#142 = Volume 47, Part 3 = November 2020
Thinking Through the Pandemic: A SymposiumIntroduction. It would seem that both science and science fiction had prepared us well for the pandemic. Though nicknamed the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 was in fact not new from an epidemiological perspective; it was only the latest iteration of a long line of zoonotically transmitted viruses with the capacity of rapid spread among humans that have been appearing with increasing frequency and severity over the last several decades: HIV/AIDS, SARS, H1N1, MERS, Ebola, and most recently SARS-CoV-1. The specter of its emergence was as robustly rehearsed in war-game pandemic simulations that have become staples of policy and governance as it was in killer viruses and zombie contagions that have returned with a vengeance to entertain viewers and gamers. It was this latter-day subgenre of pandemic sf—The Hot Zone (1994), Outbreak (1995), Pandemic (2008), Contagion (2011), Spillover (2012), and Plague Inc. (2012), among others—that served as the most immediate concordance for critics and commentators mandated to make sense of the world from the confinement of their desks.
As the sub-microscopic, semi-living entity, transmitted through shared air, continued to defy geopolitical borders as easily as it overwhelmed the most sophisticated biomedical infrastructures, the search for prophetic prefigurations and manuals for survival in sf’s predictive and diagnostic capacities expanded far beyond this thematic corpus. A rich archive of visionary reckonings with the end of the world began to serve as synecdoche for the sweeping scope and monumental scale of facts—a pandemic “infowhelm” commensurate with climate data (to which Heather Houser applied the term in her eponymous book of 2020). Color-coded models and mobile interactive projections, tracking unthinkable numbers of the sick, the dead, the unemployed, and the dispossessed, generated their own neologism of “doomscrolling” through newsfeeds (Brian X. Chen, The New York Times, 15 July 2020). What made the coronavirus novel, then, was not the event of its emergence but the totality of its effect on the imagination, one that rivaled the most ambitious tropes of sf and made apocalypse and dystopia the lexicon of scientists, policymakers, journalists, and storytellers alike. It was the pandemic as consummate novum that brought Mary Shelley’s forgotten 1826 classic The Last Man out of obscurity (Eileen Hunt Botting, The New York Times, 13 March 2020) and reminded readers like us that the common cold wiped out the Martians in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898)—a detail illuminating not so much a viral continuum as the resilience of the colonial imagination in which epidemics stay corralled in foreign lands and “invisible enemies,” as the US President dubbed it, are easily vanquished. Atomic Armageddon, which Susan Sontag famously called the archetypal “imagination of disaster” in 1964, wormed its way into op-eds via numerous comparisons of the US response with Chernobyl (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times, 25 April 2020; Calder Walton, The Washington Post, 8 July 2020; Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 29 July 2020). Staunch defenders of literary fiction discovered the sublime terror of environmental catastrophe in the unnamed plagues of Margaret Atwood’s MadAddam trilogy (2003-2013) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006).
As both a symptom and a terrifyingly concrete manifestation of this last frame—the deep, slow, unimaginable, and multifaceted disorder often shorthanded as the climate crisis—the pandemic also repurposed apocalyptic science fiction into a politics of hope. “The pandemic is a portal,” declared Arundhati Roy in the early days of the lockdown in India, as the smog-filled skies cleared and millions of migrant workers were left with the stark choice between death by proximity and death by starvation (Financial Times 3 April 2020). Roy called the virus “a chemical experiment” that simultaneously exposed the “great derangement” of fossil-fueled global capitalism, as Amitav Ghosh put it in 2016 (The Great Derangement), and the magnitude of economic inequality it had engendered; a planet on pause was the unique opportunity to “emerge on the other side” without either pollution or prejudice. Rupture and revelation also infused Rebecca Solnit’s return to the concept of disaster utopia and liquid states (A Paradise Built in Hell [2009])—conceived through similarly apocalyptic world-historical events at Chernobyl, New Orleans, and Fukushima—to mark COVID-19 as an inflection point of resilience for the human community and restoration for the nonhuman inhabitants of the planet.
As we sent out the call for contributions to this symposium, however, it was already becoming apparent that the pandemic was not an equal-opportunity apocalypse for which the aforementioned corpus of Anglo-American science fiction had signed us up. The ability to cultivate monumental abstractions of dystopia and utopia, and indeed to contemplate science fiction as a comprehensive toolkit of diagnosis and prediction on a planetary scale, literally depended on the privilege of physical distance from the pervasive presence and embodied experience of the virus in the spaces and practices of everyday life. Acknowledgment of this privilege, popularized by Charles Blow in the New York Times (5 April 2020), became an obligatory disclaimer for pandemic journalists and emerged as a statistical fact through the instruments of disaggregation. The death gap between those of us in the knowledge economy and those engaged in the so-called essential labor of care and social reproduction—not coincidentally represented by women, migrants, and ethno-racial minorities in the US and across the world—opened up a new set of fissures in the figuration of the novel coronavirus as both an unprecedented fact and a singular novum. It was in the face of this fractured, stratified convergence of catastrophes—which Joni Adamson and Steven Hartman eloquently called a “syndemic” for those who have always dwelled at the intersections of socioeconomic and environmental violence (“From Ecology to Syndemic,” Bifrost Online, 8 June 2020)—that we asked our authors to ponder not what science fiction can say about the pandemic and its possible meanings, but instead how thinking with and through the pandemic might transform what science fiction can do in the present continuous and future imperfect. Without exception, their responses indicate that survivalist stories of last and first men, individuals embarked on existential quests across a devastated planet, have become not just outdated but dangerously provincial.
