Ageing and generation in recent narratives of longevity

From Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels ([1726] 2013) to Neal Shusterman’s young adult Arc of a Scythe series, namely, Scythe (2017), Thunderhead (2019), The Toll (2020), authors have narrated and imagined future worlds in which some kind of ‘cure’ for ageing has been found. The quest for youthfulness in the form of longevity or immortality has long been central to speculative and science fiction. As Teresa Mangum points out, ‘The search for immortality forms almost a subgenre of this literature’ (2002: 70; see also Yoke and Hassler 1985; Clark 1995; Slusser et al. 1996). Variously read as narratives about class conflict, hubris and human desire, what is sometimes overlooked in discussions of these texts are their explicit and complex explorations of what it means to live in and across time....