Fictions of the near future are no new thing. In The Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction, Brian M. Stableford identifies the ‘future war’ genre that emerged in the late nineteenth century, in works such as George T. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), as the first cohort of near-future fantasies; these were followed by celebrations of ‘a newly emergent era of technological discovery and invention’, as in the writings of Jules Verne. Stableford refers the emergence of this genre to the dawning realisation ‘that an individual’s lifetime might see changes of considerable import’.¹ If the same might obviously be said of the twenty-first century, it is the contention of this book that a growing awareness of the Anthropocene, and the scale of human impacts on planetary processes, has not only led to an increasing number and variety of works of fiction being set in the near future but also that the contours of this hazily liminal zone have recently taken on a newly distinct and eloquent character.²

The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction discerns two major themes shaping contemporary literature’s relationship to the Anthropocene:³ the prospect of radical systemic change, and of a society founded on a collective broader than the domestic unit. The reasons for this are obvious: any adequate response to climate change will entail the radical transformation of every aspect of society, and the close cooperation of large bodies of people. However, a large number of the works read in this book recoil from the prospect of such cooperation and change and are shaped instead by a conservative desire to retreat to an unchanging domestic realm – notwithstanding an often progressive personal politics that would apparently set them ‘against’ climate change. These works are explored under the label of the ‘domestic near future’.

The second half of the book looks at fictions which do take on the challenge of imagining new kinds of collectivity, and radical change, though they frequently struggle to find a generic form adequate to the task. In these cases, the near future acts more like the emergent form that Raymond Williams hypothesised: ‘a pre-emergence, active and pressing but not yet fully articulated, rather than the evident emergence which could be more confidently named’.⁴ This is to underline the link between the emergent near future as narrative genre and the cultural shift to which such a genre might correspond: as Williams notes, ‘emergent culture … is never only a matter of immediate practice’ but ‘depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form’.⁵ The two versions of the near future are simultaneously ‘structures of feeling’ for our historical moment, to use another Williams idea, and literary genres, at least in a heuristic or experimental sense.⁶ They can tell us something about both where we are now and where we might need to go.

When Did the Near Future Change?

Definitively dating the emergence of these two variants of the near future is as much a fool’s errand as any other putatively authoritative period bracketing. However, the majority of the near-future fictions read in this book post-date 2008 and as such emerge at a time when a heightened sense of the possibility of rapid, politically driven change intersects with a pressing awareness that the planetary ecological emergency requires urgent, drastic and large-scale coordinated action. The global financial crisis of 2008 and ensuing events – such as the rise of movements like Occupy, Syriza and the Tea Party; the misadventures of the US and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq; the so-called Arab Spring – are of explicit importance to a few of the fictions read in what follows, for suggesting that an apparently monolithic and intransigent status quo can change radically, unexpectedly and quickly.⁷ Furthermore, Adam Trexler suggests a step-change both in the collective perception of global warming around 2008 and in the number and nature of ‘Anthropocene fictions’, thanks to increasingly unignorable evidence of the contemporary reality – rather than future prospect – of such warming, coupled with a correspondingly unignorable failure of national and international politics to adequately address it (George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004; the widely recognised failings of the Kyoto Protocol in 2005; the even more widely recognised failings of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen; the rise of climate change denial in US politics; and so, miserably, on).⁸

Ultimately, apart from being part of a newly common and mainstream trend, what marks out a twenty-first-century near-future fiction from one published in 1871, or 1949 (George Orwell’s 1984), or 1985 (Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale), or even 1992 (P. D. James’s The Children of Men), is the urgent awareness of coming and needed change in relation to global environmental crisis. For instance, comparing the latter novel – in which children have stopped being born in an England of 2021 – with the kinds of near-future fiction read in Chapters 1–3 of this book, in which children also pay a central role, is to register the difference immediately. The prospect of the end of the world functions in The Children of Men as a fictional conceit allowing for the exploration of ethical and existential questions, whereas in the contemporary work it is a viscerally experienced pressure; ‘nature’ seems innocent and passive in The Children of Men, where in the contemporary near future it is much more active and contested, even when playing a comparably pastoral role; James’s novel can be easily parochial, whereas even the most localised of contemporary near-future fictions registers the global scales of space and time that are the frame now through which we picture ourselves. Or turning to the less-well-known – but, in this context, unignorably titled – Myths of the Near Future (1982) by J. G. Ballard, we can note the collection’s determined scrambling of the body and its affects, where contemporary near-future fictions register it as a stable foundational coordinate; the way that for Ballard a decaying suburban infrastructure can be incidental, or a surrealist touch, rather than inescapably instrumental and referential; the general lack of an awareness of ecology in the earlier work, and the consequences of that lack, such that Ballard’s avant-garde exploration of consciousness now gives off an aura of lost innocence rather than radicalism.

