The Land that Time Forgot: Fictions of Antarctic Temporality

• Main Author: Leane, E
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Rodopi 2009
• Subjects: Language; Communication and Culture; Literary Studies; Australian Literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Literature); Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Shelves
• Online Access: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=SPATIAL+9; http://ecite.utas.edu.au/59067

Antarcticas unique spatiality its isolation, its position on the bottom ofthe world, its seemingly limitless icescape produces a complex and contradictorytemporality. The preserving power of ice, along with the unfamiliar diurnal rhythmsof high latitudes, gives the sense that time progresses differently in the southernmostcontinent. Antarctica thus offers itself as an ideal location for speculative fiction dealingwith strange temporal phenomena, including allochronic fiction novels inwhich different periods in history are juxtaposed and cryonic fiction, in which iceacts as a form of time machine, allowing a living being effectively to fast-forward intothe future. With the advent of global warming, the Antarctic ice has taken on increasedtemporal significance: its layers of ice provide a record of past ages and hencea means of predicting the future, and its collapsing ice shelves ominously point towardscatastrophes to come. Antarctica has become a literal futurescape, an idea thatdystopian writers (and filmmakers) have seized upon. Focussing primarily on sciencefiction but also drawing on exploration narratives, this paper explores the way inwhich time and space are intertwined in textual representations of Antarctica.