Margaret Atwood, Doughnut Holes, And the Paradox of Imagining (Part V: Future Fictions) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The questions have been asked: 'Can the future be imagined?'; 'If so, how?' The answer to the first of these is deceptively simple. It would seem to be an unequivocal 'yes'. If we take, for example, just the history of the future novel, then the fictional field is crowded with those who believe that the time to come can be imagined and, indeed, for various reasons needs to be. (1) Beginning with the first apocalyptic future novel, Le Dernier homme (1805), by the wonderfully named Jean-Baptiste Francois Xavier Cousin de Grainville, the list rapidly becomes crowded with the famous and the forgettable: from Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) to Alfred-Louis Auguste Franklin's Les Ruines de Paris (1875), John A. Mitchell's The Last American (1889), and--in a minor key--Lieutenant-Colonel Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871). In the 20th century, the likes of Aldous Huxley, with Ape and Essence (1949), Walter Miller, with A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Gore Vidal, with Kalki (1978), have all written memorably about the destruction of humanity. If one casts the net a little wider and focuses on future utopias, the date is pushed back to the 1763 anonymous work The Reign of George VI. And if one takes a more flexible approach to genre, then poems, such as Eugenius Roche's London in a Thousand Years (1830) and Byron's 'Darkness' (1816); plays, such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes' unfinished The Last Man (1825) and George Dibdin Pitt's The Last Man; or, the Miser of Eltham Green (performed in 1833); and paintings, such as Joseph Gandy's 'Architectural Ruins: A Vision' (1798), need to be considered. Remarkably, even if one narrows the field to 'Last Man' poems alone, the literature is significant: Thomas Campbell's 'The Last Man' (1823); Thomas Hood's 'The Last Man' (1826); Edward Wallace's 'The Last Man' (1839); and Thomas John Ousley's 'The Last Man' (1853). And this at a time when the presses were not churning out material in anything like the volume they do today.