the paradox of ‘a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualized a distinctive squalor’ (Williams, 1963: 277).

In The Long Revolution (Williams, 1965), in the chapter on ‘Realism and the Contemporary Novel’, SF is again represented by Huxley, Orwell and Bradbury, but here also by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, and it is used as a key element in one of Williams’s exercises in literary typology. There have been two main types of realist novel in the 20th century, Williams argues, the ‘social novel’ and the ‘personal novel’, each of which has ‘documentary’ and ‘formula’ subtypes (Williams, 1965: 306, 308). The ‘social formula novel’ in Williams’s schema works by way of the abstraction of a particular pattern from the sum of social experience, accentuating it so as to create a fictional society. The best example of this is the future-story, which is virtually coextensive with ‘serious “science fiction”’. This kind of SF is ‘lively’, he argues, because ‘about lively social feelings’, but lacks both a ‘substantial society’ and ‘substantial persons’: ‘For the common life is an abstraction, and the personal lives are defined by their function in the formula’ (Williams, 1965: 307–308). An obvious objection to this conclusion would be that it judges SF according to criteria more appropriate to the realistic ‘literary’ novel and thus ignores the formal conventions of the genre. But in the 1965 Pelican edition Williams added an endnote explicitly addressing this argument, which insists to the contrary that ‘the form itself … must … be criticized from a general position in experience’ (Williams, 1965: 387). The implication is that, if only it would try, SF could indeed create both a substantial society and substantial persons. Which returns us, by implication if not expressly, to space anthropology and Blish’s Lithians. Williams would revisit this notion on more than one occasion: in a 1971 column for the BBC’s The Listener, for example, where he insisted that, for all the patent inadequacies of television SF, the genre had peculiar ‘advantages’ for the exploration of themes such as ‘identity and culture-contact’ (Williams, 1989a [1971]: 144); and more extensively in the various discussions of Le Guin from the late 1970s.

The first edition of Williams’s Orwell develops a more even handed account of Nineteen Eighty-Four than that in Culture and Society, weighing the novel’s strengths against its weaknesses, rather than the author against his text. The convincing elements were twofold, it concludes, the treatment of language on the one hand, and international power politics on the other (Williams, 1971: 75–76). Against this, the identification of totalitarianism with socialism and the pessimism about human capacity, evident both in Winston’s loveless relationship with Julia and in the reduction of the people to passive ‘proles’, amount to a ‘failure of experience’. As in Culture and Society, Williams concluded that ‘the question about Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is why Orwell should have ‘created situations and people that, in comparison with his own written observations, are one-dimensional and determined’ (Williams, 1971: 82). But here the answer is essentially sociological, ‘not in the personal contradictions but in the much deeper structures of a society and its literature’ (Williams, 1971: 83). Hence, the final conclusion that the only ‘useful’ thing, now, ‘is to understand how it happened’ (Williams, 1971: 97).

The aspiration to understand is betrayed, nonetheless, by Williams’s aversion to Orwell’s presumed ‘anti-socialism’. At one point, Williams complains that Orwell ‘had the best of reasons’ to know that political police ‘were not a socialist or communist invention’. ‘By assigning all modern forms of repression and authoritarian control to a single political tendency’, he continues, Orwell ‘not only misrepresented it but cut short the kind of analysis that would recognize these inhuman and destructive forces wherever they appeared’ (Williams, 1971: 77–78). The strange thing about this is that, in the immediately preceding paragraph, Williams quotes from Orwell’s letter of 16 June 1949 to the United Auto Workers Union, to the effect that Nineteen Eighty-Four was intended ‘NOT … as an attack on Socialism … but as a show-up of … perversions … partly realised in Communism and Fascism’ (Williams, 1971: 77; see also Orwell, 1970: 564). That is, Orwell had intended neither to represent political police as a ‘socialist invention’ nor to assign authoritarian control to a ‘single political tendency’, but had rather assigned it quite expressly to both communism and fascism, totalitarianisms respectively of the Left and the Right. Williams quotes from the letter with scrupulous accuracy, but nonetheless appears not to hear what it says. And this is so, surely, because his private judgements were far more hostile to Orwell and to Nineteen Eighty-Four than those actually published in the book. As he would later explain to the editors of the New Left Review: ‘I cannot bear much of it now … its projections of ugliness and hatred … seem to introduce a period of really decadent bourgeois writing … I am bound to say, I cannot read him now’ (Williams, 1979a: 391–392). This would not, however, be Williams’s last word on the subject.

