[1]
In Narrative Discourse, Gerard Genette theorizes both “open” analepses (flashbacks that trail off with no clear conclusion or diegetic connection to the plot) and “closed” analepses (flashbacks that lead to a plot event). The analepses in the speculative analeptic are somewhere in between: they are flashbacks that lead us to some inevitable rupture after which climate change is irrefutable, but they remain vague about what that rupture actually is.
[2]
The emphasis these thinkers put on the future evokes Lee Edelman’s No Future, in which he positions futurity as the political mode of heterosexual hegemony. As I’ll discuss, one major difference between fictional and nonfictional modes of the speculative analeptic is the centrality of what Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” or the centering of future children in a political project.
[3]
The vagueness regarding the event and the analeptic future-time of the addressee allows Vollmann to avoid any explicit prediction: we’ll only be able to see what the event turned out to be from the other side.
[4]
Millet’s 2020 novel A Children’s Bible took up the world of children whose parents abandoned them to climate catastrophe. In We Loved It All and other speculative-analeptic non-fiction texts, children either remain in the present or occupy a deferred future after the cataclysmic event we haven’t yet experienced. In this way, the nonfiction’s emphasis on children enables an eternal perpetuation of the politics of reproductive futurism.
Already in the Room:
the Speculative Analeptic and the Problem of Scale
When I teach environmental literature, I ask students to imagine stacks of one-dollar bills: one hundred, then one thousand, one hundred thousand. How many stacks for each? How tall would they be? While they share a pretty clear sense of one hundred and one thousand, their guesses quickly diverge as the quantity grows. The exercise is meant to foreground problems of scale. I can cite atmospheric carbon levels or describe the deep time required for oil formation, but the geologic magnitude of numbers like the 880 million tons of CO2 released annually by airplanes resists intuitive understanding. Numbers have no explanatory power if they can’t be imagined, which is a serious problem with attempts to narrate climate change.
The issue of representing geologic scales has long been a problem for the environmental humanities. In the aptly titled Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon describes the way environmental violence is meted out against the poor as “slow violence,” because the scale of the visible accumulation of such violence goes mostly unnoticeable by those who benefit: the violence happens somewhere else to other people that I can’t see. Amitav Ghosh, writer of several cli-fi novels like The Hungry Tide that interrogate industrialization’s environmental impact, famously described how phrases like a “once-a-century storm” are unhelpful in comprehending the accelerating pace of catastrophic climatological events. Even the phrase “cli-fi,” with its sonic play on sci-fi, relegates novels about the effects of atmospheric carbon accumulation to the status of genre rather than literary fiction, or as Ghosh says, sends them to “the outhouses to which science fiction and fantasy had been banished.”
There’s a growing body of work that attempts to speculate without being sci-fi or, worse, cli-fi—a body of work I’m calling the speculative analeptic. Speculative fiction takes us forward in time, but the narratological term “analepsis” refers to flashbacks, to history. [1] In the speculative analeptic, writers guess at how future generations will look back at our moment, at us. It’s an act of self-estrangement, of trying to achieve perspective. On the one hand, the speculative analeptic effectively represents the problem of scale. It is a way to see the present in the midst of the longue durée. On the other hand, it moves the site of action to the future, reproducing a fatalistic politics and introducing personal exceptionalisms: everyone is fated to suffer, but these particular special children will have full lives. This fatalism destroys the urgency of the present. These texts, then, help readers imagine temporal scales and better understand ourselves in perspective—everything we do has a consequence, even if we might not live to see it—but at the cost of foreclosing possibilities for action in the present. While this foreclosure is a sober response to novels like Ben Lerner’s 10:04, which frames simply imagining the future as an active politics, the speculative analeptic presents the future as predestined: what is to be done if climate apocalypse, the direct outcome of our failures, is inevitable?
Representing Scales of History and Futurity
Literary theorists have long tried to address the question of how to represent time. Most famously, and counterintuitively, the late Marxist critic Fredric Jameson argues that speculative fiction is a way of thinking historically, which culture has forgotten how to do. Further, he says that “temporal thinkers seem to agree that no historicity can function properly without a dimension of futurity, however imaginary.” In other words, we can only narrate the events of, say, the Industrial Revolution in hindsight; if we want to historicize the present, we need to imagine a future point from which the present might be seen. In order to understand the effects of the present, we need to think historically, and in order to think historically we must project ourselves into the future.
