On Most Ancient Earth: The narrative role of stratigraphy and deep time in science fiction
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-26

Full title:  On Most Ancient Earth: The narrative role of stratigraphy and deep time in terrestrial science fiction

It is axiomatic that science fiction is about the present as much as the future, but this means it is also about the past: any fictional world needs a sense of history to make it a convincing setting. Just as the genre allows creators to experiment with future outcomes of present moments, it also makes use of the ways in which real past societies are understood to document that path to the future. These temporal permutations are particularly interesting in science fiction set on a distant future Earth, where ‘the archaeological’ is often a very powerful presence. This paper will explore how science fiction novels, comics, and games use archaeology, and particularly stratigraphy, to create tales of future pasts. I will triangulate some common themes and motifs from three case studies: the relatively near-future setting of 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd; the richly elaborated Terra of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, featured in the core game and numerous other media produced by Games Workshop; and the dying Urth of the Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe. These disparate creations across a range of media share ways of using ideas derived from archaeology to tell often-dark tales of our future Earth. 

Andrew Gardner (UCL)