Quest for Love: A cosy uchronia?

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.