Alternatively, the contemporary preoccupation with impending and urgently needed change can be indexed by the trajectories of two major contemporary authors who are important to this book, and whose first novels happened to be published – propitiously or not – in 1984: William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson.⁹ The former – perhaps the most famous novelist of the liminal zone between present and future – has moved from a relatively frictionless concern with technology (the Sprawl trilogy, 1984–88) to a concern with contemporary politics (Blue Ant trilogy, 2003–10), and then, more recently, to the depiction of a near-future world facing the same concatenation of problems as us, the environmental tangling with the societal and political (The Peripheral, 2014; see Chapter 6). The latter – the most acclaimed living novelist of utopia and Left politics – has long been concerned with a ‘history that gets us from here to there’, but, as this book explores (see Chapters 5 and 8), his novels of 2017 and 2018 – New York 2140 and Red Moon – are distinguished by their urgent quest to locate and generate agency for large-scale systemic change, in a way that marks them out from previous work set in more remote futures and pasts, or the earlier near-future Science in the Capital trilogy (2004–7).¹⁰

What Is the Near Future?

In its dominant concern with a climate change present and future, the critical category which the near future most obviously jostles against is ‘climate fiction’ or ‘cli-fi’. The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction argues that this category is something between a distraction and a red herring, subsuming too many differences in genre, theme, approach and period to be useful. The term was coined by a journalist, Dan Bloom, who has described its propagation as his ‘life’s work’, as he acts as ‘a cli-fi missionary, a cheerleader for novelists and screenwriters, a PR guy with media contacts, a literary theorist, and an advisor to novelists seeking publication advice and direction’.¹¹ James Bradley has aptly described it as ‘a marketing category’.¹²

It is common for critics of climate fiction to acknowledge the difficulties entailed by the term, but the fact it provides the initial bearing for the critical compass means that it too often still interferes with or circumscribes the course that is subsequently taken. For instance, it is common for studies of climate fiction to note that instances of it occur across genres, and to then move to different ways of organising a critical approach, commonly by theme: posterity and care for Adeline John-Putra;¹³ trauma for Anne E. Kaplan;¹⁴ multiple themes such as truth, place, politics and economics for Trexler;¹⁵ collapse, pastoral, urban, polar for Bracke;¹⁶ and so on. However, this means that determinant questions of ideology, form and history bound up in the concept of genre risk being left behind, as if a recognition of the diverse make-up of ‘climate fiction’ had answered them; or the theme ends up duplicating the original problem by acting as a genre in everything but name. The label also leaves open the question of what exactly might count as an instance of climate fiction, if it is not a question of generic identification, given that global warming is now bound up with every facet of existence.¹⁷ Indeed, as Mark Bould has recently argued, the Anthropocene has become ‘the unconscious of “the art and literature of our time”’.¹⁸ Unlike ecocriticism and the other disciplines making up the environmental humanities, which designate approaches that might conceivably tackle any subject matter, ‘climate fiction’ is undermined by the classificatory drag that comes with the term.

Its stubborn persistence in the face of such problems is illustrated by even as supple an introduction to climate fiction as that by Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra noting at one point that ‘holding too fast’ to a definition keyed to the depiction of climate change ‘excludes novels that do not explicitly name climate change but might be read as addressing it’, before still ending up with the literal presence implied by the term: ‘Whether climate change is identifiable as a component of setting, plot, or character, it occurs in the climate change novel as something, whether individually or collectively, that affects psychological, emotional, physical, or political experience, and relates directly to readers’ lives.’¹⁹ The solution, this book suggests, is to recognise the limitations of the label and to look instead for different ways of understanding how climate change is making its presence felt in fiction.

