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  • The Future that Failed:Speculation and Nostalgia in Francis Spufford's Red Plenty
  • Marc Singer (bio)

Red Plenty is a difficult work to categorize. An examination of the planned economy in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era, the book, published in 2010, frames historical events through fictional portrayals of real people and realistic depictions of fictitious characters, defying classification even by its author. "This is not a novel," Francis Spufford writes in the book's opening line, "It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story" (3). This ambiguity has prompted many readers to approach the book as a work of alternative history, a chronicle of the Soviet abundance that never was but might have been. Fredric Jameson identifies Red Plenty as a counterfactual novel, though he notes that Spufford "does not undertake to represent his alternate universe with science-fictional speculation" ("In Soviet Arcadia" 126). In contrast, Adam Roberts, writing for Strange Horizons, a magazine of speculative fiction, insists that "the novel is science fiction," but adds that the science in question is economics ("Red Plenty"). Spufford's publishers, Faber and Faber, take a similar approach, quoting science fiction author Ken MacLeod's description of the book: "It's like a science fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson or Ursula Le Guin" ("Hindsight and Red Plenty"). Robinson himself, in a seminar on Red Plenty held on the blog Crooked Timber, suggests the book should be read in the contexts of both science fiction and socialist realism while also arguing that it is unquestionably a novel, Spufford's demurral notwithstanding ("Red Plenty Is a Novel"). [End Page 483]

The question of genre has vexed many of the contributors to the Crooked Timber seminar, with some writers confidently identifying the work as speculative fiction while others place it firmly within the traditions of the historical novel. John Holbo may identify the source of the confusion when he confesses to his own initial misreading of the book, admitting "the one thing I thought I knew about the book―no, I don't know where I mis-acquired this notion―was that it is a fictional alternative history of how Red Plenty, the fairytale dream, came true" ("Red Plenty"). I am grateful to Holbo for this admission, since otherwise I might have thought I was the only reader to make this mistake. Like Holbo, I don't recall quite how I formed this misapprehension; likely it was through the comments of Roberts or some other reviewer. Certainly artist Tavis Coburn's cover to the first edition, which depicts a futuristic metropolis filled with elevated trains and bubble-helmeted cosmonauts, does nothing to dispel this impression. Everything from the book's marketing to its initial reception primes readers to expect that Red Plenty is a tale of a future that never happened, so much so that some readers are perplexed when it turns out instead to be the story of how and why that future didn't happen. The book promises to become an alternative history without ever arriving at the alternative.

To characterize Red Plenty as a history, however, would be equally incomplete. Spufford's book alternates between broad historical overviews and short fictional narratives, interspersed with copiously sourced footnotes and epigraphs drawn from Russian fairy tales. Neither a conventional narrative history such as such as China Miéville's October (2018) nor a work of historiographic metafiction in the manner of Laurent Binet's HHhH (2009), Red Plenty is at once more academic in its reliance on an extensive scholarly apparatus and more imaginative in its willingness to adopt different narrative styles, straddling the documentary and literary forms. The book occupies a similar place in Spufford's own career, serving as a bridge between nonfiction narratives such as I May Be Some Time (1996) and his more recent historical fiction in the novels Golden Hill (2016) and Light Perpetual (2021). Moving across genres as easily as it shifts between protagonists, Red Plenty functions as both novel and history without limiting itself to either mode. [End Page 484]

As a fictional reconstruction...

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