Collected here for the first time are Liam Gillick’s major fictional texts: McNamara Papers, Ibuka, Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre, The Winter School, with Erasmus is Lateand Literally No Place. Within each history, and the utopias and alternative visions of society envisioned by writers, filmmakers, philosophers, and scientists are presented and speculated on, often through the fictionalised voices of secondary historical characters. Traversing genres of fiction and critical discourse, ideas are explored in a nonlinear, open-ended discursive format, in which the textual structure mirrors the structuring of the presented ideas. In each text Gillick’s concern is to explore complex, paradoxical historical moments and the ideologies that shaped them, reflecting on how the redundant utopian elements of the past continue to structure contemporary society and remain impulses within speculations of our post-utopian future.

A special edition of All Books is also available.