Overview

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.

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9781009279925

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Reviews

'David Sergeant works carefully through his chosen texts and key textual evidence to draw conclusions about their ideological commitments. The analyses here can be brilliant; what he manages to pull out of these texts is revelatory.' Amy J. Elias, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville 'David Sergeant's Fictions of the Near Future makes a crucial intervention in scholarship on utopian fiction, speculative fiction, and climate change fiction by demonstrating the contemporary political relevance of the near future as it appears in novels across a range of genres and styles' Rachel Greenwald Smith, Saint Louis University '… 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 'We need to get beyond apocalypse novels and zombie tales in picturing the future: Sergeant in this academic but still readable work, helps us see patterns in what's now a flood of fiction.' Nickie Aiken, Publishers Association's 'Summer Reading List for Parliamentarians' '… a nuanced and careful treatment of a proposed emergent genre, featuring extensive research, clever readings of texts, and interesting intellectual propositions.' Elizabeth Callaway, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture

Author Information

David Sergeant is Associate Professor in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at the University of Plymouth. He is the author of a monograph on Rudyard Kipling, three poetry collections, and essays in journals including Novel, Genre, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He is co-editor of volumes on Robert Burns and Doris Lessing.

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