In the ensuing weeks, as the viral video of George Floyd’s killing drove unprecedented numbers of protesters to break pandemic protocols and take to the streets, the responses turned from concerns of scale and order to a deep engagement with distribution. Against the materiality of the pandemic’s unthinkable burdens that continue to fall disproportionately on those to whom colonial modernity, racial capitalism, and neoliberal globalism had already outsourced all the risks in the world, this symposium offers up quite a different project than even the one we intuited in early May. By July, when most authors sent in their dazzlingly diverse and formally experimental pieces, this forum had become as much a collaborative archival endeavor as an exploration of “storying otherwise,” as Donna Haraway put it in Fabrizio Terranova’s documentary Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016). Focused on the absences around the edges of the canon, the authors recuperate science fictions of multilayered, accretive pandemics told by voices from places in which catastrophe has always existed in close proximity with ordinariness. Commensurate with the densely woven dialogism of a symposium format, this is a science fictionality not of distance but, perhaps appropriately for the context of the pandemic, axiomatically collectivist in both articulation and vision.—Anindita Banerjee, Cornell University, and Sherryl Vint, Univeristy of California, Riverside
Notes in Support of an Epidemiological Cold War. “All reality is a game,” observes Gurgeh in Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games (Orbit 1989): “by being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail” (41). Games and game-playing may seem like frivolous distractions during the current global health crisis, but games have been serious business for some time now. For example, by creating mathematical “games” to imagine how different rational actors may interact, game theory has been used to model complex phenomena ranging from economics to evolution. “All reality is a game” may not be far from the truth.
Game theory reached its political crescendo during the Cold War, when “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) was cemented by Robert McNamara and others as America’s de facto policy of nuclear retaliation. At its base, MAD is a zero-sum game, where victory for one player means loss for the other—unless, of course, the opposition has the resources to retaliate, annihilating all players and wiping the board clean. Games are not just serious business, it seems, but potentially apocalyptic, a notion portrayed with absurdist delight in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).
Science fiction can be a kind of game as well, not just superficially but structurally, and I propose that the games of sf could be useful in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The genre can certainly portray games and their ubiquity, but it also has the capacity to facilitate game-like thought experiments. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. may have suggested something similar in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Wesleyan UP, 2008) where he claims that a specifically science-fictional attitude or mindset—what he terms “science fictionality”—is defined by two “linked forms of hesitation, a pair of gaps,” one focused on the plausibility of the novum, the other on its ethical implications: “how good/bad/altogether alien are the transformations that would issue from the novum?” (3).
Readers of sf play this kind of game regularly. Like game theorists during the Cold War, they imagine hypothetical scenarios involving various players and their resources, and what their interactions may produce under specific conditions. This is not the mathematical modeling of classical game theory, which was largely blind to ethics, but a thought experiment that considers future scenarios and how the relevant players are affected by certain conditions, like pieces on a chess board (or figures on the giant screen of Dr. Strangelove’s war room). This is a uniquely science-fictional game theory and there is a fundamentally game-like quality in its form of imagining, which is perhaps why Csicsery-Ronay insists that the beautiful qualities of sf are “always ludic” (8).
If sf can be a game, and if games can be used to grapple with disparate phenomena and their potential outcomes, it is worth considering the value of games in relation to COVID-19 and the pandemics that are predicted to follow. For example: given the current trajectory of technoscientific development, what could future pandemics look like? And if a new variable or novum is inserted—more robust health agencies, better testing technologies, or even something as future-oriented as gene-edited immunity—could the devastating effects of a viral outbreak be adjusted or minimized? If these questions sound like reasonable fodder for sf, it is because they have been—in Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden (1989), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and others—but also because sf is uniquely poised to grapple with such questions.
Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes how thought experiments are anchored in the present moment. In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (Ace 1969), she explains that “The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future … but to describe reality, the present world” (xxiv). Deploying a form of sf consciousness or game theory to think through the complexities and possibilities of global pandemics could very well tell us more about the present than about the future (in the same way that the games of Cold War-era politicians tell us about that era), but the very act of thinking through such variables, of entertaining conceptual games that deploy existing and future resources, institutions, nation states, and more as elements in a specific problem, could position us better for the future of infectious disease.
The game does not predict the future, but as Banks makes clear, the future is “malleable” and “retains the possibility of change” to such a degree that the realization of change is a win condition in our perpetual game-playing. In relation to pandemics, this could be conceptualized as a Cold War waged against an impending viral future we can only guess at vaguely, but one that nonetheless allows us to envision new practices and technologies to address potential scenarios, and possibly to win—the “hope of coming to prevail,” as Banks puts it. It would be a “cold” war, of course, since no direct conflict is taking place—the games are preparatory and conceptual—until a war turns “hot” with the arrival of a new disease. The thought experiments of sf could play a crucial role in waging that war.
In Banks’s Look to Windward (2000), the denizens of an orbital habitat play games to pass the time, including extreme sports such as “lava-rafting” (players have their minds “backed up” so the risk is minimal). The games in Banks’s Culture novels are enormous social and technological achievements, collectively designed for a very specific purpose: to ease the tedium of living in a utopian society that requires very little of its citizens.
Like Banks’s games, our own games of sf could be cooperatively practiced to address our shared dilemmas, including the current intersection of economic and technological factors underlying COVID-19. Rather than fueling brinksmanship, we should explore the possibility of a new game theory, one informed by sf and collectively oriented against those menaces (epidemio-logical and other) that threaten us all.—Chad Andrews, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
No Virus without Us, No Us without the Virus. Science fiction offers unique and varied ways to understand ourselves as part of a collective.
