The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
Climate, Retreat and Revolution

Explores contemporary fiction set in the near future to shed new light on our culture's relationship to the Anthropocene.

David Sergeant (Author)

9781009279888, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 December 2022

280 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

'… this study is most impressive in the way that it combines granular close readings with a form of 'distant reading', allowing speculative fiction's broad patterns to emerge alongside its finer details.' Arin Keeble, The Times Literary Supplement

A growing awareness of climate change and looming planetary crisis has put unprecedented pressure on the near future, leading to an increasing amount of fiction being set there. But what do these disparate works have in common, other than their temporal setting? And what can the imagination of the near future tell us about where we live now? The Near Future in 21st Century Fiction ranges across novels and films to reveal how our contemporary near future splits between two divergent paths. One seeks to retreat from climate change and the disruption it threatens to affluent lifestyles; the other tries to imagine new forms of community, and radical change, but struggles to locate a genre adequate to the task. It in this struggle, however, that we begin to glimpse the outlines of an emergent near future form: a revolution fit for the Anthropocene.

1. The domestic near future 1: renewing time
2. The domestic near future 2: bodies
3. The state of art: creativity and scale
4. Diagnostic dead-ends: seeking the emergent form
5. The art of history: Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Moon
6. Identity and power: historical returns and breaks
7. In search of revolution: territory and history
8. The genre of revolution: Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140.

Subject Areas: Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], The environment [RN], Modern & contemporary fiction [post c 1945 FA], Literary studies: general [DSB], Art forms [AF], History of art / art & design styles [AC]