Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction

by Sarah Falcus (Editor), Kate de Medeiros (Editor), Maricel Oró-Piqueras (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350230705
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/22/2024
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in the Humanities, Ageing and Later Life
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sarah Falcus is a Reader in Contemporary Literature at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She is interested in the intersection of ageing studies and literary studies, and is the co-author (with Katsura Sako) of Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics (Routledge, 2019). She has published in jourbanals such as Feminist Review, Women: A Cultural Review and Ageing and Society. She co-edited a special issue of the European Jourbanal of English Studies (2018), focussed on the intersection of English Studies and Ageing Studies. Her current work centres on two main areas: children's literature and ageing; and ageing/the lifecourse in science and speculative fiction. She is the Primary Collaborator on the project 'Ageing and Illness in British and Japanese Children's Picturebooks 1950-2000: Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives', funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She is the co-director of the Dementia and Cultural Narrative Network.

Maricel Oró-Piqueras is Associate Professor at the Department of English and Linguistics, Universitat de Lleida, Spain. She has been a member of research group Dedal-Lit since it started working on the representation of fictional images of ageing and old age in 2002. Her research interests include ageing and old age in contemporary fiction and representations of gender and ageing in film and TV series. She has co-edited two collections of essays entitled Serializing Age: Aging and Old Age in TV Series (2015, with Anita Wohlmann) and Narratives of Mentorship: Rediscovering (Age)ing (2019, with Núria Casado-Gual and Emma Domínguez-Rué) and a special issue of the European Jourbanal of English Studies with Sarah Falcus (2018). Moreover, she has published her research in national and international jourbanals such as English Studies, The Gerontologist and Jourbanal of Aging Studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Intersections between Age Studies and Science and Speculative Fiction
Maricel Oró-Piqueras and Sarah Falcus

Chapter 1
Remaking Ourselves: Age, Death and Techno-bodies in the Fiction of Transhumanist Immortality
Teresa Botelho

Chapter 2
Ageing and Youthing: Portrayals of Progression and Regression in Science Fiction Film and TV
Peter Goggin and Ulla Kriebernegg

Chapter 3
Ageing and Generation in Recent Narratives of Longevity
Sarah Falcus and Maricel Oró-Piqueras

Chapter 4
Biological Slaves: Discardable Bodies in Dystopia
Maria Aline Ferreira

Chapter 5
Prejudice Against Our Feared Future Self: Contemporary Perspectives on Ageing in European Dystopian Literature
Aleksandra Pogonska-Baranowska

Chapter 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)
Stella Achilleos

Chapter 7
'Whatever comes after human progress': Transhumanism, Antihumanism, and the
Absence of Queer Ecology inLidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan
Sean Seeger

Chapter 8
A Spectral Future: Dementia and the Nonhuman in Marjorie Prime
Michael Hooper

Chapter 9
A Cure for Ageing: Digital Cloning as Utopian End-of-life Care in the 'San Junipero' Episode of Black Mirror
Eszter Ureczky

Chapter 10
Ageing, Anachronism and Perception in Dystopian Narrative: The Case of Margaret Atwood's 'Torching the Dusties'
Susan Watkins

Chapter 11
Playing with Possibilities: Ursula Le Guin and Speculations on the Human Condition: An Anocritical Approach
Roberta Maierhofer

Editorial Reviews

Bringing together the critical perspectives of scholars from both SF studies and aging studies, Age and Ageing in Contemporary Science and Speculative Fiction tackles a gap in the study of representations of age, by exploring the possibilities that SF aesthetics afford to capture and reconceive the human experience of time. The variety of theoretical approaches that the contributors employ opens the book up to be used across a range of scholarship, which may further show the centrality of age and aging, rejuvenation, and immortality to SF… It lays a foundation for scholars who would like to further explore SF as a source of new and subversive visions of aging” —Mariana Batista da Cruz, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, Utopian Studies

From the Publisher