Chapter 6 - Epilogue

Summary

The conclusion reflects upon the ways in which British fictions of the not yet are experimenting with narrative form and philosophical content through a shared preoccupation with the question of time. In order to engage seriously with the alternative ways of being and becoming imagined in these novels, I argue that we need to refine a utopian strategy of reading that can identify ‘moments of possibility’ in literary texts that have not been written as works of utopian or science fiction. This expands discussions of literary utopianism beyond the limits of genre fiction. This strategy also needs to be able to conjoin such utopian moments into a broader political articulation. Connected in this way, the glimpses of utopian possibility that these British novels suggest can become networked into a non-contemporaneous model of time that brings our lived present into contact with multiple alternative pasts, presents and futures.