The fictions in this chapter break from early twenty-first-century novels of revolution, in which the historical rupture was relativized or treated ironically: given imminent planetary disaster, they cannot afford to desert the prospect of a radical transformation of society. However, while all four novels are preoccupied with territory, they cannot imagine a history that might sustain a new kind of politics upon it. Walkaway by Corey Doctorow (2017) demonstrates how the difficulty of imagining revolution today is linked to genre and space, as a failure to locate the first causes the collapse of the second. Infomocracy by Malka Older (2016) portrays a world that has already achieved a radical transition, but the lack of economic change leaves this as global capitalism in territorial fancy dress. Zone One by Colson Whitehead (2011) occurs in the wake of a zombie apocalypse that only confirms the undead continuation of both neoliberal capitalism and the contemporary genre matrix. Finally, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2009) sees a revolution split between territory and history, as it is unable to reconcile two elements of a potential revolutionary collective: the subjected citizen and the subjected refugee.

In New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017), the struggle between the oligarchy and the commons is posited as the genre of modern history, subsuming different instances under this synchronic form. The novel’s utopianism consists of the synthesis of such dialectical movements: between two kinds of revolution, a mass civil resistance and a conventional electoral capture; between past and future; between fictional and non-fiction genres. The revolutionary event in the novel becomes the radical recombination of the central themes of the near future as they play across the chasm of scale between individual and globe. The characters work as an allegorical assemblage, an interaction best understood in relation to the debate between symbol and allegory as it was inaugurated by the Romantics at the birth of capitalist modernity. However, the need to stabilise the macro structure in New York 2140 raises hard questions with regard to gender, race and class, which suggest the impossibility of finally resolving the tension between collective and individual. Equally, however, this tension is the generative dialectic that underlies the utopian impulse as it takes form in the genre of near-future revolution.

In its emphasis on reading as bound up with agency, Red Moon repudiates not only the domestic near fiction but also the reading practices commonly labelled ‘surface reading’, as they would seek to reinstate a divide between aesthetics and politics. Although the novel registers the pull of the body, it makes it codependent on a social totality that is itself reconceptualised in the wake of ecological emergency. The collective vessel for this body is the superpower state, which not only wields power enough to change the course of the Anthropocene but is also accessible to a narrative that leads out from the present without heading straight into apocalypse. The chapter ends by considering Red Moon as an instance of the historical novel set in the future, in which the utopian nation state, and the collectivity that underpins it, only exists as a dialectical relationship between part and whole, space and time.

This chapter registers how questions of collectivity and radical change cannot be considered without questions of gender, race, class and power coming to the fore. In William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014), technology seems at first sight to distinguish the near from far future, but the foundational difference is between gendered bodies. In World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler (2008), the jump-starting of history leads to a pre-modern US from which race is excised, and a world that mirrors the role the South has played in the US regional imaginary in such a way that The Peripheral is revealed as a riff on the counterfactual civil war history. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014) sees the collaborative arts become a societal model in which women can assume prominent roles. However, the novel’s emphasis on timeless ‘beauty’ promotes the post-Fordist creative as human universal, while its patriarchal cult relies on a stereotyped figure of the white South, such that the novel’s utopian overlooking of race threatens to efface the history of slavery. Station Eleven ultimately splits between the return of a fatally compromised history, and a utopian break from it.

This chapter reads three examples of what is now frequently labelled climate fiction and argues that rather than addressing climate change in the manner commonly assumed by criticism, such works frequently wish to evade it. Clade by James Bradley (2015) draws on the domestic novel and therapeutic fiction, and their concern with the personal, pairing these with climate events to become an anaemic version of the nineteenth-century historical novel. The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (2017) replaces climate events with myth so as to scale up the personal to the planetary scale of the Anthropocene. These genre combinations convert the punctum of apocalypse into something more durable and suggest a cultural structure of feeling chiefly concerned with a fantasy subjugation of climate change to a continuation of the affluent lifestyle of the Global North. A reading of All Rivers Run Free by Natasha Carthew (2018) confirms the link between climate events and myth as replacements for the planetary forces that are truly frightening to the domestic near future: history, and other people.

This chapter explores the prominence of the arts and their cognate vocations in near-future fiction, and how they act as a way of scaling up the domestic near future to appease the spatial demands of planetary ecological emergency. In Arcadia by Lauren Groff (2013), art acts like myth and climate events in Chapters 1–2, shrinking climate change to the scale of the body. However, in The History of Bees by Maja Lunde (2015) and 10:04 by Ben Lerner (2015), the artwork models the social totality, though this entails both an authoritarian overwriting of individual identity and the desertion of narrative and history. Such a totality suggests Romantic theorisations of the symbol, situating the domestic near future in a literary history in which the symbol has been a compensatory device for a revolutionary history that has painfully faltered. Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2017) both provides a glimpse of this revolutionary dynamic and an exemplary desertion of it, as it moves away from an opening centred on latent class solidarity and revolution to become a quest adventure to locate the domestic near future, vested in an artist and their parent–child relationship.

The introduction traces the emergence of new forms of the near future to the global financial crisis of 2008 and ensuing events, linked to an urgent awareness of coming and needed change in relation to global environmental crisis. It argues that by merging the Anthropocene with the broader contemporary field, the near future provides a better means of understanding how global warming makes its presence felt in fiction than does a focus on ‘climate fiction’ alone. Two major themes shape contemporary culture’s relationship to the Anthropocene: the prospect of radical change, and of a broad collective. A large number of works, explored through the first half of the book as the ‘domestic near future’, recoil from the prospect of such cooperation and such change. The second half reads a set of fictions which do try to imagine new kinds of collectivity, and radical change, though they frequently struggle to find a generic form adequate to the task. In these cases, the near future acts more like the emergent form that Raymond Williams hypothesised, underlining the link between the emergent near future as narrative genre, and the cultural shift to which such a genre might correspond.

If the domestic near future operates with residual and dominant cultural forms, in Raymond Williams’s terms, it also provides glimpses of potential emergent formations. This chapter reads two novels that give a particularly vivid sense of the incipient genre of near-future revolution struggling within inherited genres that can register but not properly embody it. While the eponymous company in The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013) provides a more legible delineation of the Anthropocene than the environmental disasters that often populate the domestic near future, its victory relies on a similar investment in individual embodiment, that has as its correlate a latent antipathy to collective agency – such as might coalesce in the prospective revolution glimpsed at the novel’s close. Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich (2013) progresses from a devastating satire of apocalyptic capitalism into an oscillation between shattered human communities and a dangerous journeying: between capitalist realism in the shadow of dystopia and the adventure romance. However, almost despite itself, the novel dowses at its end towards another kind of collective that would also be another form of novel.

The figure of the child has frequently been seen as central to discourses about the future; this chapter argues that its importance is trumped by the sensorially rich individual body. In Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (2015), the child introduces a temporality of change and is associated with collectives that can only appear as a threat. In The Rapture (2009) by Liz Jensen, climate events intensify embodiment, while the desolation of apocalypse finds its true aetiology in the compound spectre of parenthood and the public realm. Her (2014, dir. Spike Jonze) is oblivious to climate change but shaped by a valorisation of the human body ensconced in domestic comfort, as it is threatened by the spectre of the mass. In all three fictions, the turn to the body is the denial of a fundamental equality with an Other both within and without the state. The chapter closes by showing how John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) passes from a nationalist dystopia to the germ of a utopian collective in which the legacies of colonialism are finally overcome, to an isolation buoyed by material comfort, in a manner that updates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for the Anthropocene.