Table of Contents

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.

Promotional Information

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

About the Author

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.

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