In The Country and the City (Williams, 1973) Williams’s primary concern was with the pastoral and the counter-pastoral, but he found examples of both in the future cities of SF. The essential novelty of Williams’s procedure here was to compare literary representations with ‘questions of historical fact’ (Williams, 1973: 12), so as to test his texts for the extent to which they misrepresented their contexts. In his treatment of SF, Williams stresses the importance of the city as a site of utopian and dystopian imaginings, and emphasises the historical recency of the social experience of the megalopolis. The science-fictional ‘experience of the future’ comes out of an ‘experience of the cities’, he writes (Williams, 1973: 272), tracing this ‘deep transformation’ in the first instance to late 19th-century London, as represented especially in Morris’s News from Nowhere and H.G. Wells’s A Story of the Days to Come. But Williams is clear that this dynamic extends into the 20th century, into cities elsewhere and into film as well as the novel, tracing a line of descent from Wells to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Williams, 1973: 273–274). Williams follows the history of the SF city through Huxley and Orwell, James Thomson, Brian Aldiss and Arthur C. Clarke, J.G. Ballard and Walter M. Miller, Don A. Stuart, Henry Ruttner, E.M. Forster, Robert Abertheney and Blish (Williams, 1973: 274–277). And he still seemed to prefer Blish to Orwell, specifically the flying cities of Earthman, Come Home to the ‘shabby, ugly, exposed and lonely city’ of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Williams, 1973: 277, 275). The comparison is much less pointed, however, than in the earlier formulations. For the primary intent of the analysis is now not so much to take sides as to chart and explain the more general movement. ‘In a sense’, Williams concluded, ‘everything about the city – from the magnificent to the apocalyptic – can be believed at once’ (Williams, 1973: 278).

The second edition of Orwell included a new afterword, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984’, in which Williams begins by observing that the novel had three distinct layers: an ‘infrastructure’, where the hero-victim moves through a degraded world in search of a better life; a ‘structure of argument’ concerning the nature of the fictional society; and a ‘superstructure’ of fantasy, satire and parody, which renders this society ludicrous and absurd (Williams, 1991 [1984]: 95–96). His main interest is in the second, which he saw as comprising three main themes: the division of the world into super-states; their internal organisation along totalitarian lines; and the crucial significance to the latter of media manipulation through ‘thought control’ (Williams, 1991 [1984]: 99). Williams is clear, however, as he had not been in the first edition, that these societies have ‘developed beyond both capitalism and socialism’ and that the novel is not therefore ‘anti-socialist’. Indeed, he requotes exactly the same passage from the Auto Workers Union letter, so as to insist that ‘what is being described … is not only a universal danger but a universal process … This is a much harder position than any simple anti-socialism or anti-communism’ (Williams, 1991 [1984]: 101).

This is not to suggest that Williams was now uncritical of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Rather, he subjected it to much the same mode of analysis as that deployed in The Country and the City, comparing Orwell’s projections with the real world that eventuated in the period after the Second World War. Unitary super-states did not emerge, he points out, only superpowers and their attendant military alliances; the arms race between these superpowers generated affluence and technological innovation, rather than the stagnation and poverty envisaged by Orwell; and the superpowers were often resisted, both by local tradition in the metropolitan heartlands and by national-liberation movements in the former colonial periphery (Williams, 1991 [1984]: 106–110). More fundamentally, what Orwell had most failed to anticipate was the ‘spectacular capitalist boom’, which falsified ‘virtually every element of the specific prediction’ (Williams, 1991 [1984]: 117).