In his fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson solves the issue of longue durée narration through the use of gerontological treatments that extend characters’ life expectancies for hundreds of years. This science-fiction conceit offers scientists a chance to witness the terraforming of Mars and the preservation of the red planet’s latent state on Olympus Mons in the Mars trilogy (1992-1996). The longevity treatments fundamentally change how characters understand themselves and how they can relate to one another. Time stretches ahead of them in a way never experienced before. Can they even maintain sense of self across such a span of history? Urgency fades from one’s life work and becomes acute in the terrain of Martian politics. Robinson estranges the individual with these long-lived characters who engage in conscious, equity-based collective pursuits. Rewiring the narrative impulse to focus on one individual’s story at a time provides a rationale for the characters to gather for an extended period to write the Dorsa Brevia agreement in Green Mars (1993). Robinson makes social and environmental justice possible through the conceit of a life that stretches beyond a century and the hope that such a shift effects a new form of radical selflessness.
While I see a model for how to react to a collectively transformed sense of time in the Mars trilogy, in reality the situation of ongoing quarantine warps our relationship to time in ways that are starkly divided. Ongoing quarantine or nonstop work outside the home. No commutes or more treacherous ones. Screen time for meetings or app-driven hustling to make deliveries. Two-week incubations or total avoidance. By now such descriptions may feel familiar. How to bring a unique perspective to something humans are experiencing more consistently than any other global event of the twenty-first century, including the uneven accelerated spread of the COVID-19 virus in racialized, Indigenous, and economically poor neighborhoods? In Toronto, Ontario, the virus has taken the most lives in structurally compromised communities and in long-term care homes for the elderly. These facts expose the inequalities that government cuts to education, employment, healthcare, and housing programs subtend. The spread of the virus traces the paths of those people on multiple work contracts and of those traveling through crowded airports and transit systems, so its spread also outlines in bold the affordances and precarities of twenty-first-century life.
Bayo Akómoláfé, coordinating curator of The Emergence Network, writes that the virus not only shows us how we already live, but that “the coronavirus phenomenon is us—and yet it is not about us” (7 April 2020). “We are meeting ourselves, our systems, our borderlands and hinterlands, our children …, our punctured bubbles, via the transversal disruption of this visitor.” Under the title “I, Coronavirus: Mother, Monster, Activist,” Akómoláfé produces an estranging encounter with the very idea of a virus, of what constitutes human life and its conceptual and physical borders. This piece expands our understanding of the pandemic and its ensuing political, social, economic crisis through a speculative narrative. The experience of reading it is as disorienting as it is elucidating:
Viruses in themselves resist coherence and categorization; there isn’t a stable group we can refer to…. How do you identify something that reworks identity, that destabilizes bodies and invites diffraction? How do you name viruses without naming the cuts, the measurements, the philosophies, the agendas and the technoscientific practices that are complicit in the naming?
“I, Coronavirus” uses a mode of experimental writing adjacent to science fiction, in that it reframes commonplace understandings of viruses in general and the novel coronavirus in particular. This reframing makes a material understanding of the virus as an entity separate from humans and human social systems impossible, despite its oft-pictured polytopic viral membrane protein as a separate and distinct molecule. Rather than the metrics of infection that frame the virus in terms of so many infected individuals, Akómoláfé offers an account of the pandemic that understands the virus as inseparable from the social whole.
The third science-fictional concept I posit to open up space between Akómoláfé’s and Robinson’s short-circuiting of narrative structure and importance of individual accomplishments comes from the work of Octavia E. Butler. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) extrapolate an accurate vision of early twenty-first-century America: deeply stratified and racialized inequality, the election of a President whose slogan is “make America great again” (1998, 20), environmental degradation, massive fires in California, and the list goes on. It is in this social landscape that Lauren Oya Olamina has the capacity (or has been cursed) to feel the emotions and feelings of others. Due to the state of the world, these sensations largely come in the form of pain. Olamina witnesses her world burn down around her. She sees people struggle. She sees people die. She kills someone attacking her and is knocked unconscious by the pain. Yet in the face of this sharing, Olamina forms a group of followers around a sacred vision she has of what she calls Earthseed. Its core principle: God is Change.
Given the strange manipulations of time that we experience differentially during the virus, given the uneven effects and spread of the virus, given that the virus is us, given ongoing anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism and that Black and Indigenous people face brutality, duress, and murder, all of us, and especially white people, should not look away. Instead, we might take a lesson from Robinson, Akómoláfé, and Butler to experience complexity without a rush to personal absolution, acceptance, and resolution. The inequalities are real, the virus in many ways makes them undeniable, and, as it has always been, now is the moment to stand witness and join the struggle against the inequality that the virus latches onto and for a world of equity and care for all.—Brent Ryan Bellamy, Trent University
Ballard wasn’t even close.... I can only write this version because I am one of the relatively lucky ones. I have stayed healthy and lost no one to COVID-19, and my job is no more precarious than usual (although it is predicted that UK university finances will collapse by next February). So for me, it’s been a banal apocalypse. The oddest thing about it, for which post-Einstein, post-Schrödinger sf should have better prepared me, has been the experience of time and temporality.
