Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction

The pervasiveness of questions of temporality, futurity, and immortality in science and speculative fiction opens new perspectives on aging and generationality. However, despite the potential of these genres to illuminate alternative ways of thinking about the human being in time, there has been a clear tendency within the field of aging studies to favor the analysis of realist narratives. To be sure, Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction does not venture into completely uncharted territory. Teresa Mangum's study of "rejuvenation narratives," Andreu Domingo's conceptualization of "demodystopias," and Sarah Falcus's analysis of generational anachronism in dystopian novels have attempted to fill related gaps in aging studies.1 Yet Sarah Falcus and Maricel Oró-Piqueras's edited collection of essays is the first extensive study of speculative and science fiction (SF) as cultural productions that encode prevalent concerns about age and aging societies.Focusing on texts from Europe, North America, and South Asia, with particular emphasis on the anglophone world, the scope of the collection is limited but its contributions are rich in the range of themes that they address. This broad variety, touching on questions of genre, immortality, biopower, demographic change, temporalities, and transhumanism, renders the book relevant not only to those working within the field of aging studies, in particular scholars of SF and those more generally interested in representations of futurities.The collection is divided into two parts: The first part consists of six essays, each of which analyzes a range of SF narratives and identifies "genre-based trends in the representation of age and ageing" (4); the second part presents five detailed case studies that consider specific SF texts. This structure suits the book's goal of mapping the intersections between studies of SF and aging studies. The first part illuminates recurrent patterns in the representation of aging in works of SF, while the cases analyzed in the second part demonstrate the range of creative and aesthetic possibilities that SF affords to reimagine human temporality. The two parts contain chapters on literary as well as audiovisual texts, including essays on film, TV, and a play. The latter are a valuable addition to the collection, not only, as the editors point out, due to "the importance of the visual medium to SF/speculative writing" (4), but also given the popularity and reach of these textual modes, which establish SF as particularly influential forms of cultural representation.The chapters in the first half of the book center around the topic of longevity, exploring narratives that capture hopes and anxieties connected to the possibility of prolonging human life. Teresa Botelho's essay on the opportunities that science fiction provides to reimagine humanity's "biological destiny" (10) opens the collection well, as it introduces topics that are further developed in subsequent chapters. Focusing on texts that construct transhumanist scenarios where enhancement technologies have made rejuvenation, immortality, or life extension tangible realities, this chapter considers how SF narratives have questioned the desirability and political implications of these changes to the human life span. Peter Goggin and Ulla Kriebernegg study age regression and progression as narrative devices to show how popular SF films and TV series have assigned meanings to old age and given expression to dominant concerns regarding aging. The narratives that they analyze have done little to subvert dominant cultural assumptions about old age, and older women in particular continue to be underrepresented in SF.Generationalism is the focus of Falcus and Oró-Piqueras's discussion of anglophone longevity narratives, one of the highlights of the first part of the book. This chapter examines literary and audiovisual texts that project future worlds where the aging process has been successfully halted or delayed: the novels Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (2010), The Postmortal by Drew Magary (2011), and Everything Belongs to the Future by Laurie Penny (2016), as well as the film In Time by Andrew Niccol (2011). These texts are ultimately ambivalent about aging: On the one hand, they critique anti-aging ideology; on the other, they rely on an ageist imaginary that perceives the aged body as repulsive. This ambivalence, according to Falcus and Oró-Piqueras, also permeates the exploration of generationalism that takes place in the dystopian worlds of the novels. The texts not only represent class and generational conflicts in a global capitalist system where longevity has become a commodity accessible only to a privileged few; they also reflect on the existential implications of life-extension technologies for the human species if generational succession is compromised. While these concerns with generational succession reveal a reliance on heteronormative ideas about family and reproduction, the chapter concludes by highlighting the relevance of the texts' preoccupation with the possible effects of generational disorder on our sense of history and collective belonging.Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction also includes Aleksandra Pogónska-Baranowska's and Stella Achilleos's analyses of gerontocide in SF and Aline Ferreira's discussion of "discardable bodies" and biopower in three dystopian texts—Manjula Padmanabhan's play Harvest (1997), Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go (2005), and Ninni Holmqvist's novel The Unit (2010)—which Ferreira reads as cautionary tales against the dangers of sustaining extreme biocapitalist values. Although there is overlap between the topics of these three chapters, resulting in some repetition, the essays are certainly not redundant, as they focus on different texts while emphasizing the persistence of demographic concerns and the associated trope of age-based extinction in narratives of futurity. Together, these chapters highlight the role that contemporary dystopian fiction plays in expressing collective fears about aging and old age and in drawing attention to the danger of ageism in intergenerational relationships, as demographics continue to change.The case studies in the book's second part confirm and expand on some of the findings of the first part. They introduce different narratives that show the range of concerns about aging and the aged expressed in SF. Sean Seeger's reading of Lidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan (2017) as a deconstruction of the ideal of human progress, and of its reliance on aging as a metaphor for the development of the species from immaturity to enlightenment, is a notable contribution to this part of the collection. Care, a key issue in aging studies, is addressed in three chapters. Michael Hooper analyzes Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime (2014), a play set in a future where people living with dementia are cared for by holograms of their deceased relatives. According to Hooper, these human replicas, which represent the absent body of dementia, perpetuate the idea that people with this condition have no subjectivity or agency. Ezter Uresky focuses on an episode of Netflix's Black Mirror series, "San Junipero" (2016), about two terminally ill older women who find an ever-lasting refuge from aging, death, and heteronormativity in the virtual seaside resort of San Junipero. The chapter questions the episode's optimism, suggesting that its representation of San Junipero does not actually transcend ageist ideology and its happy ending obscures such issues as death denial and suppressed sexuality in old age. Susan Watkins analyzes Margaret Atwood's short story "Torching the Dusties" (2014). According to her, Atwood's "demodystopia" (Domingo)—a dystopia brought about by demographic change—encourages readers to consider older subjects and the question of population aging through a fresh perspective.Finally, in the last chapter of the book, Roberta Maierhofer focuses on Ursula K. Le Guin's critical writings, specifically the essays "Introducing Myself" (1992) and "The Space Crone" (1976). Maierhofer's analysis of age and gender as "narrative presences" in Le Guin's writings, and her inquiry into the author's "commitment to the speculative definition of human conditions from a feminist perspective" (215), is a fitting conclusion to the collection, as it reaffirms one of its guiding theses, namely, that SF provides tools to deconstruct dominant ideas about aging and to create a richer and more diverse imaginary of old age. 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.The collection's primary focus on anglophone, white-dominated texts at the expense of other SF traditions is its most evident shortcoming, one that the editors acknowledge and justify by pointing to the study's non-comprehensiveness. The book provides a solid starting point for future research that expands on its work by considering SF from other parts of the world. At a time when population aging is often thought of and portrayed as a crisis of the future,2 Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction offers critical insight into how these concerns have been encoded into SF and otherwise rendered through the projection of alternative futures. Furthermore, it lays a foundation for scholars who would like to further explore SF as a source of new and subversive visions of aging.