Williams here quotes extensively from Orwell’s 1946 essay on James Burnham – completely ignored in the first edition – to situate the novel in a very precise politico-intellectual context. Like Burnham, Orwell had believed capitalism finished. Unlike Burnham he hoped to see it replaced by democratic socialism, but like Burnham he also acknowledged the possibility that quasi-socialist rhetoric would be used to legitimise ‘managerial revolution’ and bureaucratic dictatorship. Burnham anticipated this prospect with some relish, Orwell with much fear. Hence, the latter’s insistence, both with and against Burnham, that ‘the question is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy or to true democracy’ (Orwell, 1970: 198). This, then, was for Williams Orwell’s crucial mistake, to have imagined capitalism already beaten and, hence, the central issue as that between different ‘socialisms’. As it turned out, the real ‘question’ would be that of a resurgent capitalism, re-legitimised by post-war affluence and radically oligarchic in its own later responses to the renewed depression and unemployment of the last quarter of the century. What really survives, Williams concludes, was ‘Orwell’s understanding of propaganda and thought control’ (Williams, 1991 [1984]: 120), even though the thought-controllers would be press lords and film magnates rather than totalitarian ideologues.

The Future Novels

Williams’s eventual reputation will doubtless depend on his academic and scholarly work, perhaps even his political involvement, rather than on his novels or television plays. This does not seem to have been his own view, however, and, whatever we might make of his Welsh trilogy or Loyalties, both The Volunteers and The Fight for Manod remain unusually interesting novels; the first a critical dystopia in the fullest sense, the second a utopian novel which nonetheless almost seems to defy classification. Williams himself described The Volunteers as a ‘political thriller’, rather than SF. Yet his recollection of wanting ‘to write a political novel set in the 1980s’ (Williams, 1984: 296), that is, in the then near-future, also marks it out as the kind of future story he closely associated with SF in The Long Revolution. By most conventional academic definitions – Suvin’s for example – the book is indeed SF and, ironically enough, SF written in the dystopian mode. For it is organised around the socio-political novum of a complete ideological and organisational collapse of the British Labour Party. This is, of course, more or less exactly what New Labour eventually achieved in historical reality, but in 1978 it remained a dystopian fictional novum. This novum is set within a changed technological landscape: a jet from London to Cardiff, an air-taxi to St Fagans, coin-operated seat-screens in railway station waiting rooms (Williams, 1978: 9, 10, 188). As Tony Pinkney observes, The Volunteers is ‘packed with gadgetry’ and SF is the genre ‘that in its heart of hearts it truly aspired to’ (Pinkney, 1991: 93). But, as with Orwell’s telescreens or Huxley’s feelies, these technological devices remain narratively subordinate to the hegemonic socio-political novum.

The novel begins in media res on 9 July 1987 – Nineteen Eighty-Four had begun on 4 April 1984 – with news of the attempted assassination of Edmund Buxton, Secretary of State for Wales, ‘shot as a murderer and as an enemy of the people’ by the Volunteer, ‘Marcus’ (Williams, 1978: 104, 5, 32). Lewis Redfern, the novel’s narrator and central protagonist; ‘Marcus’ and his comrades; Mark Evans, the onetime Labour junior minister turned NGO organiser; the secret ‘Volunteers’ with whom he is involved: all share connections with seventies ‘utopian’ activism. But, by virtue of these connections, Redfern has now become a consultant analyst for ‘Insatel’, a global satellite TV station, specialising in spectacle and news, ‘tin gods of the open sky’, as a critic describes it (Williams, 1978: 6, 154). Geo-spatially, the novel is structured around this opposition between hi-tech, global capitalism and its ruined and impoverished localities, from Wales to East Africa. In Williams’s 1987, Wales enjoys pseudo self-government through a Welsh Senate, but its finances are firmly controlled by the ‘Financial Commission’, represented by Buxton, also a former Labour minister. ‘So it is not his inherited class’, Redfern tells us, ‘that has produced his undoubted authoritarian character. He is that now more dangerous kind of man, whose authority and whose ruthlessness derive from his absolute belief in his models’ (Williams, 1978: 12). He is also widely suspected of having ordered in strike-breaking troops who shot and killed Gareth Powell, a picketing loader, at Pontyrhiw Power Depot. Hence the ‘murderer’ charge.

