Description: The Future is Fiction is the first cultural history of the idea that living people have an obligation to protect the world for future generations. While political philosophers have regarded intergenerational justice as an important field of study since the 1970s, the history of modern forms of obligation to the future has received almost no attention. This book traces the evolution of the Anglo-American concept of intergenerational justice, from its origins in eighteenth-century democratic revolutions to its flourishing in the 2000s. It illuminates how fiction--both popular and literary--has made the most significant, if misunderstood, contribution to the debate about how living people should act in the interests of futurity.
