Late-Roman Post-Futures: The Spectral Planets of Derrida and Gene Wolfe

This chapter examines Gene Wolfe’s science-fiction tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun, alongside other literary and philosophical texts from the waning of the Cold War, including Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic and Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Wolfe repurposes classical imagery and tropes of late Roman decadence to construct a fictional world in which the archaic, the modern, and the futuristic coexist in a single picture. I interpret Wolfe’s anachronic classicism in light of other late 20th-century authors who diagnosed the temporal disorientation of capitalist globalization and the “end of history.” Wolfe and his contemporaries explore the ethical and political affordances of “world-pictures,” totalizing depictions of an interconnected planetary reality that might orient the subjects of globalization within its intractable crises. In Wolfe’s novels, the untimeliness of Greco-Roman antiquity serves as a productive resource for constructing such pictures. I conclude by considering the dilemmas that Wolfe’s sci-fi speculations raise regarding the temporality of classical receptions.