"An important dive into Québec's social imaginaries. This foundational book sets the path for a much-needed dialogue between historiography and speculative fiction, between how we understand the past and how we project ourselves in the future. In a world that must face its own broken futures, Caron's ultimate argument for hope should resonate well beyond our province." -- Martin Hébert, Director of the Department of Anthropology, Laval University, Canada "What do Captain Kirk and Bonhomme Carnaval have in common? With this intelligent and ambitious book, Caroline-Isabelle Caron proposes nothing less than a brilliant historiographical intervention: that Québec's science fiction constitutes a privileged site for understanding how a society imagines itself. What a refreshening, unexpected and most stimulating addition to Quebec historiography! Drawing from a large spectrum of canonic western thinkers of temporality, from phenomenology, sociology, intellectual history and epistemology, historian Caron understands the construction of past and future within the present. Evoking Janus-faces, her multi-angled research is at the crossroads of contemporary Canadian and Quebecois' intellectual production and the careful analysis of an understudied genre, Science-Fiction, published between 1970 and 2015. Caron suggests that if national narratives are constructed, speculative fiction offers a laboratory in which one may observe their mechanics. Québec's Broken Futures demonstrates how stories of invasion, extremism, erasure, colonialism, difference, and political independence convey cultural anxieties about language, identity, sovereignty, and belonging.

Echoing Koselleck's insight that time can only be expressed through spatial metaphors, Caron invites the readers to redraw the map of Quebec's imaginary of self, while exposing the scaffolding of its national narrative. An exceptional read, which stems from a playful, while rigorous, important questioning." -- Anne Trépanier, Senior Lecturer, Carleton University, Canada.