Age and Anachronism in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction

Dystopian novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are inherently concerned with the exploration of lateness in the form of what Frank Kermode calls ‘the sense of an ending,’ an expression of apocalyptic thinking through writing and reading. It is, as many have pointed out, no surprise that in the time of mediatization, consumerism, globalization, ecological devastation and rapid technological change, writers have increasingly turned to the dystopian imagination. Many of these texts take the form of what Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan call critical dystopias, texts which “maintain a utopian impulse” (7) in their critical exploration of our contemporary moment. Through their dystopian visions, critical dystopias force us to confront our present and so hold out the possibility of change, of a different future. Dystopian fiction exploits a feeling of species precarity and lateness, whether this is due to war, technological overreaching, illness/plague, ecological devastation and/or a combination of these factors and others. It evokes species (and often planetary) vulnerability, as Tom Moylan has argued in his Scraps of the Untainted Sky, at the same time as it warns the reader that such a future may be avoided.

Central to many of these dystopian visions is a form of generational anachronism, or disorder. In these worlds, apocalyptic environmental and social collapse frequently results in, and is often tied to, societies where the life course, progress and the promise of the future are all disrupted by threats to generational continuity. These may take the form of mass infertility, the danger of longevity, uncontrolled population growth or decline, and/or technological changes to the nature of the human. Underlying these events may be globalization and migration, war and violence, technological development, or illness and plague. They may remain unexplained. Nevertheless, the anachronism that then results is both reflective of science and speculative fiction’s central concern with time and the future, and specifically a temporal anxiety that brings together a sense of individual, species and planetary lateness. Threats to the future, and by extension therefore our ways of imagining the future, are both inextricably linked to and metonymically represented by generational disorder and by figures of ageing. Our sense of an ending therefore depends upon and foregrounds narratives of ageing and generational identity, making ageing itself fundamental to dystopian writing.