This course examines the literary history of fictitious futures, or to use Frederic Jameson’s phrase, we will mine “the archaeology of the future,” to determine the central concerns of authors and film-makers who imagine, in particular, dystopian visions of the world to come. Beginning with fiction from the end of the Victorian period, we will read several novels, short stories, and consider some films, that provide glimpses of a variety of futures, and consider how they approach respectively the disintegration of the political, social, and natural world.