In “Progress Versus Utopia” (1982), Frederic Jameson argues, “The moment in which the historical novel as a genre ceases to be functional is also the moment of the emergence of SF,” contending that speculative fiction (sf) picks up where the historical novel leaves off. Considering the ways in which sf adopts the historicizing gesture, Jameson suggests that “the emergence of...SF...registers some nascent sense of the future, and does so in the space on which a sense of the past had once been inscribed” (150). Jameson embraces the analysis of the historical novel provided by Lukács’s (1938), for whom the form reflected a nineteenth-century transition in historical thinking, abandoning “affirm[ations of] the past as being essentially the same as the present” in favor of a conception of history as a “concrete precondition of the present” (21). By highlighting “the struggles and antagonisms of history” using “characters who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces,” Lukács argued that writers like Scott saw the past historically, “as it actually was,” “humanly authentic,” and yet “re-liveable by the reader of a later age” (40). As Carl Freedman (2000) later argues, sf contains elements that “might be called disguised historical fiction” wherein the present “is...estranged from two temporal directions...at once” (56). The result, for Freedman, is that, “free from the burden of the past,” sf remains “more capable of...seeing the overall development of human society in dialectical, historicizing terms” (58). In short, despite its speculative prolepsis, sf provides a critical laboratory for looking backwards, for thinking historically.

While later theorists (viz. McHale 1992, Booker & Thomas 2009, Smith 2012) have periodically invoked these connections between sf and the historical novel, there has been little sustained analysis of these generic intersections and their historicizing implications. This panel amends that absence, focusing on sf which emphasizes “the personal destinies of a number of human beings” as they “coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis” on which historians or characters within the texts occasionally “look back” (Lukács 41). This future-archival gesture we designate “proleptic nostalgia”: both the recursive historicizing of the texts as well as their inevitable drifts into ideological gestures of sameness.

In “Universal Pliability,” Cody Brown addresses M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract series’ widespread space-faring society. For Brown, Harrison’s work positions the “present” as a temporal position that past and future bear upon. Spanning six-hundred years, history becomes recurrence, time existing as a singular and instantaneous mass of actions and objects. This temporal pressure shapes the present as the concatenation of forces that precede and succeed it, wherein categories of past, present, and future are themselves confused. Patterns and coincidence represent “spooky action at a distance,” the mechanisms of which defy human perception and render the laws of physics in the novel into something like Tim Morton’s conception of “ecognosis,” a “knowing that knows itself” that is closer to revealing causality or fatedness than any kind of material ontology.

Our second speaker, Taylor Pryor, addresses Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon in terms of its various historical underpinnings. Responding to a critical gap in anime scholarship, Pryor explores Indigenous representation in Japanese media—specifically manga—and relates it to Japanese settler-colonialism. In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Pryor contends, the narrative trajectories of the characters—specifically, the narrative of Sailor Pluto, the solitary guardian of the entrance to space-time—serve as textual examples of the displacement, erasure, and eradication of the Indigenous Ainu peoples of Japan. Considering the work as reflecting what Juliana Pegues terms “space-time colonialism,” Pryor analyzes the events that culminate in Pluto’s death in the series as a lens through which to further explore Japanese imperialism and the histories of Indigenous erasure.

Finally, in “Indigenous Futurity and the Decolonization of the Culture Concept in Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home,” Eric Aronoff approaches LeGuin’s troubling of the distinctions between backwards-looking nostalgia and utopian futurity particularly in relation to anthropological traditions. Aronoff points to LeGuin’s wild verb tenses in the narrator’s (anti)ethnography—e.g., "[T]he people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California.” LeGuin’s sketches of the Kesh as a utopian community draw on the indigenous California tribes her anthropologist father, Karl Kroeber, studied. For Aronoff, LeGuin challenges the anthropological chronotype and its “incarcerating” of the “primitive Other” in the past. LeGuin’s text becomes an anti-ethnography, challenging modernist culture itself: especially as the challenges LeGuin incorporates into her text emerge simultaneously from Native authors, Like Leslie Silko, who address such concerns from Indigenous perspectives.