The near future provides one means of doing this, in its urgently registered awareness of coming and needed change in relation to global crisis – indeed, in merging ‘climate fiction’ with other works under the banner of an Anthropocene that is coincident with the contemporary, this book has more in common with the work of scholars such as Lauren Berlant, Caren Irr, Peter Boxall, Theodore Martin and Jane Elliott, who have tried to discern new or emergent cultural and political formations in contemporary literature and culture, than it does with most climate fiction criticism.²⁰ Equally, for finding that a proper understanding of contemporary literature’s engagement with climate change requires looking beyond its first-order manifestations, the near future plays a simple variation on the shift that occurred between first and second wave ecocriticism, whereby the latter expanded its concerns from nonhuman ‘nature’ to human issues such as social justice; to urban and suburban environments as much as wildernesses; and to other kinds of text than nature writing.²¹

However, the cross-cutting nature of the near future might entail a different set of definitional problems. Stableford defines it as ‘a world which is imminently real … which exists only imaginatively and hypothetically, but which is nevertheless a world in which (or something like it) [sic] we may one day have to live, and towards which our present plans and ambitions must be directed’.²² The devilish detail lurks in that ‘imminently real’, which occludes difficult questions concerning mimetic and temporal proximity. How close – and how distant – is ‘imminent’? What does ‘real’ mean here (or ever)?

This book takes what might be called the ‘strong’ form of the near future to be fictions set in a world to come that mingle multiple markers of the contemporary with indicators of future difference, so as to suggest a historical continuity with the present moment that has not been utterly ruptured by an eschatological-like event, such as apocalyptic disaster or technological paradigm shift.²³ The increasing prevalence of the strong form is due to the unnerving effect of climate change on our sense of both imminence and reality. It is a truism, easily evidenced, that depictions of the future say more about the writer’s own time than they do about what is to come.²⁴ However, our near future is peculiar for being so manifestly and pressingly entangled with the present, such that we can know to varying degrees of certainty what might or will happen, while at the same time not knowing exactly how this will occur, or its extent and consequences if it does. The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report even formalises this entanglement of certainty and speculation through pre-defined phrases indicating ‘assessed likelihood of an outcome or a result’: from ‘virtually certain 99–100% probability’ through ‘likely 66–100%’ to ‘exceptionally unlikely 0–1%’. The space of the future, so open to fiction, is burdened by the knowledge of outcomes that seem in many cases increasingly irrevocable: there are few observers who think it likely we will keep within the 1.5°C threshold. At the same time, this Anthropocene future, in some ways as irrevocable as our historical past, is still open to change, shaping, alteration, in a way the past is not. The strong form of the near future probes this space between the given and the possible, continuity and difference.

However, while the strong form is the starting point for this book, it also takes in post-apocalyptic fictions in which the notion of the imminently ‘real’ becomes more tenuous, for a sudden event catapulting the fiction into a very different world to our own, notwithstanding its chronological proximity. The readings that follow suggest that this ostensible proximity is enough to bring contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction under the influence of the near future, in either its domestic or its emergent guises. Given this gradation from a strong form of the near future to more marginal instances of it, as well as its yoking of texts from different established genre categories, the two forms of the near future should be regarded as what Phillip Wegner has called heuristic, rather than historical or institutional, genres: as devices ‘created by a particular reader or critic in order to heighten the awareness of previously unacknowledged connections and continuities across a range of texts’.²⁵ Indeed, for hovering between the previously unseen and the newly perceived, this heuristic genre could be seen as a variant of Williams’s emergent form, described earlier. In this vein, the book identifies continuities between post-apocalyptic (e.g. World Made by Hand, Station Eleven), pre-apocalyptic (e.g. the Rapture) and non-apocalyptic near-future narratives; simultaneously, it finds the eschatological temporality of apocalypse to not be restricted to near-future fictions that actually depict one.²⁶

The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction reads a broad and representatively varied range of near-future works in this ‘creative, and from a certain perspective deeply improper’ light:²⁷ some award-winning, some more obscure; some by celebrated authors, others more marginal; some in receipt of considerable critical attention, some very little. Most are novels, but two films are also analysed, so as to suggest how the basic near-future heuristic can persist across different narrative media. The fictions read are mainly from the US and UK, a heterogeneity justified by the commonalities these examples exhibit. However, this is not to assume that these examples can stand for or explain near-future fictions – or realities – from other parts of the world, which are excluded due to the practical need to limit the scope of material under discussion: a particularly important note given that the violent and destructive effects of the Anthropocene are visited disproportionately upon the world’s most vulnerable populations, particularly in the Global South.²⁸ Indeed, although that part of the world is rarely foregrounded in the fictions that follow, its presence is often not just detectable, but more threatening and destabilising than the catastrophes which supposedly animate the plot – sometimes merged or in combination with the demonised classes of that fiction’s home culture. Given this, the readings that follow concern not just the near-future fiction of the wealthy, developed West but also the critical failure in sympathy that inflects its imagination.

