Québec's Broken Futures

An examination of Québécois speculative fiction and how it evokes alarmist thoughts concerning Québec's independence and its place in the space-time continuum of history. Caroline-Isabelle Caron explores how Speculative Fiction from Québec from the 1970s to 2015 has eerily echoed alarmist thoughts concerning Québec independence and Québec’s place in the space-time continuum of history, from the first explorers to Turtle Island to the present and well into the future. Speculative fiction, no matter how fictional, is an inherently historical literary genre. With this in mind, this book presents an in-depth analysis of Québec’s identity question as viewed through the prism of Speculative Fiction. It proposes innumerable configurations of a future that is, more often than not, fractured and bleak. Caron argues that these works both fictionalize and amplify broader collective fears and social anxieties around long term survival, language, ethnicity, race, religion, fascism, oppression and colonialism, while projecting the contemporary interpretations of Québec’s past into the future. In doing so, Speculative Fiction from Québec reveals a constant preoccupation with the meanings of agency, individuality, collectivity, nationality, and territory in the same period.