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  • Utopian Literature & Science
  • Roger Luckhurst
Patrick Parrinder. Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond. New York: Palgrave, 2015. ix + 222 pp. $99.00

ALTHOUGH NOT NAMED in the title, this rich and erudite book continually circles around the utopian writings of H. G. Wells and his important role in the dual emergence of the modern, dynamic utopia and the rise of the dystopia at the end of the nineteenth century. Patrick Parrinder's book travels far and wide, to seventeenth-century telescopic and microscopic fancies, nineteenth-century British satirical and racial utopias of Morris, Hudson and Bulwer-Lytton, Kafka's "Metamorphosis," Francis Galton's eugenics and J. B. S. Haldane's rejection of negative eugenics, but it always comes back to H. G. Wells.

This should not come as a surprise. Parrinder was a crucial figure in rescuing Wells from the opprobrium of modernism and its scholars. After his death in 1946, Wells's reputation—his literary one, leastways—plummeted [End Page 387] and became the antithesis of the forms institutionalized in modernist aesthetics. Wells's vast, eclectic body of work was then crudely divided between political theorists and students of utopia, leaving most of his other books to oblivion. It took Parrinder's generation to develop the field of "science fiction studies" (an epochal session involving Darko Suvin and Samuel Delany was held at the MLA in 1968, and two academic journals followed shortly afterwards). Science fiction critics have recovered Wells's peerless scientific romances from the 1890s and the strain of utopianism that ran through his career, although often ignoring his social novels and restless formal experiments.

Parrinder is unusual in having been able to negotiate these diverse elements: a traditional EngLit professor, but also a pioneer in teaching and writing on science fiction (in Canada and the United States, which was much more enabling at first in this regard); a serious scholar of James Joyce; and latterly, the General Editor of Oxford University Press's multivolume history of the novel. His first book on Wells appeared in 1970; he excavated and republished many of lost or forgotten controversies in H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage in 1972.

Utopian Literature and Science opens with a reminiscence of the now emeritus professor on his decision in the early 1960s not to study science but to take a degree in English literature at Cambridge. This placed him in the cauldron of the "two cultures" row pitting art against science, since C. P. Snow's famous lecture found its most vociferous detractor in the Cambridge dissenter F. R. Leavis, the cantankerous defender of literature and cultural value against the philistinism of scientific modernity. Since for Leavis the adjective "Wellsian" was amongst the worst insults imaginable to sling at a writer, it is even more striking that Parrinder emerged to produce scholarship in the literary field on the history of utopia, science fiction and Wells. Perhaps a trace of Leavis survives in Parrinder's insistence here on solely addressing a tradition of literary utopia, acknowledging but entirely ignoring the move towards multimedial or multidisciplinary studies of science fiction utopias and dystopias across different cultural forms. There is also a continued resistance to cultural theory. Parrinder contributed to those old wars back in the 1980s with The Failure of Theory, of course: now it is simply ignored for exercises in literary history (by far the better strategy). Inside these limits, this book presents an always absorbing clutch of essays, full of illumination and interesting [End Page 388] sidelights on the utopian tradition, from which every reader will learn something new.

Many of the twelve chapters arose from individual commissions, but the collection is given coherence by a forceful introduction that establishes the overarching framework. Wells's A Modern Utopia helps name a significant new development that moves beyond the classical, Platonic, static utopia. If the principal agency to move towards the modern utopian society is scientific practice, this marks a newly secular and intrinsic (rather than religious and extrinsic) ideal, driven by a new sense of human potential to intervene in and direct natural and cultural forces for improvement. Parrinder persuasively suggests that the observational sciences...

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