Origins of Futuristic Fiction.

Abstract

For nearly two thousand years, future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance Epigone, which carried subtitle the history of future century. Unlike stories of space travel that were popular at time, or tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age.Paul Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, forgotten writings of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are precursors of such well-known masterpieces of form as H.G. Wells's Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984. The first secular story to break imaginative barrier against tales of future, Epigone marked emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin's courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as Memoirs of Twentieth Century, Year 2440, Last Man, and World As It Will Be.Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin's great metafictional Le roman de l'avenir, the novel of future. Both a narrative of future and a poetics of new genre, this book identified in previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define aesthetics of a major transformation in relation between literature and time still stands as basis for poetics of futuristic fiction.Tracing early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines key works of earliest writers of genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of future could achieve their full power in works of later novelists.