Book Review: The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle by Matthew Beaumont. Peter Lang, 2011

The following four chapters that focus on Looking Backward adopt increasingly specific lenses through which to interpret and contextualise them: the utopian redemption of shopping in Looking Backward and News from Nowhere; the 'epidemic' of memory and identity loss in America as a way of reading West's flight or 'fugue' from the nineteenth century; the restlessness of West as a case of agoraphobia in the socially empty spaces of the utopian city and the construction of a 'Bellamy Library,' or publication series, that successfully capitalised on the popularity of Looking Backward by using it to promote other books that interested readers might also enjoy (a technique that users of Amazon will be familiar with). Beaumont writes that the 'finest utopian fiction and science fiction intimates that an inchoate future is secretly gestating in the present - like the alien incubated in John Hurt's body at the start of Ridley Scott's Alien' (p. 221-22). Susan Buck-Morss reflected on the idea of utopia in the writing of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch: 'The real possibility of a classless society in the "epoch to follow" the present one, revitalizes past images as expressions of the ancient wish for a social utopia in dream form' (my emphasis).4 Beaumont's figuration of utopia as a latency haunting the present in order to defamiliarise it could also be applied to the irruption of the past transformed into an anticipation of an altered present. 1 Marcus Waithe, 'News from Nowhere, Utopia and Bakhtin's Idyllic Chronotope', Textual Practice, 16: 3 (2002), 472n.