Main description:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: Intersections between Age Studies and Science and Speculative Fiction
Maricel Oro-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 Oro-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