Published to coincide with the centenary of Wells's birth, Moura Budberg's translation of Herbert Wells (Moscow, 1963) by Yuly Kagarlitsky – or Julius Kagarliski, in her version – was greeted by one of its British reviewers as a ‘sign of the times’ reflecting the climate of destalinization and (short-lived) ideological rapprochement in the Cold War. The reviewer, Maurice Richardson, concluded that ‘You can learn a lot from this book’, and I believe that this is still true today. Kagarlitsky (1926– 2000), who wrote as an undoctrinaire Marxist, was then a senior lecturer at the Moscow State Institute of Theatrical Art, from which he would be dismissed in 1984 as a result of the dissident activities of his son Boris. Just how deep his Marxist convictions were in the 1960s is not for me to say; although he and I had been in correspondence since the 1970s, I did not actually meet him until 1987 when, as he clearly sensed, the Soviet experiment was almost at its end. But his own account of his book in the ‘Author's Preface’ is sufficiently arresting:

“Romance is a figure with outstretched hands, yearning for the unattainable.” E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey / Utopia, the good place which is no place, is also the place at the end of the traditional fairy tale, where 'They all lived happily ever after.' If romance, as Forster says, is an expression of the yearning for the unattainable, then utopia is that which cannot be attained - the happy-ever-after which always eludes us no matter how near we draw to it. In utopian narratives, the blissful state fleetingly evoked in the fairy tale's final sentence is extended to a whole society, and fully and often pedantically spelt out. The fundamental purpose of both romances and utopias is to 'remake the world in the image of desire', but the image of desire in each case is very different. The heart of romance are the physical and emotional torments suffered by its heroes and heroines and their determination in the face of adversity; utopia, by contrast, portrays a collective, not individual, reward for suffering humanity as a whole. If romance is Cinderella, then utopia is a fairy godmother not just to the heroine but to the whole world. Romance and utopia have something in common but are in many ways opposites. It is with this in mind that we should approach the genre of the utopian romance, which came into its own with the spread of modern popular fiction on utopian and dystopian themes.

This chapter will not attempt to trace Joyce's literary precursors, in English literature or elsewhere, for that would be an unending task. I shall be concerned, instead, with Joyce's explicit references to English literature and English writers, and especially with writers whose names and achievements take on a symbolic significance in his works. One such example is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose eight-line fragment beginning ‘Art thou pale for weariness’ helps Stephen Dedalus to transcend his adolescent self-pity during his schooldays at Belvedere College. Some years later, when he is expounding his aesthetic theory to his fellow student Lynch, a more mature Stephen invokes Shelley's image of the creative mind as a ‘fading coal’ (P 231). As a poet, Shelley cannot be said to prefigure any aspect of Joyce's art except for the brief lyrics of Chamber Music, yet Joyce took it as a good omen when in 1906, on the first day of his first visit to Rome, he came across a plaque marking the house in which The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound had been written some ninety years earlier. Two weeks later, he seems to have taken his family to see Shelley's tomb in the Protestant cemetery (SL 90, 95). This visit stayed in his memory, since ‘Shelley's grave in Rome’ features in his notes to Exiles written in 1913 (PE 346).

Ursula Brangwen in the laboratory

In his multi-generational novel The Rainbow (1915), D. H. Lawrence shows his early twentieth-century heroine Ursula Brangwen as a biology student at Nottingham university college. During her final year of study Ursula has a conversation with a woman doctor of physics, Dr Frankstone, a materialist who believes that there is no special mystery to life. Life is simply a ‘complexity of physical and chemical activities, of the same order as the activities we already know in science’. As scientific research continues, there is no reason why we should not come to know everything. But the conversation ends on a note of uncertainty – Dr Frankstone is, after all, only restating the conventional outlook of nineteenth-century scientific Positivism – and Ursula, for one, is not convinced.

Positivism has been defined as ‘a collection of prohibitions concerning human knowledge, intended to confine the name “knowledge” or “science” to the results of those operations that are observable in the evolution of the modern sciences of nature’. There is, then, a distinct circularity involved in the claim that we can come to know everything through scientific research, since science itself has been allowed to prescribe what counts as knowledge. Dr Frankstone is speaking for the so-called ‘classical’ Victorian physics, which would be fundamentally challenged in the early twentieth century by Einsteinian relativity, quantum theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Classical physics derives from Newton, but in the late nineteenth century its most influential figure was Lord Kelvin, whose Laws of Thermodynamics had led to a conception of the physical universe in which everything could be charted and everything was predictable.

Estrangement, cognition, the novum: these well-known terms of Darko Suvin's have borne the main burden of his attempt, declared at the beginning of his 1972 essay ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, to lay down a ‘coherent poetics of SF’. A ‘poetics’ is a construction of formalist or structuralist theory—it speaks to us, these days, of the age of Roman Jakobson and Northrop Frye—and (as is clear from the above quotation) it addresses only the synchronic aspect of literary texts. Literary history and the politics of the text are never absent from Suvin's writings, but in his poetics of science fiction they are apparently subordinated to the idea of an ‘imaginative framework’—elsewhere he calls it a ‘formal framework’— which is the historically continuous textual structure distinguishing one literary genre from another. In the case of SF, an imaginative framework specified by estrangement, cognition and the novum is said to be common to all true examples of the genre, which Suvin also provides with a ‘long history’ stretching back some centuries before the term itself was invented.

The resulting theory is offered as a ‘heuristic model’ for SF criticism and research, and it has been very widely adopted. But is the model actually coherent? Should a poetics of science fiction still be seen as a desirable and necessary construction? And what sorts of blindness accompany its insights? Suvin himself seems to have been disturbed by these questions. In a number of essays since 1972 he has revisited his poetics of SF, and it is a moot point whether this process of theoretical revision has shored up or tacitly undermined the foundations that he originally laid down.

‘Discover science fiction and fantasy … We hope you enjoy this taster of a new world of reading’, coaxes a sixteen-page pull-out supplement in a recent London newspaper. Inside the supplement is a ‘Timeline’ beginning with More's Utopia, and a series of author profiles culminating in a full-page feature on ‘Mars specialist and writer Kim Stanley Robinson’. The three hundred words on Robinson focus on his ‘attempt to rehabilitate the term utopia’, his ‘egalitarian beliefs’ and his ‘idealistic life’ on a commune in rural California. Science fiction's ability to transport us to other worlds, and to draw improving lessons from them, could not be more clearly stated.

Looking more closely at this piece of advertising hype, we can detect many of the tensions and contradictions surrounding the contemporary SF phenomenon. Neither book clubs marketing the literary tradition nor record clubs marketing classical music find it necessary to strike quite this note of earnest edification in order to shift their products. There is the appeal to nerdishness—‘Get into science fiction and fantasy at W. H. Smith’, exhorts a major bookselling chain—but also the presentation of science fiction as a source of collective enlightenment and an area of knowledge, as in the prospectus of a university course. SF is both something we can ‘get into’ and, by implication, something we can or should be able to build up credits in. But it is, too, a field manifestly insecure, chronically given to overselling itself, and at once proudly incorporated in and curiously peripheral to today's culture industries. The institution of science-fiction studies has become an essential part of the genre's brand image, since SF still craves recognition and wants, above all, to be taken seriously.

Clearly, this was not always so. SF is much older than science-fiction studies. The latter's institutional life goes back no more than thirty years, though now it can boast its full quota of learned societies, journals, reference tools, annual conferences and awards for scholarly achievement. Science- fiction and utopian texts, including media texts, have become a familiar presence in the classroom. But with maturity have come diversification and a certain amount of self-questioning.