The Domestic Near Future

Criticism has tended to assume that literature’s engagement with environmental crisis must be a constructive one and so, implicitly, a positive one, even when it falls short on one count or another. For instance, according to Adam Trexler, ‘the [climate change] novel [is] a privileged form to explore what it means to live in the climate change moment’;²⁹ Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw introduce a special issue of Studies in the Novel on ‘The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction’ by stating that it concerns the novel’s ‘ability to meet the representational challenges posed by’, and its ‘ability … to capture,’ climatic change.³⁰ For Bracke it ‘reflect[s] [an] awareness of climate crisis and participate[s] in the construction and renegotiation of the stories that surround it’;³¹ for Johns-Putra and Goodbody it is involved in an ‘effort to represent’ and to ‘[meet] the challenges of representing climate change’.³² However, this book finds that much fiction of the near future better resembles Clare Colebrook’s odd-one-out contribution to the volume Climate and Literature, which observes that ‘the twenty-first-century imaginary, especially by way of the trope of the Anthropocene, has become intensively counter-apocalyptic’ in the sense that it imagines the ‘“end of the world” as nothing more than the end of liberal and affluent capitalist urbanity’.³³ The first half of this book gathers together a variety of works under the label of the domestic near future, for which the primary significance of large-scale radical change is the kind of disruption to middle-class Global North lifestyles that Colebrook describes, and for whom the prospect of engagement with a collective broader than the domestic unit turns out to be terrifying. Indeed, the collective as agent of change, and metonymic of either the hordes of the lower class or the global masses, is often the true catastrophe in such fiction, rather than the climate events which ostensibly fill that role. Rather than exploring, capturing, reflecting, renegotiating and representing climate change, this book suggests that much of this fiction is more concerned with escaping it.

This retreat has a longer aetiology than a focus on climate change alone can compass, and one that becomes visible in the generic makeup of near-future fiction. While critical accounts of climate fiction often consider genre, it tends to be treated as a spread of tools which might be brought to the problem of climate change, singly or in combination, while the ideological baggage that genres bring with them is often overlooked. However, as Fredric Jameson describes:

In the domestic near future, elements from a variety of established genres – such as the domestic novel and therapeutic fiction, the adventure romance, and the historical novel – are interwoven, in such a way that some of the ideological work previously performed by those genres is carried over into the contemporary Anthropocene moment. In tracing these links, I draw on the work of scholars such as D. A. Miller, Mary Poovey and, in particular, Nancy Armstrong, who have explored how the centrality of the domestic sphere in the nineteenth-century British novel helped instantiate an opposition between the private and public, the domestic and institutional, the intimate and the bureaucratic;³⁵ as well as on the many critics who have seen a similar valorisation of the personal and private, in the service of capitalism, in the ‘therapeutic’ world-view characteristic of much twentieth-century fiction.³⁶ Equally, Chapters 1–3 of this book explore how the domestic near future often draws on the adventure novel and its roots in the nineteenth-century romance, as a way of enacting a sort of ritual exposure to climate change which allows for a therapeutic return to a reconsolidated domestic sphere; and how this fiction sometimes makes use of a version of modernism, in a manner comparable to the post–World War II ‘late modernism’ theorised by Jameson, touting the autonomous power of the work of art as a consolatory substitute for a utopian politics.

More broadly, it has become increasingly common to note that the landscape of contemporary fiction is marked by the crossover between what were once markers of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural production, such that writers and filmmakers with cultural cachet have turned their hand to genre fiction, and those genres have been credited with ‘literary’ status, as Martin summarises.³⁷ Many critics have seen this kind of generic ‘boundary crossing’ as reflecting what Caroline Edwards describes as ‘a revived sensibility of the fantastic and the speculative in the contemporary period’, under the influence of political and economic uncertainties.³⁸ The equation of generic change with changing times is particularly prevalent in accounts of climate change fiction, where it is generally seen as innovation in response to a crisis.³⁹ However, while this book finds plentiful evidence of such innovation in the domestic near future, it reads it as often more concerned with the strenuous maintenance of a bourgeois existence that has become speculative and fantastic under current global conditions, both in the sense that it is demonstrably unsustainable and yet continues largely unchanged, and because for many the prospect of a middle-class stability appears increasingly fanciful, if it hasn’t already slipped away.