Not being able to go to work, but having more work than ever, some of it out of the blue, last minute, urgent, always urgent, and then gone. And as it disappears into that haze of past days you can’t quite keep track of, it becomes more and more spectral, losing substance to the cumulative consequences of policy shifts, until a sudden institutional change of direction consigns all that labor to the memory hole.
And then (although it is never as neatly sequential as that then implies) the multiple, distended, overlapping uncertainties while you try to find out whether that announcement—made directly to all students simultaneously but trickled down through sundry hierarchies to anyone who might have to explain it to an actually existing student—really means what it seems to mean, and whether there is any chance to pre-empt the problems its obvious flaws will create before they are created.
Meanwhile classes continue, both/and, and/or, either/or, synchronous and asynchronous, and so always dis-synchronous, and beta-testing without remuneration woefully inadequate digital platforms.
And in the midst of it all you find yourself having to model alternative futures. And sf, it turns out, is not a whole lot of help when you need to figure out how to deliver a degree program on a campus that is fully open, partially open, shut down, or switching between those states as changing circumstances may or may not demand, with social distancing at two meters or at “one meter plus” or abandoned, with or without big enough classrooms, wide enough corridors, with or without shielding, with or without masks, with or without the functional platforms you need, with or without sufficient staff, and with various synchronicities and hybridities of delivery. And with—but never it seems without—the assumption that academics will risk their health, their lives, their loved ones, to keep it all going.
You get a moment to look up.
Weeks and months have raced by at a snail’s pace. At some point you stopped working from home and started living at work.
And despite the constant stress and anxiety, the moments of despair and days of depression, catastrophe somehow has the nerve to be this fucking boring.
… and Star Trek was wrong.
We are not getting that shiny future. We are not just an upgrade away from the shoddy, half-assed digital platforms COVID foisted upon us transforming into some smoothly operating, friction-free, and equally accessible-everywhere-by-everyone techno-utopia. Progress was a lie, and that lie is over.
Sf has always, whether intentionally or not, been adept at picturing uneven development, but it has always struggled to break free of myths of progress. But right now, down here in the already unfolding Jackpot (see William Gibson’s The Peripheral [2014]), only the most willfully blind ideologue could deny that the unevenly distributed consequences of a natural disaster are human-made (or that the naturalness of “natural” disasters is at least sometimes at least partly anthropogenic).
These seem like exceptional times, but they are not, nor will they be.
Temperatures are rising, water supplies diminishing, agriculture collapsing, climate refugees fleeing, disease vectors relocating north and south out of the tropics where the Holocene had confined them. There is so much more to come, and the disaster capitalists are rubbing their hands with glee.
But here and there, sometimes noisily, sometimes quietly, real life responds with disaster communism. Sf must do the same.
In the middle of a respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak, one more Black man, George Floyd, crying “I can’t breathe” as police kill him unexpectedly set the world alight.
While I was under lockdown a couple of hundred miles away, #BLM protestors in my hometown tore down the propagandist statue of a slaver and dumped it in the harbor. It was the people, making actual living breathing history.
Other statues have fallen, others must fall.
More mundanely, back in March, for half a second, I time-slipped back to when I was young enough to have a morning paper-round before school. I turned a corner and there, ambling up the street toward me like a friendly dinosaur, was an electric milk float. The driver had been a milkman for 47 years. He started in his teens, back when everyone had bottles of milk delivered daily to their doorstep before breakfast. Somehow he’d survived the foreclosure of that way of life by Thatcher’s neoliberal war on the working class and the very notion of society. He now works for a small local dairy, delivering mostly to middle-class houses dotted through south Manchester. In the last couple of weeks, his round had expanded beyond capacity. He’d been told he could not take on any more customers. But unofficially, and every day, he was adding elderly and housebound folks to his round.
Because, he said, what else would you do?
The planet might not be healing any time soon, but maybe society is returning.
Change is possible when we fight for it.
And science fiction must be adequate to our world, our times. It must imagine new technologies and social changes disaffiliated from ideas of progress. It must discard the heroic individual in favor of collective endeavors. It must abandon that tired old honky-futurism and devote itself to making habitable worlds. Starting with this one.—Mark Bould, University of the West of England
A Century of Centenaries. The momentous events of the “October Revolution” of 1917, followed by the development of twentieth-century academic historiography, have created fertile territory for a century of centenaries. The production of state-sanctioned Russian history, celebrated and codified, generated a specific list of “important” events commemorated with particular days on the historical calendar. These had been celebrated within the secular calendar of Soviet everyday historical practices by godovshchiny [anniversaries]. Jubilees and centenaries were festivals associated with a temporal metric system. This system measured everything in fives and tens—after all, 61 years following the Revolution was never a major day of celebration. On 2 July 2020, for example, Chukhotka celebrated the sixtieth jubilee of the first Nomadic School serving Indigenous reindeer herders. Such celebrations were matched with others, including the Day of the Overthrow of the Autocracy (12 March 1917) and Cosmonautics Day (marked in celebration of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight on 12 April 1961).