The speculative analeptic embodies the kind of “ad-hoc” narrative projection Jameson desires. By flashing back to the present from the future, the reader is pulled out from the midst of the present and provided some distance. The speculative analeptic uses the future to force historical consciousness on the reader. Through imagining an “after” in delayed conversation with the “now,” readers can see the vastness of geological time over which even small acts accumulate.
Jameson’s idea echoes earlier works of literary criticism. In 1967, Frank Kermode proposed that futurity is what gives subjects the ability to narrate their lives. Events only have meaning if you can narrate them from the perspective of death. Fifty years later, in The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction, Emily Horton makes a similar argument: “in this way, a future-looking narrative—or indeed, multiple narratives—regarding the potential revision of social experience, is necessary in order to locate political hope outside the merely intimate, in the realm of public order.” Nixon, Ghosh, Jameson, Kermode, and Horton all agree that we need to reimagine the present, which requires refashioning the representation of time itself. The present needs the future. [2]
The Speculative Analeptic, Formally
In steps the speculative analeptic, works of fiction and nonfiction that deploy a developing set of formal characteristics in order to gain purchase on climatic time scales and address the inability to think historically amidst the obvious and increasing precariousness of life on the planet. These characteristics include explicit dialogue between present and future, the direct address of personal pronouns, and an overdetermined cataclysmic presentism.
The speculative analeptic takes as its starting point the concept that any meaningful story must include some sense of an ending. William Vollmann’s nonfictional reportage in his Carbon Ideologies series realizes a sense of an ending through its conceit: a description in quasi-epistolary form of Vollmann’s research into how our present, carbon-intensive lifestyles became so irresistible that we accepted future climate devastation. “I who send this letter to the future,” Vollmann begins, “hereby plead that we were no more evil or even selfish than anyone else.” He then details his vision of the future:
Now that we are all gone, someone from the future is turning this book’s brittle yellow pages. Unimpressed with what I have written so far, he wishes to know why I didn’t do more, because when I was alive there were elephants and honeybees; in the Persian Gulf people survived the summers without protective suits; the Arctic permafrost had only begun to sizzle out methane; San Francisco towered above water, and there were still even Marshall Islands; Japan was barely radioactive, Africa not entirely desertified.
All this destruction is still occurring now, at the present time of the book’s composition, but it’s described as a long-ago event. This gap between the description of the present and the presumed situation of the addressee, who lives in a world after the unavoidable cataclysm, is the speculative analeptic. Unlike more typical speculative fiction, which looks forward, the speculative analeptic looks forward by way of looking back. It stages a complex dialogue across the gap between present and future, before and after the inevitable destructive event that will make climate change apparent to all. [3]
Other texts open similar gaps. Lydia Millet’s nonfictional We Loved It All does so in its title and argues that U.S. society in the 2020s appreciated its abundance. Millet describes this gap several ways: as “a double menace,” something “we deny and embrace at the same time…disbelieve and believe,” and as “any apocalypse but our own.” Like Vollmann, Millett is writing to the future on behalf of the selfish present, but where Vollmann tries to schematize the desire that energizes our way of life, Millet, with more pathos, tries to describe the bind of the 21st century’s more ethical citizens, caught between the power of present political hegemony and the acknowledgment of obligation to the future.
In fiction, this staging looks a little different but works similar effects. In M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, the characters narrate from beyond The Climatic Event, as they call our present moment: “I am old enough to remember it though, before the fires, the extinctions, the deadzones.” Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo’s ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines takes the form of found documents, some from the founding of the ELADATL in the early 20th century and some from the near future, after
the wildfires burning up what was left of the trees, firestorms scorching the West and the South and the Southeast, and Florida, so fucked up it was just a vague memory of grasses and clumps of foliage still above water, with geysers of flame from wells polluted by toxic frick-fracking fluids vomiting fireballs hundreds of feet into the air, from the desert to the sea, while noxious fumes billowed inland from the dense carpets of algal scum off several dying oceans.
