p. 7 “Criticism has tended to assume that literature’s engagement with environmental crisis must be a constructive one”
p. 8 “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 21st-century imaginary, especially by way of the trope of the Anthropocene, has become intensely 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.”
p. 9 “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 bodies and its comforts … this emphasis on the sensorially rich individual body is part of the same movement by which the prospective of a broader collective is dismissed, occasionally demonised. Such a two-part movement is suggestive of Hannah Arendt’s account of how actions, 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. A more historically eloquent explanation is provided by Jameson who describes that contraction of politics to the circumscribed space and time of the body as a consequence of colonisation and the shocking exposure of ‘the security of the ego or the unique personal self’ to a ‘demographic plenianisation of … subjectivity’ … 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 our ephemeral time of individual experience. 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.”
p. 14 “The questions of what forms of human cooperation – or, to put it more simply, politics – might prove adequate to planetary climate disaster has 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’ as an yet unrealised political model that would move beyond capitalism and concepts of planetary sovereignty, and be based on equality, dignity and solidarity. Jason Moor and Raj Patel’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things also looks towards indigenous movements and other traditions of anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, but deliberately refrains from drawing a “road map for class struggle”; Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm calls, like Clive Hamilton, for a new seriousness about anthropic agency, but also accounes 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. 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.A similar haziness characterises the titles in the Verso”Futures” series such as The Future by Marc Auge (2015), Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2015) and Deja Vu and the End of History by Paulo Virno (2015) – all of which deal with, to quite the website blurb, “the outer limits of political and social possibility”.
p. 15 Frederic 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. 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 noothing much had changed … A reading od 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 is 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.”
p. 30 “In the domestic near future, men as well as women can be primarily identified with the household, as we have seen in Clade and will see again in Her and Arcadia, reflecting the elevation of its economic and class significance over its gender connotations – men as much as women pine for their house in the country.”
p. 31 Mitch R Murray and Mathias Nilges have argued that ‘the arrival of cyberpunk in 1984 could be read … as an epitaph to the radical feminist science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, which includes landmark novels by Ursula K Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy and Octavia Butler, while Philip Wegner … has suggested a range of ‘dialectical rejoinder{s} to cyberpunk, many of them by women. In a similar vein, the domestic near-future might be read as an epitaphic successor or rejoinder to these radical ‘feminist fabulations’ and ‘critical dystopias’, and as dialectically engagde not jnust with the near-future novels of revolution … but also with work that falls beyond its remit, such as the global and postcolonial science fiction …. or the fantasy novels of authors such as N.K. Jemsin, Nalo Hopkinson and Shawntelle Madison that, as Sami Schalk puts it ‘challenges readers’ assumptions and understandings of (dis)ability, race, gender and sexuality through the defamiliarization of these categories”.
p. 64 “the arts in near-future fiction often seem to be called forth by the prospect of totality, but their attempts to appear its scalar and spatial demands push them towards the static image that erases the very narrative from which the totality might emerge. The resemblance of these static images to theoretical descriptions of the symbol then allows them to be understood as part of a continuation of the oppositional relationship between symbol and allegory, as it was inaugurated in its modern form by the Romantics. Planetary ecological crisis is thereby placed in a direct lineage with that earlier period of disruption and transformation – of revolutions, incipient nationalisms, a changing relationship to nature, and a self-consciously historicist sense of a break with the past – such that it can be better understood as part of the longue dureee crisis of capitalist modernity, rather than as an unprecedented epistemic and representational rupture, of the kind climate change is often presented as being.”
p. 70 “What the near-future resolution of The History of Bees reveals is the importance of the intermediary scales between micro and macro, which tend to be much less discussed by critical and theoretical accounts of literature in the Anthropocene. … some recent work on the challenges facing contemporary politics has zeroed in on it. For instance, in his study of contemporary democracy, David Runciman has described how “the space between the personal and apocalyptic which is where democratic politics traditionally plats out, has become a battleground for rival world views which are informed by personal or apocalyptic expectations of the worst that could happen. Mid-level politics is what’s missing… Bruno Latour has diagnosed the need for a future ‘third space’ that would lie between the outdated drive to fulfil the globalising project of modernity, and the equally untenable retreat to the local, often accompanied by a focus on national and ethnic identity.”
p. 159 paradigmatically ‘strong’ form of the near future: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson “the novel cuts through the problems of historical legacy and revolutionary change .. by addressing them directly. A Marxist conception of global history replaces a submerged US regional imaginary, as the struggle between the oligarchy and the commons is posited as the genre of modern history, subsuming different instances within this synchronic form: the US can then serve as an easily recognisable territory to house the revolution, and as a scalar fulcrum between planet and populace… The utopianism of New York 2140 consists of a dialectical movement between the convergent global history of modernity as it spans that ‘G2’ and its particular national instances. Other dialectical movements fuse with this: between two kinds of revolution, a mass civil resistance and a conventional electoral capture; between past and future; between fiction and non-fiction. .. involves characters working as an allegorical assemblage, an interaction between understood in the light of the debate between symbol and allegory as it was inaugurated by the Romantics at the birth of capitalist modernity, rather than by the planetary scale of climate crisis to which contemporary allegory is often referred. However the need to stabilise the macro structure in New York 2140 raises hard questions with regard to gender, race and class… the hint of a St Elmo’s fire of violence and sex playing around the allegorical ropes that hold it in place, suggests the impossibility of finally resolving the tension between collective and individual. Equally, however, this tension is the generative dialectic that underlies the utopian impulse as it takes form in the genre of near-future revolution”.
p. 183 “a change in the historical timeline without a change in the relationship between violence, power and forms of identity such as gender, secuality and race, is no change at all. As we have seen, New York 2140 is cognisant of such issues and their importance, though its strategy is to act as if such propositions as gender, race and LGBT equality have been universally accepted, so that the struggle which might in our world join and direct these revolutionary forces, of the plural people against the oligarchy, can come overwhelmingly to the fore. In this sense the novel acts in the spirit of John Foran’s suggestion for a new kind of political party to ‘harness the people power, radical imagination and boundless energy of all these new actors of the future” such as “lack Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and many, many other rising voices, the vast majority of them not well known”. Nevertheless, the sense of strain we have also discerned within the allegorical structure suggests the impossibility of finally resolving the tension between collective and individual, or between ‘theories of the body’ and ‘theories of history’. New York 2140’s achievement is therefore not to somehow resolve this tension but to install it as a generative dialectic underlying the utopian impulse. As Jameson puts it – in a passage quoted by the novel … “”In this situation, what once can say, as Giambattista Vico seems to have been one of the first to do, is that while nature is meaningless, history has a meaning; even if there is no meaning, the project and the future produce it, on the individual as well as the collective basis. The great collective project has a meaning and it is that of utopia. But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning.”
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