If the domestic near future is characterised by a desire to retreat to the rural homestead, at the centre of that enclave, generating and defining it, lies the individual body and its comforts. The readings in the chapters that follow suggest that this emphasis on the sensorially rich individual body is part of the same movement by which the prospect of a broader collective is dismissed, occasionally demonised. Such a two-part movement is suggestive of Hannah Arendt’s account of how action, the deeds and speech which constitute both individual freedom and the political realm, is occluded under consumer capitalism by labour – the realm of the household and the body.⁴⁰ A more historically eloquent explanation is provided by Jameson, who describes the contraction of politics to the circumscribed space and time of the body as a consequence of decolonisation and the shocking exposure of ‘the security of the ego or the unique personal self’ to a ‘demographic plebeianization of … subjectivity’, as a result of which this self took refuge in ‘new forms of subjectivity’.⁴¹ This ‘reduction to the body’ is a symptom of ‘the death of historicity … the weakening of our phenomenological experience of past and future’, as we remain pinned to the ephemeral time of individual experience.⁴² The domestic near future shows this body to be the root of all the other forms of the ‘local’ named by Bruno Latour as providing one reactionary response to globalisation: ‘a land, a place, a soil, a community, a space, a milieu, a way of life, a trade, a skill’.⁴³

Identifying the individual body as the heart of the domestic near future allows for the recognition of fundamental commonalities between works that conventional critical categories would normally keep apart. For instance, Chapter 2 reads together two climate fictions in which women are central, a science-fiction romantic film seemingly oblivious to climate change, and a climate-edged dystopian adventure with a male protagonist. This focus on the body also allows for a reconsideration of other topics that have been important to contemporary literature and culture. For instance, the figure of the child as an icon of continuation and responsibility has been prominent in discussion of critical discourses about the future.⁴⁴ The domestic near future suggests that this is due to the significance it holds for the individual body and the domestic realm; however, it departs from such discussions in showing how the child can just as easily act as an unwelcome figure for radical change, when it becomes metonymic of the collective and of history. It is the place and role of the domestic body that is the determinant factor, therefore, and not the figure of the child. Or another example: the domestic near future often incorporates the arts and creative work, most obviously as an antidote to bullshit jobs and precarity, in a way that reproduces the ambivalent position of creativity in post-Fordist neoliberalism.⁴⁵ However, through the prism of the domestic near-future creativity is also shown to be a sort of scalar inflation device for the privileged individual that works in the compensatory manner of the Romantic symbol, displacing problems of history and heterogeneity.

In reading in this manner, I obviously align myself on the side of ‘critique’ rather than ‘postcritique’ in the divide that has been one defining feature of the critical and theoretical landscape for over a decade now. My reasons for doing so are manifold: for instance, seeing postcritique as an institutional and disciplinary retreat in the face of hostile ideological criticism of its interdisciplinary and political engagements. More pertinent to this book’s main burden, however, is Anna Kornbluh’s recent description of the varieties of postcritique as an ‘“anarcho-vitalism” in which “to give form is to oppressively contain”’: a trend which she traces back to a fear of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ in fascism and consequently of aesthetics’ ability to bound and contain, such that the forms which are celebrated become ‘those that undo their own formedness and have imagined politics as demolition’, with ‘modernism [privileged] over realism, openness over closure, transgression over synthesis, irony over telos’.⁴⁶ While Kornbluh’s account has been criticised for conflating a disparate range of critical approaches under one label and historical aetiology, it is suggestive for the two kinds of near future that materialise through the readings that follow.⁴⁷

The near-future domestic valorises forms of relation that are central to two strands gathered under Kornbluh’s anarcho-vitalism heading. The first of these is surface reading, or the critical discourses often grouped under that banner, which, like the domestic near future, withdraw from politics to a compensatory realm of aesthetics isolated from history. The second are the political theories derived from Deleuze and Spinoza – the most notable examples are those of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri – which emphasise flow, horizontality and affect. When the domestic near future turns outwards and tries to take on rather than escape the challenge of planetary scale, the result is often such vitalist assemblages, which resemble nothing so much as the symbol as it has been theorised in opposition to allegory since the Romantic period, and whose appearance in near-future fiction marks the ultimate collapse of narrative and the negotiation with genre provoked by contemporary crisis. Conversely, the emergent near future resembles Kornbluh’s description of nineteenth-century realism, and how such aesthetic forms are generatively and dynamically linked to political forms, ‘composed relations, institutions, states’.⁴⁸ In this regard, The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction shares Kornbluh’s interest in ‘building’: in the generative potentiality of literary forms in relation to political forms, and the dependence of humans as political animals on ‘forms that scaffold sociability’ – a potentiality that belies the common caricature of critique as purely negative in approach.⁴⁹