Only a few years ago we met the centenary of the 1917 Revolution and we wonder if perhaps we are witnessing a temporal revisioning of Jorge Luis Borges’s famous one-paragraph story “On Exactitude in Science” (“Del rigor de la ciencia” 1946), in which cartographers can only depict the world in a 1:1 ratio. Imagine, if you will, a future Russia, where after the death of Vladimir Putin, a new communist party surges to democratic victory and institutes a national memorial project to celebrate every communist victory and event from the twentieth century, reliving each successive hundred-year anniversary of every milestone until each day of the year becomes a holiday. The depth and importance of this almanac is such that it would need to be managed by an administrative apparatus—named, perhaps, the Ministry of Calendars. Their first act: to boldly propose a century of centenaries.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s sudden death by way of a COVID-19 related lung infection in January 2021 threw the Russian Federation into turmoil. A second wave of infections had just begun to be reported, barely a month after the All-Russia Victory Over the Global Pandemic celebrations were held in an effort to kick-start the anemic economy. The aim of the celebration was to paper over the severity of the losses and to quell the increasingly effective “monstrations” by the new virtual-citizen party TSifrovye Grazhdane [Digi-Citizens] or TsG for short, also disparagingly known as TSygane [Gypsies]. The party’s popularity exploded in the fall of 2019 when it was exposed that Federal Security Bureau agents were behind a spate of physician deaths. The uninspired murders of activist doctors attempting to shine a light on the severity of the crisis had created a pattern even the state-owned media was incapable of diminishing. Twenty defenestrations in twenty-nine days. So many doctors falling to their deaths … had even rattled the normally unflappable union of surgeons who’d been forced to issue a demand for inquiry. The latter was swift, the denial total, and a cadre of young anarchists and anti-state political agitators with barely plausible culpability were blamed. By October the crisis had been managed into an irritable but low-level thrum of discontent.
Late autumn was bitterly cold, dumping a cruel mix of snow and frozen rain on Moscow, leaving the city mired in sliakot’—an ankle-high slushy frustration for two-legged mobility and a seriously dangerous impediment to the elderly. By the time the stay-at-home order was lifted, the city was coated in layers of slick ice. Normally this would have been melted by the passage of countless pedestrians to-ing and fro-ing from work each day. But the general city-wide quarantine had left the slush and snow pristine. Photographs of the Garden Ring and Okhotny Riad trimmed in white and empty of people circulated rapidly over social media. Since the beginning of November, new cases of “Korona Veerus” had become statistically insignificant. Plans for the All-Russia Victory Over the Global Pandemic celebrations were appended to the usual winter festival (which amalgamated the west’s Christmas with the secular New Year’s party followed by the Orthodox Christmas in a month of intense eating, drinking, and physical proximity). All of Moscow was decorated with Yolochki firs and garlands. Icicle lights were draped at intersections and across streets of the shopping districts; outdoor markets went up almost overnight in preparation for Friday, December eighteenth, when the quarantine would be lifted, winter festivities would begin, and Moscow’s mayor could kick off the national celebration of the All-Russia Victory Over the Global Pandemic.
On the night of December seventeenth, a brutal arctic cold blew in off the Kola Peninsula and plunged Moscow into a record-setting freeze. The layers of slush and ice hardened into fine sheets. On the day the quarantine was lifted millions of Muscovites exited self-isolation for the first time in months, eager to breathe fresh air and to visit the winter markets and the beautifully decorated parks. Everyone and their cat left their apartments to greet the world and celebrate. But the ice was like nothing they’d met before. There were more broken hips, sprained angles, and fractured arms in one day than ever reported. And that was just the pedestrians. The automobilists fared even worse. Thousands of accidents were reported as vehicles slid around like drunken soldiers on an ice rink … the steel fence at Patriarch Ponds was smashed by a cement truck and followed over the edge by six cars, three of which broke through the already thick ice and disappeared below the surface.
The hospitals filled up and patients were sent to surrounding cities, yet these too were overwhelmed. Such were the conditions that fueled the crushing second wave of COVID-19 infections, that led to the death of Putin, and that paved the way for the return of Russia’s New Communist Party [NKP, Novyy Vzglyad].
Medvedev, at that time the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, kept the severity of Putin’s illness hidden for several weeks. The President was sequestered first in a Kremlin hospital with backdoor access to his private rooms and offices. When it became more severe, the President was moved to a private medical clinic in one of Moscow’s forested suburbs. For a while there was not even a whisper that Putin was ill. The stitch-up was seamless: the crisis-response apparatus and public-relations officers masterfully suppressed each rumor and report. Their speed and skill were unmatched— even augmented by the shock of reports about the return of the virus after the fiasco of the All-Russia Victory Over the Global Pandemic celebrations.
The clinic, full of Israeli-trained physicians, served the wealthiest oligarchs and was famous for healing erotic diseases and keeping secrets. And yet, a selfie featuring the visage of a dead Putin barely recognizable behind an array of life-saving machines ... became an Insta’post by a male nurse wearing Fabergé blue PPE and a matching custom Bosco.ru protective face unit, decorated with traditional lacquered black-and-gold khokhloma ornaments:
selfie w/Putin’s carcass @fuckputin #coronavirus #goodmorning #khokhloma #bosco [Selfi s tushkoy Putina @хуёвыйпутин #коронавирус #доброеутро #хохлома #боско].
