Abstract

“Since 1989 we have lived in a world where the nightmare of socialist science fiction has become reality: capitalism has won. With some exceptions, we have no alternative visions of economic, technological, and social future, no visions that would spring from anything besides capitalism”.1 With these words, Tomáš Pospiszyl closes the introduction to a volume that accompanied a recent exhibition about imaginary futures in socialist Czechoslovakia organized in Dům umění in Brno and Centrum současného umění Dox in Prague. Pospiszyl’s idea indeed echoes through contemporary Czech culture. At second sight, however, through the over-a-century-old...