SOURCE: Parrinder, Patrick. “News from Nowhere, The Time Machine and the Break-Up of Classical Realism.” Science Fiction Studies 3, no. 3 (November 1976): 265-74.

In the following essay, Parrinder views William Morris's News from Nowhere and Wells's The Time Machine as “symptoms of cultural upheaval,” particularly the end of classical realism at the end of the nineteenth century.

Critics of SF are understandably concerned with the integrity of the genre they study. Yet it is a commonplace that major works are often the fruit of an interaction of literary genres, brought about by particular historical pressures. Novels such as Don Quixote, Madame Bovary and Ulysses may be read as symptoms of cultural upheaval, parodying and rejecting whole classes of earlier fiction. My purpose is to suggest how this principle might be applied in the field of utopia and SF. While Morris's News from Nowhere and Wells's The Time Machine have many...