The Emergent Near Future

Fictions of the near future are haunted by the knowledge that our contemporary situation demands radical action by humans at a scale commensurate with the planetary nature of the ecological emergency and that this emergency will entail radical changes for humans regardless of the action they do or do not take, given that a dangerous level of climate change is already baked into our situation, whatever else happens from here.⁵⁰ If the texts brought together under the label of the domestic near future ultimately retreat from the terrifying scale of this vision, back to the space and time of the body, then those grouped together as the emergent near future can be read as responding to it: either by imagining how groups of people might live together in the near future or by how they might bring about radical systemic change, or both.

However, it is important to note, at the start, that a concern with a new kind of collectivity and with radical change is not historically new, and neither are the representational challenges this poses. As the generic inheritances of the domestic near future also implied, these are issues bound up in the history of the novel, and as such they take their place in a longer critical tradition that an emphasis on the unprecedentedness of climate change has often obscured. Another term for the collective might be the social totality, which has been central to both evaluations of the history of the novel and categories such as realism and modernism, while the importance of historicity, of historical change, has been central to the work of Jameson, arguably the most important cultural critic of recent decades. Indeed, much of Jameson’s work constitutes a brilliant pursuit of how the totality and history are bound up in a dialectical relationship, a pursuit he also sees in the work of Lukács in the early twentieth century:

Fictions of environmental crisis are the inheritors of representational challenges that go back to the Romantic period and the age of revolutions, whose determinant relationship to the historical novel was described by Lukács. Similarly, the innovations in representation often called for in relation to environmental crisis have a longer lineage, as in Jameson’s theorising of ‘cognitive mapping’ in 1991 and of the ‘geopolitical aesthetic’ in 1992.⁵² As Elizabeth DeLoughrey observes, the questions asked by such works are ‘precisely the questions raised by scholars of the Anthropocene’, and Jameson’s work is of central importance to the chapters that follow.⁵³

If questions concerning representation and the totality gain a new emphasis in the Anthropocene, then this is due to the urgent need for agency generated by its temporal and spatial scales: by its global scale and the unmissable, time-sensitive imminence of its threat. Questions of agency have been problematic to Left academic theory since the 1990s, as Jane Elliott has described, as it ‘became through its very critical erasure a utopian marker for what we could not really have yet could not seem to do without’. Elliott recently posited ‘suffering agency’ in which ‘agential action and domination become intertwined with one another’ as a non-utopian and actually existent form of agency in neoliberalism⁵⁴ – a concept expanded in her recent book on the ‘microeconomic mode’.⁵⁵ Elliott’s work is a brilliant exposition of how conceptions of agency have been violently constricted under neoliberalism. However, it is precisely an expansion of such agency that the Anthropocene demands, and obviously so – it is perhaps implicit in all reporting on climate change, and explicit much of the time as well, nowhere more so than in the various reports of the IPCC. Near-future fiction is caught between these two: a reality in which agency is shrunk to the ‘micro’ level described by Elliott, but when action commensurate with the macro scale of the planet is required.

However, such questions about human agency within the context of capitalist modernity are often missing from writing on literature and culture in the Anthropocene, which tends to focus on what would constitute an adequacy of representation rather than action, often with regard to vast scales of time and space, either evolutionary or geologic.⁵⁶ Timothy Clark gives a vivid sense of the ‘derangement’ that climate change can bring to our familiar sense of scale, and the understanding of agency and causality that comes with it: ‘a campaign for environmental reform in one country may be already effectively negated by the lack of such measures on the other side of the world … a sentence about the possible collapse of civilization can end, no less solemnly, with the injunction never to fill the kettle more than necessary when making tea’.⁵⁷ Scholars such as Bruno Latour, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and Jane Bennett have made clear how misplaced were traditional conceptualisations of anthropic agency founded on a discrete human mastery over nature, and how those two categories are inextricably entangled and agency distributed across them.⁵⁸