The state’s secretive disinfo-manufacturing unit—what the Americans then called a troll-factory—flooded the internet with counter-conspiracies: digital noise, meant to hide the grim truth while the managerial apparatus for United Russia scrambled to respond. In 2121, the day would be celebrated as the KOMDEM: Kommunisticheskaia Deus Ex Machina. This was understood as the event that would catapult Russia past any significant union organizing, any committed and long-term efforts to mobilize the proletariat, past any necessary sacrifice and struggle of poets and artists or agitation among peasants, to the final stage of history. KOMDEM required no revolution. It was the people’s autonomous self-transformation from stalled and backward ideologies. It was a mass social self-pollination: The Great Selfing.—Craig Campbell, University of Texas, Austin
Which COVID-19? Whose Crisis? The emergence of the novel coronavirus onto the world stage since December 2019 and the consequent dissolution of the ordinary conditions of twenty-first-century capitalism has simultaneously produced a suffering universally felt (the pan- in pandemic)and intensely specific, highly differentiated, and hyperlocal, almost individualized categories of human misery. The virus has produced its own vocabulary—essential workers, virtual learning, social distancing, economic impact payment—that has quickly become ubiquitous and which has already become a site of contestation and struggle. Does essential mean vital, necessary,or does it mean disposable?Does virtual mean online,or does it mean not?Can social distancing be mandatory, and under what sorts of conditions, and for how long? Whose economic impact, and which one? And do you really think that a one-time $1200 check is going to cover the whole thing?
If COVID-19 feels apocalyptic in its violent power to disrupt the cultural and economic ties on which our sociality depends, grinding most commerce and interpersonal exchange of any kind to a halt within just a few weeks in the face of steadily rising case numbers, it is also apocalyptic in the original Greek sense of being an unveiling, a revelation. The virus has made visible capitalism’s hidden fault lines:
• the divide between a managerial class that can be shifted to work from home and a worker class, low-paid, without significant savings, and (in the US) even lacking health-care benefits that must nonetheless put itself at daily risk of infection;
• the intergenerational poverty, dating back to the slave trade, that has left Black bodies significantly more at risk than white ones both for initial infection and for the development of serious complications;
• the irregular distribution of quality health care that has made some regions and some populations especially vulnerable to coronavirus, particularly a nursing home population that has in some regions in the US been literally decimated;
• the yawning gulf between the billion-dollar corporations for whom no level of bailout is too costly and the small businesses that have been left simply to wither on the vine without material support; and
• the differential impact of the lockdowns on households with and without children—with new psychic costs for being alone and new psychic costs for being together—and, within those households, on the uneven shares of the new domestic labor disproportionately falling on women’s shoulders.Like climate change, the Great Recession, and the rise of the zombies, the ostensibly universal scope of COVID-19 only reveals to us the things that have always been true about our society: that it considers certain types of lives more valuable than others, more worthy of protection and care; and that certain types of suffering are a social emergency demanding an immediate response. Other people, meanwhile, are simply collateral damage in the inexorable workings of automatic and remorseless laws of nature—a regrettable state of affairs, perhaps, but not something you could ever actually do anything about.
Little wonder then that the coronavirus has struck hardest in right-wing-led countries such as Brazil, Russia, the UK, and the US, whose ideological refusals both within the government and among the populace to accept the severity of the virus and the need for a suspension of the ordinary operation of capitalism for the duration of the pandemic have led to wildfire outbreaks that will now be impossible to suppress and that have put the entire national population at risk. The haunting spectacle of the US stock market rising and rising against a steady drumbeat of hospitalizations and deaths (as well as historically unprecedented leaps in unemployment unseen even during the Great Depression), with Congress simply out of session for weeks in the midst of the worst global crisis since World War II, is a marker of late-period imperial decadence, registering the absolute callousness of our elites and the total inability of neoliberalism meaningfully to respond to this or any crisis. If COVID-19 can’t make us think in a different way about the relationship between capitalism and human thriving—if it can’t force us to see the utter toxicity of our existing social and economic relationality—what could? Instead, the very idea of wearing a mask at all has now become a political hot potato within the US, a question of allegiance to one political party or the other, rather than a minimal, commonsense public-health measure.
And yet there are strong indications that outside the Fox News bubble, and outside a political class that has plainly elected to send the global economy into a decade-long economic depression rather than admit that the market can’t be the final arbiter of every problem, coronavirus seems indeed to have been an unveiling of truths too long left unacknowledged. The mass protests against police brutality in the US have been genuinely enormous both in their size and in their widespread popularity, and they have led, in very short order, to concessions and reforms previously unimaginable (if still vastly insufficient to the true scale of American racism). The tragic synchronicity between the coronavirus and Black Lives Matter has already been remarked upon by so many—that both the murder of George Floyd and the plight of those suffering from coronavirus are characterized by the inability to breathe—and unexpectedly seems to offer up for us the utopian glimmer that out of this unhappy time a world might yet be built that refuses to normalize pain. If science fiction and science-fiction studies are to be good for anything in this era of unfolding and overlapping material catastrophes, let us rededicate ourselves and our powers of imagination to the ruthless criticism of all that exists, in the service of what still might.—Gerry Canavan, Marquette University
On Living Unhinged. It happened on 23 April 2020. My partner and I were unwinding on the couch of our living room after what had become a pretty standard confined day at home, and turned the television on to watch an episode of the HBO series The Leftovers (2014-2017). I had been telling him to watch it with me for quite a while and, because of the predicament forced upon all of us by the pandemic, it seemed to be as good a time as any to dive deep into what is my favorite show. So, just like that, each night, we ritualistically poured ourselves a glass of wine and sat on our couch to watch an episode. The Leftovers, adapted into a television series from Tom Perrotta’s eponymous book of 2011, takes place in a parallel universe in which, on 14 October 2011, 2% of humanity simply vanished into thin air. The show follows various characters as they try to cope with this event, euphemistically called the “sudden departure.” They struggle to grieve something so utterly unexplainable and sudden that it leaves no trace, nothing to hold on to. In this world, people live in fear, in shock, in awe, in disillusionment. Meaning has become an impossible currency, while those affected by the event in various degrees have to exist with a double bind—not knowing where their (un)loved ones have gone or whether the event will ever recur, thereby making any attachment excruciatingly painful. In that version of our world, each and every person is left to exist with a feeling that something is always already unhinged—of always living beside themselves.
