Speculative Fictions in Culture and Society

Lecture: "Naming the Things that are Absent”: On Speculation and/as Critique

This talk will examine the key questions that underwrite this event: can literature, the novel, and speculative fiction in particular offer us ways to make meaning of and critically interrogate material reality and help us imagine future alternatives? Can speculative fiction help us make sense of the age of speculative capitalism and indeed of a moment when speculation itself has been seized and grotesquely, cynically distorted by the far right? Certainly, many of us would like to believe that literature can do this—but how, exactly? And how do we engage with such questions in a moment when both literary critics and authors of speculative fiction have insisted that neither novels nor political scholarship in the humanities can save us or have any meaningful effect material or political reality? Answering such broader questions convincingly and in a way that responds to growing skepticism toward the political function (and value) of both literature and literary criticism requires us to grapple with a series of uncomfortable questions that ask us to clearly articulate the basic relations and definitions on which our arguments can rest. How, for instance, can the novel make aspects of contemporary capitalism thinkable when crucial aspects of reality have become inconceivable—say, the time of digital capitalism? And how, in turn, can speculative fiction generate critical thought that responds to its anti-utopian inverse: the heavily-policed, materially and historically specific boundary of the realistic and the conceivable beyond which we must journey if we are to deal with the contradictory futurity of capitalist speculation and the climate emergency? The political work of speculative fiction today can be understood in relation to these foundational questions and problems, by tracing how speculation as critique emerges from the effort to “name the things that are absent” and to “describe so that we might know.” In this talk, I’ll propose that we may understand the function of speculative fiction as connected to the formal struggle with those moments of seeming impossibility or inconceivability when our words, images, and ideas, our established vocabularies and forms of imagination appear to be lacking and when utopian world-building reveals itself as an important form of critique.

Workshop: Fictions of Real Life

Mathias Nilges is Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. His books include How to Read a Moment: The American Novel and the Crisis of the Present and Futures of Literary Studies (co-edited with Tim Lanzendörfer). He is currently working on a book project on the politics of literature and criticism in the context of the climate emergency and neo-authoritarianism. A portion of this project, an essay that examines the climate novel, has recently been published in South Atlantic Quarterly (https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11557801).

Lecture: Choose Your Own Reality: Speculative Politics and Science Fiction Apotheosis

My paper engages with Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimism Manifesto” as exemplar of the mix of libertarianism, science fiction (sf), and neoliberal profiteering defines Silicon Valley and its colonization of our capacity to imagine the future at all. Far beyond the “capitalist realism” that Mark Fisher has described as our inability to believe in a world after neoliberalism, Silicon Valley approaches the future as in need of disruption, fetishized as both optimization and freedom. Andreesen’s manifesto goes beyond the Cold War conflation of market freedoms with democracy to suggest that the entwined projects of industrialization and colonialism mark the birth of a superior civilization, reinforcing transhumanist logics by which those who master such technology are regarded as superior version of humanity, whose “descendants will live in the stars” instead of “living in mud huts.” As much a manifesto of market fundamentalism as one of techno-optimism, Andreesen’s vision seeks to naturalize neoliberal logics and technological determinism as he promotes the magical power of the artificial intelligence as a “universal problem solver,” part of a Silicon Valley political discourse known as “effective accelerationism.” Yet Andreesen also describes it as “alchemy” and a “Philosopher’s Stone,” revealing the degree to which this manifesto is a kind of speculative fiction, a discursive vision of a possible world articulated as an exercise in world-shaping rhetoric, even a new religious framework that centers tech billionaires as a new priestly cast able to intercede between humanity and our new AI gods. I read this manifesto as a clear statement of Silicon Valley’s conflation of capitalist accumulation with human progress, using the rhetorical tools of science fiction to cultivate an affective investment in this future as (if it were) inclusive, abundant, and desirable. Directly alluding to Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” Andreessen’s proclamation similarly seeks to ushes in a new political reality that destroys the institutions of liberal government and insists that the market and the “techno capital machine” are the sole institutions of required for a flourishing civilization. Andreesen’s market is a science-fictional creature, “a discovery machine, a form of intelligence,” and his manifesto is simultaneously a work of speculative fiction, a pitch for his venture capitalist investment in AI, and an invitation to abandon the liberal world and inhabit a live-action roleplay reality in which the singularity will save us. 

Workshop: Speculative Realities and Fictional Affordances

Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, and a Professor and the Chair of English, at the University of California, Riverside. She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is the Managing Editor of Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science and Popular Culture. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow (2007), Animal Alterity (2010), The Wire (2013), Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed (2014); Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge (2020), and Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), as well as the co-author of The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011, with Mark Bould) and Programming the Future:Politics, Resistance and Utopia in Speculative TV (2022, with Jonathan Alexander). She has edited multiple books including, most recently, After the Human: Culture, Theory & Criticism in the 21st Century (2020) and The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture Since 1945 (2024). A recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Innovative Research and its Lifetime Achievement awards, she is currently working on a research project on speculative finance and speculative fiction.