Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction

Sarah Falcus, Maricel Oró-Piqueras

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781350230668
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350230682
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

Focusing on the contemporary period, this book brings together critical age studies and contemporary science fiction to establish the centrality of age and ageing in dystopian, speculative and science-fiction imaginaries. Analysing texts from Europe, North America and South Asia, as well as television programmes and films, the contributions range from essays which establish genre-based trends in the representation of age and ageing, to very focused studies of particular texts and concerns. As a whole, the volume probes the relationship between speculative/science fiction and our understanding of what it is to be a human in time: the time of our own lives and the times of both the past and the future.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: (Maricel Oró-Piqueras and Sarah Falcus)
• 1 Remaking ourselves: Age, death and techno-bodies in the fiction of transhumanist immortality
• 2 Ageing and youthing: Portrayals of progression and regression in science fiction film and TV
• 3 Ageing and generation in recent narratives of longevity
• 4 Biological slaves: Discardable bodies in dystopia
• 5 Contemporary perspectives on ageing in European dystopian literature
• 6 Ageing and age-based extinction in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century speculative and science fiction: William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s Logan’s Run (1967) and Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday (2007)
• 7 ‘Whatever comes after human progress’: Transhumanism, antihumanism and the absence of queer ecology in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan
• 8 A spectral future: Dementia and the nonhuman in Marjorie Prime
• 9 A cure for ageing: Digital cloning as utopian end-of-life care in the ‘San Junipero’ episode of Black Mirror
• 10 Ageing, anachronism and perception in dystopian narrative: The case of Margaret Atwood’s ‘Torching the Dusties’
• 11 Playing with possibilities: Ursula Le Guin and speculations on the human condition: An anocritical approach
• Index
• Copyright Page