Redfern’s assignment is Buxton’s shooting, but the investigation leads him back to Powell, to Evans and to the Volunteers. The cynical journalist as hardboiled detective, Redfern makes use of his connections to unravel what is, at one level, a mystery story. But it is also a good attempt at postmodern ‘cognitive mapping’, to borrow Jameson’s description of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (Jameson, 1991: 54, 38). Provided with proof that Buxton was personally responsible for ordering in the strike-breaking troops, and that Evans is indeed a Volunteer, Redfern is forced to choose between his profession and his erstwhile political allegiances. He resigns, goes into hiding and finally gives evidence against Buxton at the Pontyrhiw Inquiry. Like Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Redfern provides the occasion for an ambiguously optimistic resolution. For although he testifies to the Inquiry, Redfern neither joins the underground, nor comes to identify with his ancestral Welshness, nor even accepts the lift to the station offered by Powell’s brother-in-law, Bob James. ‘No thanks, Bob’, Redfern replies in the novel’s closing line, ‘I’ll find my own way back’ (Williams, 1978: 208). This is precisely the kind of open-endedness Moylan sees as characteristic of critical dystopia.

The most common description of Williams’s novels is as ‘social realist’, which is fair enough comment on the first two of the Welsh trilogy, Border Country (1960) and Second Generation (1964). But the third volume, The Fight for Manod (Williams, 1979b), is a very different matter. For, like The Volunteers, its subject matter is the future, rather than the past and the present. As Williams himself observed, it is set ahead of its time of writing, but as ‘a plan’ rather than ‘an action’ (Williams, 1984: 266). The novel brings together Matthew Price from Border Country and Peter Owen from Second Generation, as consultants to Robert Lane, a onetime radical academic, now attached to the Department of Environment under a newly formed Labour Government. The eponymous Manod has been conceived as a new type of new city, to be located in mid-Wales, along the fictional Afren valley between the fictional towns of Nantlais and Pontafren. As Lane explains to Price: ‘it will be one of the first human settlements, anywhere in the world, to have been conceived, from the beginning, in post-industrial terms and with a post-electronic technology … it would be a marvellous place’ (Williams, 1979b: 13). It is, in short, a utopia. But if the initial plan is utopian, the eventual outcome is not. On Williams’s own account, the novel explores ‘the relation between necessary and desirable plans for the future and … the ways in which they get distorted and frustrated’ (Williams, 1984: 266). Its central concern is thus with ‘a specific contemporary sadness: the relation between a wholly possible future and the contradictions and blockages of the present’ (Williams, 1979a: 294). As Pinkney astutely observed, Manod is thus ‘limit-text’, simultaneously ‘realistic and science-fictional’ (Pinkney, 1991: 71, 77).