In both works of fiction, characters who inhabit the future describe specific events that happened, that are happening, today, whether the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Everything for Everyone or the Fukushima meltdown in ELADATL. In doing so, these characters represent our present as a future memory. Late in ELADATL, the reader learns that the text’s present (our future) arrived after “Los Angeles had been destroyed by Death Rays from Hair Balls from Outer Space.” Of course, this is just “the official explanation given by some fascist ‘experts’ from Silicon Valley,” as a way of justifying the federal government’s violent response to climate refugees. This crackdown meant “White guys with automatic rifles…driving around in Chevy Camaro convertibles, protecting white people from Mexican cartels and tamale vendors.” Unmissably, Foster and Romo are describing a scene from 2020s Los Angeles, not some far-flung future. The characters in Everything for Everyone describe how “the olds were trying to make it into this union thing,” which suggests that contemporary models of organizing no longer exist in their future. William Vollmann explains that because “solar energy stocks decreased in value; sales of hybrid vehicles declined … There was nothing to do but watch the buffalo get slaughtered.”
Another characteristic of the speculative analeptic is the deployment of a second-person address speaking directly to the future. Our previous examples make use of it in Vollmann’s ironic beseeching of the future on behalf of the present (“How dare you deny us our high level of development! We approached perfection, and that is why you now retreat from rising acid seas. We accomplished great works”) and the oral history staged by Foster and Romo (“Sometimes you watch too many movies and you get a messed up idea of reality, my friend, because reality is not outer space. I’m telling you TIME, TIME is everything”). The personal pronouns of the second-person address enact the dialogism between the present and the future. This works narratively, as the speaker of the text addresses his audience of the imagined future, but it also works rhetorically: the you of the future turns around into you the reader, retreating from rising acid seas, you the reader with a messed-up idea of reality.
Using personal pronouns to rhetorically summon and implicate an audience of readers separates the speculative analeptic from familiar examples of speculative- and climate-fiction. By way of second-person direct address, these authors create a dialogue across time and allow history to unfold, a counterthrust to our inability to think historically. Grammatically closing the gaps between present and future, author and audience, stages a threshold through which the present can imagine the timescale of the future, and by extension, can direct a critical eye backwards to the past.
If one of the challenges of addressing climate change is representing geological scale in order to make it palpable, apprehesible—to give us the sense that what we do while we’re alive will affect generations after us—one way to meet that challenge is to represent those ensuing generations. However, those generations can’t be represented in the traditionally sci-fi way, a contextless vacuum of an abstract future. Instead, the speculative analeptic shows how generational effects begin in our present, grounded in our actions, which are rendered strange enough to let us better grasp them but not so strange we fail to recognize them as our actions.
Social Reproduction & The Limits of Futurity
At the same time, these texts can overemphasize the presence of future generations by carving out exceptions for their authors’ descendents. As degrowth thinkers like Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter observe, our contemporary world is ruled by “a specific set of social relations resulting from and driving capitalist accumulation,” and to rewire culture to think more geologically would also be to rewrite an entire social system. Vollmann approaches the cognitive dissonance of social reproduction and climate change through the figure of his daughter: “We were experienced in our way, much like cockroaches,” he writes, “and our experience assured us that we could keep going nearly forever in this fashion; so too our children,” and then goes on to tell about his daughter getting her driver’s license so that she too could “burn all the gasoline she could afford.” Private cars are symbols of personal freedom and embody the material realities, the carbon-intensive modes of living, of the present world and its dominant modes of sociality. We need our cars to get to work, get groceries, see doctors, and do basically everything else. Vollmann is acclimated, so to speak, to a certain lifestyle, and for all his ironic apologia for the present, he wants that lifestyle for his kid, too.
Millet does much the same. “My daughter, like my son and most of their friends, is well aware of the looming chaos of climate change and species extinction,” she explains. “But still, when called upon to project herself into the future, she’s always seemed to picture a progression of events neatly decoupled from the disintegration of norms. Why not? What good does it do to plan for anarchy?” Like Vollmann, Millet is a thoughtful writer who understands climatological threat, , and also like Vollmann, she considers her daughter the exception. These writers understand that their children’s comfort is downstream of, for example, the flooding of places like Jakarta and Bangkok. But, well, they say, what were they supposed to do?
By centering their own offspring in the futures they imagine, their texts recreate the same contradictions of social reproduction that lead us to climate inaction today. Vollmann and Millet realize the necessity of a comparatively uncomfortable life for a sustainable future, but neither imagines that discomfort for their children specifically. If their version of the speculative analeptic is premised on an apology to future generations, they also emphasize the contradiction that children open for a politics of climate sustainability. “Inevitably, the future will be more horrendous than I can bear,” they seem to say, “and I can only imagine a future comfortable for my children.”
