LARB Digital eDitions #38: Speculative Fiction

August 201535 pages

LARB Digital eDitions #38: Speculative Fiction

Whatever happened to the future? Back in the 1950s, when Disney opened Tomorrowland, the future seemed to gleam with the ever-approaching promise of a bright technoscientific utopia.  Today, however, American futuristic imaginings are dominated by postapocalyptic wastelands and zombie-infested catastrophes. Disney’s own contemporary cinematic attempt to reinvigorate utopian futurism, Tomorrowland, seems somehow naive and strained in comparison to the bleak-yet-sublime imaginings of Interstellar, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Walking Dead


The reviews and essays in this issue explore recent speculative fictions concerned with ambivalent imaginings of futures yet to come. The future is (and always has been) the consequence of the conditions, contradictions, and imaginings of the past and the present. The novels examined here, and the reviewers who contemplate them, offer an intricate glimpse into those conditions, contradictions, and imaginings – and they provoke us to wonder which futures lie before us and why.