The Fight for Manod was begun in 1965 and completed in 1978, The Volunteers begun in 1970 and completed in 1976. In 1978 Williams delivered a series of lectures at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, which were later published in essay form as ‘The Tenses of Imagination’ (Williams, 1984). The lectures must have been drafted more or less immediately after the completion of Manod and The Volunteers; they are directly concerned with ‘future fiction’ (Williams, 1984: 265); and they clearly elaborate on issues raised for Williams both by his own novels and by his reading of Le Guin. At an important stage in certain kinds of future story, Williams observes, ‘a writer sits and thinks; assembles and deploys variables; even constructs what in secular planning are called “scenarios”’ (Williams, 1984: 266, original emphasis). This is so, moreover, even when ‘the factors are only partly known’ and their interaction ‘quite radically uncertain’. Such is the case with The Dispossessed, he continues, for here there is evidence ‘of deliberate and sustained thought about possible futures’, as distinct from the ‘reproductions of existing structures in externally altered circumstances’ (Williams, 1984: 266). His point is that Le Guin’s thinking is deliberate and sustained, rather than ‘sentimental’, in Abensour’s terms, and directed toward the possible, rather than the ‘untenable’. What had been a moment only in Morris – essentially chapters XVII and XVIII of News from Nowhere – thus informs the whole life of Le Guin’s ‘Odonian’ utopia.

When we imagine the future, Williams writes: ‘We speculate, we project, we attempt to divine, we figure’. Writing in the future tense is thus necessarily different from writing in the past or present tenses, ‘more general; more immediately accessible to ideas; often more angular and more edged; relatively low in the kind of saturation by detailed and unlooked-for experiences so common and ordinarily so valued in the other tenses’ (Williams, 1984: 267). Refusing to accord any necessary priority to any one tense, Williams nonetheless insists, in the essay’s striking conclusion, on the importance of a distinctively contemporary hesitation between ‘knowing … the structures of feeling that have directed and now hold us’ and ‘finding … the shape of an alternative, a future, that can be genuinely imagined and hopefully lived’. ‘There are many other kinds of writing in society’, he concedes, ‘but these now … are close and urgent, challenging many of us to try both to understand and to attempt them’ (Williams, 1984: 268).

Williams’s Key Concepts and SF

Two of Williams’s more general theoretical concepts, ‘structure of feeling’ and ‘selective tradition’, can be productively applied to SF studies. We have had cause already to refer in passing to the first of these, perhaps the central concept in Williams’s theoretical oeuvre. We might also note that it has actually been taken into SF itself: the term is used, accurately and precisely, both by the time-travelling human settlers from the Jovian moons of 3020, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream, and by the anonymous 24th-century historian-narrators of the ‘Extracts’ in his 2312 (Robinson, 2009, 2012: 244). Here, however, I propose to use it to resolve one of the key issues in SF studies, that of how to periodise the origins of the genre. For Suvin, Adam Roberts and David Seed, for example, the proper starting point is in the second century AD with Lucian of Samosata (Roberts, 2005: ix, 32–35; Seed, 2011: 2–3; Suvin, 1979: 54, 97–98); but Suvin also stresses the importance of Thomas More in the 16th century and H.G. Wells in the 19th (Suvin, 1979: 92, 219–220); for Jameson, the key figures are variously Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and Wells (Jameson, 2005: 1, 285; 2013: 298); for Brian Aldiss, it is Shelley above all (Aldiss, 1986: 25–52). Where, then, should we locate the beginnings of the genre?

Structure of feeling provided Williams with a way to theorise the ‘historical formation’ of a ‘structure of meanings’ as ‘a wide and general movement in thought and feeling’ (Williams, 1963: 17). He was particularly insistent, moreover, that a key role in the emergent structure of feeling of mid-19th century Britain had been performed by the new industrial sciences and technologies. The ‘excitement of this extraordinary release of man’s powers’, he observes, became ‘central to the whole culture’ (Williams, 1965: 88). And it is precisely this element that most clearly distinguishes the new worlds of 19th-century SF from older fantastic voyages and utopian islands. This is surely also the significance of Frankenstein, that it imagined biological science as practically applicable to medical technology. Which is why Aldiss was surely right to trace the ‘origins of the species’ to Shelley’s novel. It is also why Victor Frankenstein is still actively present in SF, continuously available as an intertextual reference point in SF literature, film, radio and television, in ways that are simply not true of either Lucian’s King Endymion or More’s Raphael Hythlodaeus.

