Engaged with the idea of the past as a model for the future, authors in this volume probe the extent to which historical scripts delimit possibilities, and how authors engaged with the practice of alternative pasts rewrite potentialities in the present.

Introduction Ian P. MacDonald and Kate Polak The Future of the Historical Novel: Freedom and Salvation in Jo Walton’s Lent Phillip Wegner Bad China and Good Chinese Fiction: What We Don’t Understand in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy Cao Xuenan "I Go Backward, Look Forward, As the Porcupine Does": History, Indigenous Futurity and Decolonizing the Culture Concept in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home Eric Aronoff Realist Apocalypse and Pessimistic Aesthetics in Animal’s People and The God of Small Things Rebecca Oh Back to Gilead’s Future: (Re)visions of Critical Dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments Luke Rodewald ‘A Poor Sort of Memory’: Jamais Vu and the Historian as Archive in Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy Ian MacDonald Constructing a Post-Neoliberal Consciousness: The 1980s and/as Now in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me Jackson Ayres Literary Activism, Fresh Registers and Ecocritical Debates in Immaculate Innocent Acan’s Short Stories Edgar Nabutanyi Settler Colonialism, Resource Extraction, and the Future of Canada: Reading Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves Shannon Lodoen Imagining Past, Present, and Future: Totalization and the Face-to-Face Encounter in Carmen Boullosa’s Heavens on Earth Preston Waltrip "The Shape of Power is Always the Same”: The Power as Exposure Therapy Kate Polak Reimagining Contagion in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Bird Is Gone: A Monograph Manifesto Gabriella Friedman Critical Afterword Gerry Canavan

'This well-conceived collection juxtaposes the historical novel and science fiction to ask questions about the genre of history itself. Introduced by a concise, lucid account of the controversies about history swirling around the contemporary culture wars, the wide variety of recent sf covered in the essays amply displays the formal and thematic possibilities of the genre.' Professor John Rieder, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa