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
Authors | Butler, A. |
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Editors | Morgan, 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. |
Keywords | Science fiction; Film; Film adaptations; John Wyndham |
Page range | 163-177 |
Year | 2019 |
Book title | Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction |
Publisher | Liverpool University Press |
Output status | Published |
Place of publication | Liverpool |
ISBN | 9781789620139 |
9781789624328 | |
9781802076950 | |
Publication dates | |
25 Sep 2019 | |
Publication process dates | |
Accepted | Mar 2018 |
Deposited | 01 Nov 2023 |
Official URL | https://academic.oup.com/liverpool-scholarship-online/book/33826/chapter-abstract/288621832?redirectedFrom=fulltext |
https://repository.canterbury.ac.uk/item/91z52/quest-for-love-a-cosy-uchronia
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