Williams uses the related term ‘selective tradition’ to denote the way cultural tradition entails ‘a continual selection and re-selection of ancestors’ (Williams, 1965: 69). In Marxism and Literature, for example, he points to the decisive importance of such selectivity in the effective operation of cultural hegemony. Tradition, he writes, is ‘always more than an inert historicized segment; … it is the most powerful practical means of incorporation’. What tradition effects, Williams continues, is ‘an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification’ (Williams, 1977: 115). ‘It is a version of the past’, he continues, ‘intended to connect with and ratify the present. What it offers … is a sense of predisposed continuity’ (Williams, 1977: 116, original emphasis). Williams himself directs this observation at the high literary canon as understood by F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot. No doubt, Suvin and Jameson would both cheerfully accept its application thereto. But when Suvin describes the ‘SF tradition’, he does so in terms that remain vulnerable to a similarly Williamsite critique.

For Suvin, as for Leavis and Eliot, tradition is inherited from the past, developed and modified in the present, then handed on to the future as a gift from the present-become-past. Hence his description of Wells as ‘the central writer in the SF tradition’, who ‘collected … all the main influences of earlier writers … and transformed them in his own image, whence they entered into the treasury of subsequent SF’ (Suvin, 1979: 220). But this tradition is also necessarily a retrospectively selective attempt to establish and maintain kinds of predisposed continuity. There are a plethora of well-known ‘Definitions of SF’ – Wikipedia currently lists no fewer than 34 (Wikipedia, 2015) – each of which represents an attempt to redefine the SF tradition selectively by re-selecting ancestors. And this is as true of Suvin and Jameson as of Hugo Gernsback or Brian Aldiss. As Patrick Parrinder rightly observed of Suvin’s Metamorphoses: ‘“Cognitive estrangement” may be taken to be a fact about the 1970s, just as T.S. Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility” was a fact about the 1920s’ (Parrinder, 2000: 10). This is not to suggest that all definitions are equally valid, but only that all are equally ‘socioaesthetic’, to borrow Suvin’s own phrase (Suvin, 1979: 53), and therefore necessarily to some extent weapons in a struggle for the power to define. And attempts to trace the genre back to Lucian and More, or Verne and Wells, such as those prosecuted by Suvin and Jameson, can be seen, at least in part, to be prompted by the desire to legitimise the place of SF studies in the contemporary academic curriculum.

Williams’s Sociological Turn and SF Studies

Jim McGuigan detects a ‘social-scientific turn’ in Williams, citing as evidence the latter’s 1975 keynote address to the British Sociological Association (McGuigan, 2014: xv). We might add the fact that Williams’s Culture was first published in Britain as part of Fontana’s ‘New Sociology’ series and in the United States as The Sociology of Culture (Williams, 1981, 1982). This sociological turn entailed a double movement by which he sought: first, to set cultural texts in their socio-institutional contexts; and second, to substitute description and explanation for judgement and canonisation as the central purposes of analysis. For Williams, the paradigmatic form of prescriptive criticism had originally been Leavisism, but by the mid-1970s it had been superseded by a kind of post-structuralist anti-realism, inspired in part by the theory of ideology propounded by the French philosopher Louis Althusser (Althusser, 1971). In British cultural studies, this position was best represented by Screen, the journal of the Society for Education in Film and Television. In ‘A Defence of Realism’, a lecture given to a SEFT/Screen weekend school in 1976 and later published posthumously in What I Came to Say, Williams observed that: ‘We live in a society … which is … rotten with criticism … we need not criticism but analysis … the complex seeing of analysis rather than … the abstractions of critical classification’ (Williams, 1989b: 239).

