Professor Mark Payne - Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction

1. ix

I AM GRATEFUL to many friends for their intellectual companionship while working on this book. At the University of Chicago, Deme Kasimis of the Department of Political Science offered invaluable recommendations on Rousseau and marronage. Cody Jones of the Department of Comparative Literature was an ever-present interlocutor on theory, fiction, and everything in between. I am also grateful to Andrei Pop of the Committee on Social Thought for sharing with me his boundless knowledge of the wide world of speculative fiction.

Conversations on Native American history with Jonathan Lear, and with Scott and Urban Bear Dont Walk, continue to resonate in this book. Urban has now passed on, but I will always be grateful to him for sharing his thoughts with me on the walks, drives, and hospital visits we took when I was visiting Crow country.

Sam Cooper of Bard High School in Queens helped me see connections between classical literature and modern speculative fiction that I would not have seen without him, and I learned a lot from his own work in these areas. Brooke Holmes of Princeton University encouraged me to think harder about what I was doing, as she always does. In England, Tom Phillips of the University of Manchester, David Fearn and Victoria Rimell of the University of Warwick, and Miriam Leonard of University College London lent receptive ears to the lines of kinship I was trying to establish.

Audiences at UCLA, Florida State University, the University of Manchester, the Boghossian Foundation, Johns Hopkins University, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago helped me move forward with their lively discussions of papers I presented at various stages of this project.

This book was conceived, and a first draft written, during a yearlong leave from the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago. I am thankful to Deans Martha Roth and Anne Robertson for the support that made it possible.

Many thanks too to Anne Savarese at Princeton University Press for taking the manuscript on and for recruiting the two excellent readers whose insights and suggestions made it a much better book than it would otherwise have been.

An earlier version of part of was published as Post-apocalyptic Humanism in Hesiod, Mary Shelley, and Olaf Stapledon in Classical Receptions 12, no. 1 (2020): 91108. My thanks to the editors and readers of the journal for their enthusiasm.

Last but very much not least, thanks to my wife and children for putting up with some difficult times during my work on this project. One of the claims I make in the book is that postapocalyptic fiction is a cheerful genre, but I dont know that any of you would have guessed that while I was working on it. Thanks to Laura, Carolyn, and Alice for all your love and support.

FLOWERS OF TIME