Quest for Love: A cosy uchronia?

Book chapter

Butler, A. 2019. Quest for Love: A cosy uchronia? in: Morgan, G. and Palmer-Patel, C. (ed.) Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction Liverpool Liverpool University Press. pp. 163-177
AuthorsButler, A.
EditorsMorgan, G. and Palmer-Patel, C.
Abstract

The catastrophe science fiction of John Wyndham was once dismissed as being cosy. “Random Quest”, one of several works that David Ketterer labelled “time schism love stories”, is an alternate history. But is this story (and its British film adaption, Quest For Love (1971)) also cosy? Just as his catastrophic narratives invoke the blind forces of evolution that resist anthropocentric visions of the world, so here the blind forces of physics and chance resist the inevitability of true love. A potential intertext, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), features a heroine Ottiline who shares her name with the heroine of “Random Quest” and offers a pseudoscientific model for predestined love that bears fruit in the film’s assumption of a cosy ending.

KeywordsScience fiction; Film; Film adaptations; John Wyndham
Page range163-177
Year2019
Book titleSideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction
PublisherLiverpool University Press
Output statusPublished
Place of publicationLiverpool
ISBN9781789620139
9781789624328
9781802076950
Publication dates
Print25 Sep 2019
Publication process dates
AcceptedMar 2018
Deposited01 Nov 2023
Official URLhttps://academic.oup.com/liverpool-scholarship-online/book/33826/chapter-abstract/288621832?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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