Tenses of Imagination

«With the twenty-first-century reader very much in mind, Andrew Milner’s selection of texts offers a new, ‘alternative’ Raymond Williams – the critic and occasional author of science fiction, the futurologist, the wary, self-questioning utopian thinker for whom intellectual pessimism is a lazy response and never the last word.» (Professor Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading)
«The future was the ultimate stake in all Raymond Williams’s thinking and writing, as Andrew Milner simply and powerfully shows us now, by assembling a volume of writings on science fiction and utopianism that turns out to be a very substantial, wide-ranging reader in Williams’s work as a whole. The defining importance of ‘the sense of the future’, as he called it, the future as the essential discipline of political and moral imagination, is the lesson of this very welcome collection.» (Professor Francis Mulhern, Middlesex University)
«Milner’s timely collection demonstrates the relevance of Williams’ work as a theorist of the subjunctive at a moment when, as Slavoj Žižek claimed recently, the ‘only true question’ is whether global capitalism contains ‘antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction’.» (Ben Harker, New Formations)