However, this is a fact now thoroughly well established in much of the Academy, and at times it seems as if the necessary correction has become an overcorrection, overlooking what should be obvious truths about human difference. Clive Hamilton has written forcefully of how such ‘deconstructed freedom’ needs to be ‘reconstructed’ now so as to recognise that anthropic agency has been ‘turbocharged’ in the Anthropocene, and by the historical ‘course of the scientific-industrial revolution’ from which there is no going back – though this is emphatically not to return to outdated ideas of human mastery over a nature either separate from us or fully subject to our control.⁵⁹ The lens of the near future brings ecological time within reach of historical time where they have more commonly been separated, implicitly or explicitly. Brutally put: in and amidst the kind of dialectic ‘telescoping between space (planet) and place (island)’ that DeLoughrey has called for, and even given the ungovernable and unpredictable nature of the Earth System, what entity is going to do something about climate change, and how, and how soon?⁶⁰ It might not be the task of fiction to answer such questions, but they nevertheless provide the given note to which the zeitgeist tunes itself, and in which near-future fiction is produced and read – notwithstanding what can seem the hopelessness of the task, and the common dystopian or apocalyptic response which, nevertheless, continues to beg the question.

Unsurprisingly, given their unmissable importance to our contemporary situation, the questions of what forms of human cooperation – or, to put it more simply, politics – might prove adequate to planetary climate disaster have been taken up by non-fictional writers. However, as acute as their analyses can be, the prescriptions for what might be done about the contemporary situation tend towards the hazy, and lack narrative pathways into the future. For instance, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s Climate Leviathan calls for ‘Climate X’, an as yet unrealised political model that would move beyond capitalism and concepts of planetary sovereignty, and be based on equality, dignity and solidarity;⁶¹ Jason Moore and Raj Patel’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things also looks towards indigenous movements and other traditions of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, but deliberately refrains from drawing a ‘road map for class struggle’;⁶² Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm calls, like Clive Hamilton, for a new seriousness about anthropic agency, but also announces the ‘death of affirmative politics’ and hopes for an ‘induced implosion’ of capitalism dependent on a ‘political movement endowed with powers not yet on the horizon’.⁶³ From a non-Marxist perspective, Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth diagnoses the need for a ‘third attractor’ that would move beyond the current split between an outdated drive to fulfil the globalising project of modernity, and a reactive but equally hopeless retreat to the local, often accompanied by a focus on national and ethnic identity.⁶⁴ A similar haziness characterises the titles in the Verso ‘Futures’ series – such as The Future by Marc Augé (2015), Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2015) and Déjà Vu and the End of History by Paulo Virno (2015) – all of which deal with, to quote the website blurb, ‘the outer limits of political and social possibility’.⁶⁵ The point at which these writers turn back is the point at which the emergent near future starts, and one of the things that makes fiction so interesting in this context is that it has little choice but to narrate its way through the proximate temporal zone that constructs such as ‘Climate X’ and a ‘third attractor’ overleap – unless it turns to apocalypse to make that leap, which is one reason why apocalyptic fictions continue to be so popular.

What might seem at first glance a problem of strategy and practice also rests on a culture of presentism that has only become more pressingly consequential in the Anthropocene. As Amy J. Elias summarises it:

As with Fredric Jameson’s famous (in cultural studies, at least) cognate comment that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, a slight sense of impatience can sometimes be detected in the recent mention of such ideas, as if we’ve had more than enough of them and it’s time to move on.⁶⁷ The association of a loss of a sense of history with postmodernity was made in what remains Jameson’s most famous work, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in 1989. However, in An American Utopia, published in 2016, he was still writing of the ‘waning of history, of historicity or historical consciousness’ as the signal contemporary political problem, as if nothing much had changed in this respect.⁶⁸ A reading of near-future fiction bears this out. This diagnosis might at first seem to contradict the notion that the zeitgeist is characterised by a sense of momentous change as inevitable and in part already here, but it is the collision and tension between these two that does much to make the headache-inducing weather of the near future. We know we need to change, we cannot change, nothing changes, change is coming, change is already happening.

