Anthropocene Consciousness, Time Loops, and Anticipatory Collective Trauma in Narratives of Anthropogenic Environmental Disaster

Abstract The article analyses science fiction texts featuring time loops from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Within its historical-environmental framework it proposes the term Anthropocene consciousness to refer to the historical process of accumulating knowledge, in both human science and cultural artifacts, concerning the threat posed to life on the planet by human impacts. One notable form of time-loop pattern, which is particularly strong in the 1980s, uses plots of enhanced fictional agency in which time-traveling characters, often retroactively, prevent anthropogenic catastrophes from occurring. This form, used in Benford's Timescape, the Terminator films, and Star Trek IV, can be seen as hypothetically countering the collective anticipatory environmental trauma that has arisen since the mid-twentieth century, whereas in reality humanity can be said to experience deep helplessness due to its inability to collectively act to stop the environmental threats emanating from its own scientific progress. Across these texts, nuclear warfare, often combined with AI technological singularity, is the most potent form of anthropogenic threat. Two key twenty-first-century texts show notable transformations to the time-loop pattern. Significantly, the most recent text, Interstellar, completely decouples the time-loop scenario from human environmental agency.