Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, like Infinite Jest, is a book you need to read with two bookmarks: one for the main text, one for the endnotes. It is also like Infinite Jest insofar as it shows us an alternative future that seems uncannily like our own. The difference is that while David Foster Wallace constructed a purely fictional near-future, Spufford presents us with an alternative timeline that failed to materialize: the triumph of Soviet central planning over Western capitalism. In this respect, Red Plenty also bears striking similarities with Wallace’s unfinished posthumous novel The Pale King, which featured a great variety of characters but was finally about a system, namely, the IRS. Yet the real topic isn’t so much the actual existing Soviet system, but a reformed system based on advanced theories of cybernetics, which was proposed but, again, failed to materialize.