The introduction opens with the observation that the twenty-first century is witnessing a flourishing of innovative British fiction comparable in its formal experimentation and ambition to the American postmodernist fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. I identify a specific caucus of texts, which I call fictions of the not yet, that can be grouped together through a shared formal and philosophical preoccupation with the question of time. The temporal disjointedness that marks our experience in the twenty-first century has given rise to different expressions of the unevenness of the contemporary, at the level of novelistic structure, prose style, generic sampling and non-mimetic interventions into otherwise realist narratives and juxtaposed timescales. The introduction closes with a discussion of non-contemporaneity, the term I use to explore how the contemporary British novels under discussion respond to, and suggestively reshape, the inequalities and unevenness of twenty-first-century social and political life in a distinctly utopian direction.