Raymond Williams was an enormously influential figure in late twentieth-century intellectual
life as a novelist playwright and critic «the British Sartre» as The Times put it. He was a
central inspiration for the early British New Left and a close intellectual supporter of Plaid
Cymru. He is widely acknowledged as one of the «founding fathers» of cultural studies who
established «cultural materialism» as a new paradigm for work in both literary and cultural
studies. There is a substantial secondary literature on Williams which treats his life and
work in each of these respects. But none of it makes much of his enduring contribution to
utopian studies and science fiction studies. This volume brings together a complete collection
of Williams's critical essays on science fiction and futurology utopia and dystopia in
literature film television and politics and with extracts from his two future novels The
Volunteers (1978) and The Fight for Manod (1979). Both the collection as a whole and the
individual readings are accompanied by introductory essays written by Andrew Milner.
