Member-only story
Surrealism is a premonition of a future realism; science fiction is a premonition of a future naturalism.
I think about the poet Osip Mandelstam, walking around an oily, rubble-strewn Petersburg in 1925, looking in vain for the city of 1913, which was still a 19th century city; I think about Kafka’s sister, sent to a concentration camp like the one her brother imagined; I think about William Gaddis’s 1975 novel JR, which portrays the rise and fall of a child’s penny-stock empire, which he manages through a pay phone…
