Temporal Scale, The Far Future and Inhuman Times: Foresight in Wells and Woolf, Time Travel in Olaf Stapledon and Terrence Malick

Abstract

This chapter links the period’s visions of the far future with modernism’s engagement with deep time in order to show how the big historicising that begins in the nineteenth century is not solely about the expansion of historicity but the multiplicity and alternative futurity that follows from it. While the heterochrony of modernist temporal zoom includes the dissolution characteristic of immense expansions of perspective, it is not centred solely on the absorption of a small frame into some more certain, fundamental backdrop. The incongruity between the aesthetic’s imperative to scale itself to what we care about and the immensity of things that can only be registered from far away – temporal hyperobjects, speculative outsides, far-futural risks – is valuable not only for the critique of modernity’s compressed timescapes that it enables, but also for the way it reveals the plurality of times that cannot be nested within one another. This chapter constructs a relationship between genre fiction’s scope and modernism’s long-range aesthetics – the connection between SF’s literal movement away from earthly temporal units (days,years, events, lives, the career of the human as such) and modernist attempts to picture human life from an estranging distance.