The Future that Failed: Speculation and Nostalgia in Francis Spufford's Red Plenty

Abstract

© 2021 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System ed 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”). M A R C S I N G E R