The struggle to locate an emergent near-future genre is the struggle to conceive of a novel of revolution for the Anthropocene. Our imagination of what this process might involve should not be dependent on the French, Russian and Chinese exemplars which lay at the heart of Theda Skocpol’s influential comparative analysis of social revolution: ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures … accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’, which are ‘set apart from other sorts of conflicts and transformative processes above all by the combination of two coincidences: the coincidence of societal structural change with class upheaval; and the coincidence of political with social transformation’.⁶⁹ Rather, in the near-future zone, the concept of revolution follows more recent shifts in revolution studies which have seen it as, in James Allinson’s words, ‘a spectrum of phenomena rather than discrete entities in their own right’, a set of processes which shade ‘into wider instances of non‐violent contentious politics and democratic transition’.⁷⁰ Or as Alyssa Battistoni puts it, with particular reference to the contemporary moment: ‘drastic and rapid change is obviously necessary; so is speculative, creative, ambitious political action. We might call such action revolution, but in a world of global wealth disparity, widespread automation, communications technology, climate change, it is likely to look considerably different from the revolutions of the past.’⁷¹

This is not however to identify the novel of revolution straightforwardly with the formulation of political practice and strategy. Rather, the near-future novel of revolution must try to bring the extreme disjunctions of the contemporary moment – of space, of time – into relation, and representation, in a manner that might be preliminary to such strategy and practice. Equally, while this revolutionary novel will draw on the legacy of the historical novel, given how central revolutions have often been to that genre, it must also enter into new generic combinations and innovations to come into being – just as the revolution to come must differ from previous revolutions, in everything from process to timescale. As Jameson notes, the difference between distinct historical moments of transition ‘suggests some doubt as to whether the historical novel … can function as a useful generic category for novels which issue from and represent wholly different kinds of historical convulsions’; though this does not mean ‘that revolutions are henceforth impossible, or that history is at an end, or that capitalism is eternal’.⁷² Or to paraphrase Lauren Berlant – who is also working, like this book, out of the inheritance of Raymond Williams – the near future is yet to find ‘its genre, which is the same as finding its event’.⁷³

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Chapters 1 and 2 explore the domestic near future. Chapter 1 traces how it converts the historicity and scale of the Anthropocene into a cyclical temporality housed in the domestic realm. Chapter 2 explores how the intensely experiencing individual body, buffered by a privileged isolation from other people and change, lies at the heart of this realm. Chapter 3 then looks at the centrality of the arts and the creative process to many domestic near-future fictions, and argues that it functions as a way of inflating the individual body so that it appears to meet the scalar demands of the Anthropocene, though with the result that historical change is displaced beyond the narrative, in a way that invokes authoritarian political forms. Chapter 4 focuses on two novels that exemplify the struggle with genre entailed by the near future, as they each stumble towards a generic construct that might escape the pull of the residual culture and embody an emergent dynamic. Chapter 5 reads Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon as a novel in which many of the central concerns of the domestic near future – the artwork and aesthetics, the body – are transformed through being paired with history and the utopian nation state.

Chapter 6 pivots to look at a set of US fictions which try to imagine a collective more expansive than the domestic unit, and how such imagining is undermined in part by issues of identity, in part by the ideological freight of the genres brought to this task and in part by their inability to pull free from the malign gravitational force field of US history and its treatment of race and gender. Chapter 7 reads a set of near-future fictions which centre on a revolutionary break, and explores how such attempts suggest a period shift from fictions earlier in this century, even as they struggle to locate and retain the historical energy which would constitute such a break. The final chapter – Chapter 8 – concludes by reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 as a novel which does generate such energy through the harnessing of various dialectical movements – between past and future, genre and instance, fiction and non-fiction – though the most tensioned of all these movements, between collective and individual identity, remains an unsolved problem, even as it is the possible catalyst of the utopian impulse.

The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction thus traces a path from the domestic near future and its conservative retreat from the challenges of the Anthropocene, to the near-future genre of revolution in which the collective and historical change are driving elements. It should be obvious that this does not claim to be a definitive reading of this set of texts or, indeed, of the strange zone of time with which they deal. For instance, the important place that Robinson’s novels hold in this reading, and the influence of Jameson’s writing, testifies to the dominant shaping role that Marxist and Utopian traditions have had on the arc of the near future that traverses this book. Indeed, the near future that emerges through what follows might best be seen as acting like one of Jameson’s generic categories, one of potentially many ‘ad hoc, experimental constructs, devised for a specific textual occasion and abandoned like so much scaffolding when the analysis has done its work’;⁷⁴ or as a form of science fiction, in the light of Phillip Wegner’s stimulating observation that ‘all periodizing narrative[s]’ are precisely this, ‘help[ing] us look at the world we inhabit in new, and hopefully productive, ways’.⁷⁵