The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction takes on the formidable task of describing and analyzing the literary response to climate change. This undertaking is made more difficult by the fact that the most obvious category to structure this examination, cli-fi, is deemed inadequate to the task. Sergeant argues that the concept of cli-fi is “something between a distraction and a red herring” (4), noting that treatments of cli-fi tend to quickly acknowledge that instances occur across many genres before moving on to explore a particular critical approach to selected examples. In merely accepting that the category is diverse, criticism on cli-fi then leaves behind questions of genre and the way it's imbricated in ideology, form, and history. Sergeant proposes instead the “near future” as an emergent genre that responds to the massive environmental crisis of climate change without sidestepping important and complex questions of genre's relationship to history.
Sergeant's treatment is an alternate way of understanding how climate change is influencing fiction as well as an argument for fiction's place in addressing climate change. In this reading, fiction responds to climate change primarily by registering an awareness of coming environmental change and the urgent need for radical political change to meet it. Sergeant locates his project at the intersection of work focused on emergent cultural forms in literature and theories of political action like Climate Leviathan (Wainwright and Mann 2018), A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Patel and Moore 2020), and The Progress of This Storm (Malm 2020). In doing so, The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction makes a cogent case for the importance of fiction to projects of radical climate action. While philosophy and theory can remain hazy about how we get to the new collectives demanded by the climate emergency, fiction “has little choice but to narrate its way through the proximate temporal zone that constructs such as ‘Climate X’ and a ‘third attractor’ overleap” (15) even as it requires writers to grapple with genre in new ways.
Starting from the premise that any adequate response to climate change will entail both the work of large-scale collectives and radical, systemic change, The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction examines how texts set in the near future address these two challenges. In order to do so, the book draws extensively on the oeuvre of Fredric Jameson, which is expertly used to interpret the relationship between the collective and history. The novels and films chosen for consideration come after 2008, which is identified as a sea-change moment in which the possibility of radical, rapid political change intersects with widespread awareness of the present effects of climate change. The 2008 financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, Syriza, Podemos, and the Tea Party all point to a belief that a seemingly intractable political system can change rapidly and profoundly. At the same time the perception of climate change shifts from a future anxiety to a phenomenon already experienced in the present moment. While there have been near-future fictions for over a hundred years, Sergeant argues that this confluence changes the tenor of twenty-first-century works set in the near future.
Though these near-future texts are linked by their recognition of the urgency of climate crisis, Sergeant proposes the near future as a genre only in the emergent sense. In this reading, the near future is akin to Raymond Williams's “structures of feeling” in that it is an emergent, not institutionalized genre that gestures to a cultural shift with which the nascent genre corresponds. In addition, Sergeant encourages readers to consider the near future a heuristic genre, a useful device created to illustrate connections and similarities across a group of texts that have been thus far been ignored, not a solidified category or commercial genre. The near-future genre merely allows Sergeant to group together seemingly unrelated texts and locate important continuities among postapocalyptic, preapocalyptic, and nonapocalyptic near-future narratives that all speak to the way fiction responds to the threat of climate change.
The book's treatment of the emergent near-future genre is extensive, examining twenty-one primary texts across eight chapters. The analysis of those twenty-one, very different texts remains cohesive because Sergeant's project is tightly focused on representations of the two major concerns in climate crisis mentioned earlier: the need to act as larger collectives and the need for radical, systemic change. The main arc of the argument begins with works that utterly fail to rise to these twin challenges, progresses through texts with different levels of mixed success, and ends with a reading of a novel in which radical change is successfully brought about through collective action.
The first half of the book examines three primary paths to failure. The novels and films in these chapters do portray climate disaster but recoil from both change and large collectives in any combination of three ways: (1) by turning away from collectives and retreating to a domestic family living in relative safety in a rural, isolated setting; (2) by focusing on the body and its immediate sensations of hunger, cold, pain, or desire, which limit agency to individual safety; and (3) by attempting to use art as the process that can transform individuals into a collective, which aestheticizes the collective and places it outside of the historical change needed to address climate. The structure of this section is quite clever, beginning with three chapters analyzing books that fail in each of these three ways, one chapter that examines how The Circle (Eggers 2014) and The Odds against Tomorrow (Rich 2013) flounder when they combine the three evasion strategies from the previous three chapters, and ends with a chapter on a text that reworks these three paths to failure in interesting ways. This capstone chapter examines how Red Moon (Robinson 2019) transforms the family, the body, and art in ways that weld them to political history and collective action, and in so doing portrays a path to a different world that doesn't rely on apocalypse or disaster as the disruptive change.
The second half of the book returns to examples of partial success. Two complementary chapters examine opposite failures. Novels like Station Eleven (Mandel 2015) and The Peripheral (Gibson 2015) imagine collectives larger than the family unit, but their failure to deal with histories of race and gender leaves them unable to imagine meaningful change. On the other hand, works like The Windup Girl (Bacigalupi 2015) and Zone One (Whitehead 2011) portray massive (though apocalyptic) change but fail to imagine collectives that cross class, nationality, and racial lines. In a persuasive reading, Sergeant argues that these works also expertly portray the elusiveness of true change as they depict instances radical change that ultimately change nothing at all. Zombies may decimate a country, but power structures are still, maddeningly, the same.
The monograph ends with its most important reading, of Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 (2018). This “strong form” of near-future fiction contains no apocalyptic event that separates the near-future world from our own. The novel succeeds in imagining different collectivities and radical change all the while narrating a blueprint for how to get from our predicament to its near-future world. New York 2140 accomplishes what it does by experimenting with a variety of dialectics—between mass civil resistance and traditional elections, genre and instance, past and future, fiction and nonfiction, and collective and individual identity. An allegorical reading of the book expertly demonstrates how that literary device helps bring together different scales of action. Ultimately, Sergeant reads New York 2140 as a historical novel pushed through to the future, underlining its investment in political change and collective agency.
Throughout The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Sergeant argues that there are two dangers a near-future novel must avoid to truly capture the urgent transformations climate change demands—the text cannot retreat to the small scale of the individual or domestic sphere, and it cannot make apocalypse the agent of radical change. It is perhaps a drawback of reading an emergent genre that so many of the texts under consideration fail at the set task; after all, the genre needed to navigate these two dangers without being drawn in by either doesn't actually exist yet. The monograph is explicit in embracing its method of examining unsuccessful texts, critiquing the way “criticism has tended to assume that literature's engagement with environmental crisis must be a constructive one and so, implicitly a positive one, even when it falls short on one count or another” (7). Sergeant's treatment does differ, devoting much of the monograph to in-depth analysis of the shortcomings of texts that recoil from the kinds of collectivity and change that climate crisis requires. The truth, though, is that the sections that build some new understanding out of texts that are thought to offer something of value are more compelling than the chapters that thoroughly dismantle texts that get it wrong.
Overall, The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction is a nuanced and careful treatment of a proposed emergent genre, featuring extensive research, clever readings of texts, and interesting intellectual propositions. It is at its best when it's examining the entanglement of genre and history, analyzing how books attempt the groundbreaking work of imagining revolutionary change, and using fiction to sketch out potential pathways for achieving the radical transformations that climate change demands.
