Time warps : Prophecy, prolepsis and the aesthetics of reversal

The tradition of literary, cultural and religious works invested in various forms of prophecy, an idea that appropriates a vision of the future to comment implicitly on the deficiencies of the present, is one that goes back many centuries. The Bible’s Book of Revelations fits within this genre, as does Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), whose title derived from the Greek u-topos, no place, a figure used by More to delineate what he considered to be his ideal republic’s future state. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) similarly envisaged a vision of the future based around human discovery and scientific knowledge. Bacon’s book took its title from the myth of Atlantis inscribed in Plato’s Timaeus, written about 360 BCE, which imagined the recovery of an underground city that had been submerged in the Atlantic Ocean nine thousand years before Plato’s own time (Figure 1: Plato’s vision of Atlantis).