Narrating Futures / Alternate History

This series explores a hitherto unidentified type of narrative: Future Narratives. Future Narratives preserve essential aspects of future time, namely its openness and undecidedness. They do this by operating with ‘nodes’ as their basic unit – situations that allow for more than one continuation. Future Narratives can be found in print, in film, in video games, in scenarios of world climate change, and in other simulations of future trends. Cutting across all media and genre classifications, this burgeoning corpus still lacks a theory and a poetics. This series offers both – and detailed case studies.

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While, strictly speaking, Alternate Histories are not Future Narratives, their analysis can shed a clear light on why Future Narratives are so different from past narratives. Trying to have it both ways, most Alternate Histories subscribe to a conflicting set of beliefs concerning determinism and freedom of choice, contingency and necessity. For the very first time, Alternate Histories are here discussed against the backdrop of their Other, Future Narratives. The volume contains in-depth analyses of the classics of the genre,such as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and Philip Roth's The Plot against America, as well as less widely-discussed manifestations of the genre, such as Dieter Kühn's N, Christian Kracht's Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten, and Quentin Tarantino's film Inglourious Basterds.