The substance of this lecture is a spirited defence of realism, deliberately intended to endorse such self-consciously radical, realist television as Jim Allen, Tony Garnett and Ken Loach’s 1969 The Big Flame. Realism, Williams argued, is much better understood in terms of intention, specifically the threefold intention to social extension, historical contemporaneity and secular action, than in terms of any particular formal method (Williams, 1989b: 228–229). Furthermore, whenever we move to the level of specific analysis, both methods and intentions are highly variable. The point, then, is not to privilege any particular formal method, but rather to pursue the ‘analysis of a developing dramatic form and its variations’ (Williams, 1989b: 239). It would, no doubt, be a mistake to conflate Suvin’s and Jameson’s SF criticism with Screen film criticism. But both were similarly indebted to Althusserianism – Screen quite explicitly so, Suvin and Jameson implicitly so – in their reworking of Althusser’s science/ideology trope as, respectively, cognition/fantasy and utopia/ideology. And both were similarly prescriptive. For, in truth, Suvin’s Metamorphoses and Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future are each far more concerned with hierarchical ranking – the more or less authentic novum, the more or less critical dystopia – than with what SF writers actually intend by, and SF readers actually derive from, SF texts. Williams’s cultural sociology seems, by comparison, to represent a far less prescriptively ‘neo-Marxist’ approach to SF studies. This is not to suggest that Williams’s approach was in any sense positivist, only that his central concerns were with cultural creativity rather than critical canonisation. Hence his sympathy for the way The Big Flame played out ‘a hypothesis … within a politically imagined possibility’ (Williams, 1989b: 234). Williams’s sociology thus becomes positively utopian, in an interesting reversal of the discipline’s foundational movement from Saint-Simonian utopian socialism to Comtean sociology.

Conclusion

Both Marxism and sociology have had longstanding engagements with utopia and SF. The obvious instances are, respectively, Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope and Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (Bloch, 1986 [1937–1941]; Mannheim, 1936 [1929]). Moreover, neither engagement seems at all likely to end in the foreseeable future: for sociology, it has continued most memorably through the work of the late Jean Baudrillard; for Marxism, through the theoretical and creative writing of China Miéville (Baudrillard, 1991, 1994; Bould and Miéville, 2009; Miéville, 2000, 2009a, 2015; Miéville and Bould, 2002). Williams’s work clearly belongs to both lineages: his cultural materialism was, as he himself insisted, ‘a Marxist theory’ (Williams, 1977: 5), but also, as Fontana rightly acknowledged, a cultural sociology. I have written about Williams and SF on three previous occasions (Milner, 2003, 2009, 2010) and on each sought to situate this work in relation to his more general evolution as a cultural theorist. Some of that analysis has unavoidably warranted repetition in this essay. Here, however, what has most interested me is how Williams – unlike Suvin and Jameson – came to substitute a properly sociological method for an earlier literary-critical approach. This shift is not, as I had previously imagined it, merely from one theoretical approach to another (culturalism/cultural materialism), nor from one politics to another (Old New Left/Postmodern New Left), but rather from one academic discipline to another. And the successor discipline is not cultural studies, which as currently practised generally comprises the application of literary-critical methods to non-literary texts; it is, rather, cultural sociology. What Miéville finds most unhelpful about Suvinian – and Jamesonian – approaches to SF studies is their valorisation of cognitive rationality and their corollary antipathy to fantasy. ‘To the extent that SF claims to be based on “science”’, he writes, ‘and … on what is deemed “rationality”, it is based on capitalist modernity’s ideologically projected self-justification: not some abstract/ideal “science”, but capitalist science’s bullshit about itself’ (Miéville, 2009b: 240). This is not an argument for fantasy as against SF, but rather for fantasy in addition to and alongside SF. Hence, Miéville’s conclusion that ‘Red Planets we have. We should not neglect red dragons’ (Miéville, 2009b: 245). Such inclusivity is, no doubt, a real strength. But Miéville’s argument, like Suvin’s, is clearly intended essentially as an intervention to affect the shape of what we have been calling the SF tradition. My own approach is much less concerned with shaping a selective tradition than with analysing and explaining it; in short, with developing a sociology of SF. And, for those purposes, Williams’s work provides a better starting point than either Suvinian pseudo-scientificity or Miéville’s brave attempts to theorise the ‘Weird’.