Imaginaries of the Future City: Envisioning Climate Change and Technological Cityscapes through Dutch Contemporary Speculative Fiction

In this chapter, we address the flourishing and fast-growing production of future novels within contemporary Dutch literature since 2014. We analyse the ways in which Dutch authors use the technique of extrapolation to envision the urban/natural environment of the future, focused on a corpus of eight future novels from the period 2015–2021. First, we argue that, by indicating and comparing both spatial and temporal ‘reality markers’, speculation in contemporary Dutch literature tends to stay ‘close to home’. Second, we demonstrate that, overall, the themes of climate change and technologization are represented as highly intertwined in diverse constellations. In addition, we try to determine in what way the stories under investigation give both formally and thematically expression to a utopian impulse: Overall, do they show utopian elements or is the urban experience predominantly dystopian?