Features | January 12, 2026

“Time is out of joint”: Useful anachronisms in three novels about the future 

Luke Dunne 

Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Grove Atlantic, 2024, 224 pp., $17.00 (paperback) 

The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball. Penguin Random House, 2024, 256 pp., $16.95 (paperback)  

Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin (trans. Max Lawton), New York Review Books, 2024, 368 pp., $18.95 (paperback)  

Do you ever feel like we are on the wrong timeline / a bad timeline? Ever since 2020 it’s felt like somehow everything is dark and gloomy and hope is hard to come by for most. It’s hard to put into words the feelings I have but I suppose “stuck” would be a decent way of explaining it. I’m keen to see if anyone else resonates with this.  

Since I first saw this post on Reddit in 2022, I’ve watched it, or close variants of it, reemerge and spread across my social media feeds over and over again. Although some commenters don’t agree that things are so bad, really, while others claim that things have always been this bad (or worse), the vast majority are sympathetic to the post’s sentiment, even if they quibble with the specifics (2016 and 2000 are also frequently cited as dates of departure).  

Many of us seem to be suffering from the same kind of temporal pathology: we feel ourselves to be out of time, both in the sense that we have failed to get a grip on the world’s problems (the climate crisis, fascism’s re-emergence) in time to solve them, and that we have been dislodged from history’s central channel: the arc that bent, however tentatively, toward justice.   

One way that writers metabolize such anxieties is to write about the future. The three novels reviewed here combine futuristic settings with various kinds of anachronism, from the reinvigoration of outmoded genres—the pastoral, the epistolary—to broken chronologies and reversed causalities.  

All three novels produce a vision of the future that feels particularly ephemeral, meagre, slight. By stepping into the future with a backward glance, they have sought to both account for and transcend the diminished moral possibilities of the twenty-first century.