Towards the end of 10:04 one of Ben’s graduate students recalls a remark he once made that ‘we shouldn’t worry about our literary careers, should worry about being underwater’ (217). When Ben tries to remember making that comment he imagines ‘I must have been joking around in class – half joking’ (217). This flippancy is typical of Ben, who tries to downplay his own anxieties about the future throughout the novel, with varying levels of success. It so happens that one reason for him to be fearful – those storms brewing over New York – turn out to have little impact on his life, but as both Colson Whitehead and Omar El Akkad suggest in their respective novels Zone One (2011) and American War (2017), the near future remains a deeply frightening prospect, particularly if America continues down its current path of neoliberalism and environmental destruction. Previous chapters in this book have considered the effects generated by a past which retains its grip over the present, continuing to disturb characters many years later. In this chapter the ‘past’ being considered is now: the early decades of the twenty-first century. These two novels highlight the mid- to long-term ramifications of poor decision-making in the contemporary period: they both take place in a near-future America which is struggling because of governmental failures over the past twenty or so years. And yet at the same time the novels also draw on particular episodes in America’s history: they share with the fictions explored in previous chapters that urge to turn backwards, blurring temporalities so that earlier periods seem at times to be pushing their way into this one.

Mitchum Huehls has described how ‘the historical novel of futurity renders the present as the prehistory of the future’ (146), and he draws attention to the vastness of current crises (most obviously ‘global capital and climate change’) to explain this turn towards the future in recent historical fiction: ‘The subject’s relation to the past will no longer suffice. Only the future provides a perspective capacious enough to account for historical dynamics that exponentially exceed the scope and scale of the human’ (147).