Annual Nicholson Faculty Lecture – Professor Benjamin Morgan

Tuesday, May 13 at 5pm, Classics 110

“Ennui at the End of Time: Planetary Fiction, 1895-1930″ 

With introduction by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Associate Professor of History and CHSS

At the end of the nineteenth century, scientific discourses of degeneration and entropy predicted the eventual freezing of the planet and biological decline of the human species. These narratives gave rise to a genre of “planetary fiction” that expanded the scale of the novel to millions of years, including H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), and H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1930). This talk explores the genre’s conflicted relation to anthropocentrism: even as these novels imagine the end of the human species, their tropes attribute human meaning to cosmic scales of time.