Making our way to the second season, we witnessed the main protagonists move from a suburban town in New York to a rural town in Texas that was “spared” from the sudden departure of its residents—Jarden, rebaptized Miracle in the wake of its non-event there. When the Garvey-Durst family arrives in town, they meet their new neighbors. Hugs and handshakes are in order as they introduce themselves—a ritual so banal and unremarkable that, under other circumstances, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. Yet, as the scene unraveled before my eyes, I became unnerved: I simply could not recognize what was happening. These gestures operated through contact would not let themselves be registered on my mind and, for a few seconds, anxiety took hold of me: “What are they doing?” I said to my partner, “They shouldn’t be touching.” As soon as the words came out, I had finally processed it. He laughed—taking my misrecognition for a sarcastic observation about the current COVID-19 situation.
In some ways, as in many others, the pandemic is/was, for most, this uncanny feeling of having entered the realm of science fiction—this dystopian, impossible future or parallel universe had become reality. Suddenly, dozens of recommendations for movies about how a team of scientists saves humanity from a deadly virus sprouted on Netflix. It was, specifically, hearing the story of a lying Pinocchio swallowed by a whale, only to realize that we ourselves are Pinocchio, and we have all collectively been inside the whale all along. Hindsight.
The problem is that the pandemic was never really about sf; the fiction, rather, was to believe that this could never happen. To many, COVID-19 was just an amplification of what was already there. How not to draw a parallel with the Anthropocene? This has become almost too easy in a world where almost everything turns into a sign of “impending” environmental collapse. The Anthropocene is this potential, this “fiction” that lurks just at the end of the road if we do not, as humans, collectively address the burning question. Images of apocalyptic rains drown and submerge us: we become taken by an existential dread that this could happen.
It already did.
Timothy Morton, among many others, has proposed in Hyperobjects (2013) to think of the end of the world as having already happened (7). Kathryn Yussof, in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), wrote of the billions of worlds that had ended in order to produce the Eurocentric one. As Kyle Whyte points out, Indigenous communities live their day-to-day existence in a world that has ended, and continues to end (“Indigenous science fiction for the Anthropocene,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1.1-2 [2018], 224-42). Much like the characters of The Leftovers, the global pandemic has catapulted those who kept playing a game of pretend—a simulacrum of “normalcy”—into an existential reality where things are, and will continue to be, unhinged.
There have been, since the start of the pandemic, various discourses that have made dubious and questionable parallels between the virus and humans—between the pandemic and global warming. This ecofascist comparison would take humans as a virus for the earth. This is not worth our time. What is perhaps helpful instead, or what may offer us comfort, is to think of the future not as a fiction from which we must deviate, but as the kind of place in time we should strive toward. What I mean to say is, as the global pandemic has pushed all of us beside ourselves, we have entered an existential mode where we see how actions yield change. Almost everywhere, the curve has been flattened.
The narratives of a “return to normal” are inviting precisely because they work as a fiction of recentering our lives: to go back to “normal” means to find ourselves again, a (false) promise to be rehinged. But this cannot be: there is no going back. We must all live in the shadow of the unthinkable numbers of the dead in the United States alone. This is a pledge to memory and to action: to accept that the world simply is not, and cannot, be the same. Much as in the final episode of The Leftovers, when Nora understands she cannot allow herself to live like a ghost in a haunted world, we must recognize that to refuse narratives of normalcy is to acknowledge that this situation is not, and in fact never was, normal to begin with.—Pierre-Elliot Caswell, Cornell University
“As Though Through Mud”: Climate Change and Infectious Play. I begin with a quotation from Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu (Arsenal 2018):
She can’t help it. The worse things get, the more her mind turns to visions of the future. She sees the men waste and die. She sees whole houses shut their doors against the flu-ridden city, only to be consumed from the inside.… She sees these things so intensely that they have become the world she already inhabits. She moves through the present as though through mud. (24)
Is COVID-19 an impediment to thinking about, let alone taking steps to prevent, climate change? While news cycles and people around the globe grapple with the pandemic, scientists and environmentalists have sounded warnings that the warming planet is still a threat that we ignore at our peril. Yet confusing messages abound: on the one hand, the pandemic appears to have given nature a break from us, clearing skies and freeways as transportation and travel slow to an unprecedented extent; but along with the carbon-heavy intensification of online shopping, experts suggest that a slowdown now may be more than offset as industries ramp up production and economies feverishly work to right themselves during reopening. Unavoidable demands for personal protective equipment (PPE) mean millions of disposable masks, gowns, and gloves will enter the waste stream. Manufacturing is touted as the solution.
Part of our difficulty in maintaining focus on climate matters while the coronavirus bears down on us like a Jurassic Park dinosaur (disasters are always closer than they appear) is human psychology—our inability to think past a proximate crisis to another ostensibly more distant. Even the potential for extreme weather and dire temperatures years or decades from now pales in the face of death and illness now. Part of the problem may also be the sorry state of our environmental accounting—did staying at home really take tons of CO2 out of the air? This seems to me bookkeeping of the Harold Skimpole variety, after that charming reprobate in Dicken’s Bleak House (1853) who congratulates himself for saving money he never had.
