"Tomorrow'll Be Yesterday Too Soon": Speculative Nostalgia in Jack Womack's Elvissey

Neither science fiction nor what Svetlana Boym calls "reflective nostalgia" claim to relate to the actual past or future. Rather, they are both concerned with the unrealized, the unpredictable, and the unarticulated. Jack Womack's Elvissey (1993) explores nostalgia through a range of its reverberations in both the public and private spheres. Elvissey gives expression to the creative and speculative dimensions of both sf and nostalgia to act as a diagnostic for the complexities and challenges of history and identity. With race as a central focus, Womack's novel employs the figure of Elvis Presley as a metaphor for the enduring power of a mythical 1950s to serve as the ground zero of white nostalgia. This article explores Womack's novel using Boym's framework of "restorative" and "reflective" nostalgia to demonstrate how sf, as a mechanism for understanding the present and guiding future actions, can provide privileged access to pastness and futurity. Most importantly, Elvissey explores how sf can render visible the affective forces that underpin nostalgic longing while also providing access to the mythical past.