Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction by Sarah Falcus and Maricel Oró-Piqueras (review)

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, bio-power, 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...