As opposed to Vollmann and Millet’s nonfiction, fictional examples of the speculative analeptic can self-consciously engage in other possibilities. Everything for Everyone, representing a kind of polycrisis including but not limited to climate catastrophe, proposes alternative modes of care, from communization to gestation work and roaming ecological farms. The characters of the novel see their children less as exceptions from the apocalyptic events and more as inheritors of political action, like the efforts of the Water Protectors who have formed “collaborations, research, and thinking by First Nations peoples about farming practices.” The eponymous East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines themselves are born from a moment in the early 20th century when Los Angeles had to choose which kinds of infrastructure to develop. As the characters in the novel resurrect these abandoned dirigible lines, they go back in time and resuscitate older structures of infrastructure and sociality alike. Unlike the nonfiction, these novels imagine communal forms of reproduction beyond the nuclear family, and in doing so they just work better.
Fatalism & the Apocalyptic Event
Finally, the speculative analeptic’s emphasis on futurity points to its primary problem: fatalism. If these texts offer perspective on the present by linking the present to a future of unavoidable cataclysm, what they take for granted is precisely the unavoidability of that cataclysm.
Whether in Vollmann’s “hot dark future,” Foster and Romo’s “hairballs from Outer Space,” or the fallout zones of O’Brien and Abdelhadi, these texts all posit some major disastrous threshold as the demarcation between present and future. Despite the enormity of what’s required to meaningfully confront climate change, there remains time to take action between now and the future. [4] But in the speculative analeptic, things get worse, implacably, until the effects are so permanent neither denial nor action are possible. There is no struggle, no political action, no collective reckoning, until it is too late. In reality, the struggle should begin now; or, more accurately, the struggle should have already begun. Every passing second closes the gap between the now and present of these texts, but that’s no reason to collapse into the comfort of fatalism.
Instead of contemporary struggle, these texts envision a kind of elect who will survive the climate cataclysm and rearrange the social reproduction of the future more equitably. In Kafka’s words, there is hope, but not for us. Sure, the cataclysm will be disastrous, but the children will survive (the author’s children, anyway). Or at least their intellectual history will survive, and a utopia built from the wreckage. It’s a strange kind of hope, a hope that not only kicks the can down the road but elects to punt with the game on the line.
The speculative analeptic envisions time anew. It manages to represent scale, the way that present actions impact the future just as the past impacts the present—but it gives up the present as lost. Are there representations capable of tackling scale without surrendering the present, without damning the present as already lost? What would the future look like if we didn’t build new data centers? If we dedicated resources to renewable energy production? If we took social reproduction seriously and didn’t strive to reproduce our lifestyle exactly in our children? It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the personal automobile, even as California’s Pacific Coast Highway crumbles into the ocean—but isn’t that exactly why we need art to keep experimenting with representing the present, future, and past?
The speculative analeptic might help us understand what one million dollar bills look like, but it assumes they’re already in the room with us, and that we’ve no choice but to drown in them.
Steven Watts
Feb. 18, 2026
ISSUE NO. 1
[1]
In Narrative Discourse, Gerard Genette theorizes both “open” analepses (flashbacks that trail off with no clear conclusion or diegetic connection to the plot) and “closed” analepses (flashbacks that lead to a plot event). The analepses in the speculative analeptic are somewhere in between: they are flashbacks that lead us to some inevitable rupture after which climate change is irrefutable, but they remain vague about what that rupture actually is.
[2]
The emphasis these thinkers put on the future evokes Lee Edelman’s No Future, in which he positions futurity as the political mode of heterosexual hegemony. As I’ll discuss, one major difference between fictional and nonfictional modes of the speculative analeptic is the centrality of what Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” or the centering of future children in a political project.
[3]
The vagueness regarding the event and the analeptic future-time of the addressee allows Vollmann to avoid any explicit prediction: we’ll only be able to see what the event turned out to be from the other side.
[4]
Millet’s 2020 novel A Children’s Bible took up the world of children whose parents abandoned them to climate catastrophe. In We Loved It All and other speculative-analeptic non-fiction texts, children either remain in the present or occupy a deferred future after the cataclysmic event we haven’t yet experienced. In this way, the nonfiction’s emphasis on children enables an eternal perpetuation of the politics of reproductive futurism.
©2026 Miscellany Journal