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The Future is Fiction is the first cultural history of the idea that people have an obligation to protect the world for future generations. While political philosophers have regarded intergenerational justice as an important field of study since the 1970s, the history of modern forms of obligation to the future has received almost no attention. This book traces the evolution of the Anglo-American concept of intergenerational justice, from its origins in eighteenth-century democratic revolutions to its flourishing in the 2000s. Thus, it illuminates the contours of a political conviction that has shaped modern culture.
Margolis's central claim is twofold: first, that fiction's capacity to imagine counterfactual worlds has made the most significant contribution to contemporary understandings of intergenerational justice; and second, that this contribution has been misunderstood. Rather than inspiring political change, fiction demonstrates that complex societies will inevitably clash over what counts as a good future and what should be done to bring this future into being.
From nineteenth-century utopian novels like James Fenimore Cooper's
The Crater and Mary E. Bradley Lane's
Mizora, to post-nuclear war dystopias, like Russell Hoban's
Riddley Walker, and Walter Miller's
A Canticle for Leibowitz, to recent fiction about endangered children like Toni Morrison's
Paradise, Suzanne Collins's
The Hunger Games, and Kazuo Ishiguru's
Never Let Me Go, the tradition of future-oriented fiction recognizes that our obligation to the future is not the solution to an ethical problem, but an ethical dilemma in its own right.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Future is Fiction: The Literary Roots of Intergenerational Justice
- PART ONE: Generational Thinking, 1789-1980
- Chapter One: After Revolution: Building for the Future in James Fenimore Cooper's The Crater
- Chapter Two: After Evolution: Creating the Future in Mary E. Bradley Lane's Mizora and George Schuyler's Black No More
- Chapter Three: After the Bomb: Warning the Future in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker
- PART TWO: Generational Resentment, 1980-2025
- Chapter Four: Human Resources: Using Up the Future in Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
- Chapter Five: The Innocence Project: Protecting the Future in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village and Toni Morrison's Paradise
- Coda: The Great Do Over: Fixing the Future in the Time Loop Novel
- Bibliography
About the author
Stacey Margolis, Professor of English at the University of Utah, is the author of
Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America (2015) and
The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2005). From 2016-2022 she co-edited
J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists with Elizabeth Duquette. She is currently working on a book about the conservative origins of American literature.
