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.

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.

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.