Beyond Narrative: Worldbuilding as Literature in C.M. Kosemen’s All Tomorrows

C.M. Kosemen (2006), in All Tomorrows offers a speculative chronicle of human evolution written as a reference book. It has no plot, no characters who persist between sections, and no narrator with a position, and it has attracted almost no critical attention. This paper argues that the book generates narrative coherence through three mechanisms that operate without any of those elements. A formula of descent, printed in the entry headings, constrains what may appear and states the constraint before each entry is read. An archival register establishes documentary authority that the narrator withdraws in the closing pages. A repeated cycle of degradation and recovery supplies a shape against which later entries become legible. The reading draws on Wolf’s (2012) account of world logic, Hutcheon’s (1988) historiographic metafiction, and narratological work by Genette (1980) and Bal (2009), applying each against its own assumptions about narrators, characters, and sequence. The paper situates Kosemen’s (2006) formal strategies alongside modernist fragmentation and Borges’s (1940/1998) encyclopedic fiction, and argues that what distinguishes All Tomorrows is the absence of a subject rather than its dispersal. Comparison with Stapledon (1930), Dixon (1990), Serafini (1981), and Barlowe and Summers (1979) indicates that the interpretive demand the book makes follows from withholding several conventional elements at once. The conditions narratology treats as given turn out to be conditions its vocabulary can survive losing. Spectrum, Volume 19, June 2024: 40-48