Epidemiologists and activists have done a much better job of using COVID-19 as a means of illuminating long entrenched racial and economic disparities, given the virus’s disproportionate toll on working-class black and brown communities in New York and elsewhere, often euphemized as those with “co-morbidities” or “preexisting conditions.” Crises are inevitably connected to other crises. The recent upwelling of antiracism protests in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many other Black Americans should not be read as detracting from the impulse for climate justice. Rather, systemic racism and inequality pervade both built and natural environments, human and nonhuman relations, and local to global scales. Witness congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tweeted response to the question of what a defunded police state would look like: “a suburb.” AOC’s quipped answer is less aspiration than sarcasm, a recognition that monocultures reign on both domestic and domesticated fronts.
Of course, many have tried to reduce the coronavirus to a single, often racially charged cause: the “Kung Flu” is variously a product of Chinese plotting, ineptitude, or difference (wet markets and the eating of bats). And the pandemic is, indeed, likely a product of our incursion into wild spaces and ensuing contact with species carrying viruses harmless to them but dangerous to us. But as the discourses around racial and ecological homogeneity should indicate, using the rhetoric of us and them (non-Chinese and Chinese, humans and bats, and so on) and calls to stay in our proper places can be equally dangerous. Viruses in general, and zoonotic viruses in particular, raise a host of ontological issues around individual and collective sanctity that I find troubling. Although some environmentalists have smugly trumpeted the coronavirus as evidence of nature’s revenge on the impudent, revenge falls too neatly into old patterns within which humans need to fear, tame, or subjugate the unknown.
Prior to COVID-19, I was not convinced that either utopia or dystopia were terms amenable to multispecies understandings. When utopia strays from the imaginable, it fails. Yet if that is so, then the pandemic arguably has its benefits in allowing us to think beyond human destruction with more clarity. In what follows, I draw on my own research into the scientific and sf tendencies of video games to consider pandemic-era play as one way to literally occupy the present and enact the future, although limited to two games and related instances.
In the first, a virtual pandemic inadvertently occurred in September 2005 within the popular massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft (WoW). The game’s designers had introduced a new tropical raid zone whose final boss, Hakkar the Soulflayer, cast a Corrupted Blood “debuff” (debilitating spell effect) on players that drained players’ hit points and had the ability to spread to nearby players. Because the debuff was limited in duration, the game’s designers did not anticipate that players (and importantly, their animal and supernatural companions) could spread the highly contagious debuff to other, unsuspecting players when returning to city centers from the encounter. What resulted was an unexpected series of devastating plagues that wiped out whole zones and populations of players. Strikingly, real-world epidemiologists have studied the Corrupted Blood incident as a way of mathematically modeling epidemic spread, and some have even recently turned those initial WoW-based models toward studying the coronavirus. (Thanks to my graduate student Ahmed Asi for pointing to this connection, which has been reported in The Washington Examiner and PC Gamer. Ran Balicer, in “Modeling Infectious Diseases Dissemination Through Online Role-Playing Games” (Epidemiology 18.2 [2007]) makes a similar point).
A second game worth mentioning in relation to the pandemic is Shanghai-based, Asian-American game designer Mike Ren’s Night Flyer: A Bat’s Journey, submitted for the IndieCade Climate Jam held 18-22 April 2020, at the height of the coronavirus’s initial escalation. In it, you play as a young bat growing to adulthood by eating fruit, then moths, and eventually finding a mate, only to find that bulldozers are destroying your habitat and making food impossible to find. Players must constantly press arrow keys to keep the bat aloft—it cannot settle on the ground or fly too high, in a side-scrolling rendering of the narrow atmospheric band in which most animals, including us, are able to live. The game’s story mode always ends with, first, the player’s mate perishing and, then, the player-bat falling to the ground, only to be captured by a human with a cage. In a short, animated sequence, the man collecting the player-bat lets out a sneeze cued by ominous music, then drives a truck piled high with caged animals away from the forest to a nearby city. This pandemic origin story is, surprisingly, both fun and funereal. The game paints bats as vital but misunderstood species in many ecosystems, and Ren’s start-screen injunction to players applies equally to bats and people: “Try to survive as your world disappears.”
Game-world crossovers like these illustrate that suffering is always intersectional and generational, but also that pandemic thinking demands imaginative, even playful disruption. Rather than traffic in the linear and pointed tropes of disease vectors and invasive species, we ought to think in terms of surrounds, whether trans-corporeally (Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2010), or amphibiously (Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media, 2019), as if a chytrid fungus waited in the wings. In a warming world, it is not enough to think solely about one’s own vulnerabilities. We are not all starfish, able to regrow missing parts of ourselves as in Lai’s The Tiger Flu, which predates the current pandemic but describes an eerily similar contagion. The book also features megalomaniacal tech tyrants obsessed with objects in orbit (in this moment of tone-deaf SpaceX launches) and hints at the unintended consequences of de-extinction science (bringing back the Caspian tiger results in the “tiger flu”). For Kora Ko, one of the novel’s protagonists, to be captivated by the future is to move painfully through the present, “as though through mud.” In play, movement through space and time is less onerous but not without consequences. Play simply asks us to luxuriate in the mud.—Alenda Y. Chang, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Pandemic that was Always Here, and Afterward: From Futures to CoFutures. By now, we all know that the inequalities brought to light by the coronavirus, the so-called equal opportunity killer, existed long before the pandemic. The disproportionate toll it continues to take on the disadvantaged and the elderly has already generated plenty of wet dreams about societal eugenics. That COVID-19 does not affect children much is an added advantage, because it ensures a steady supply of wage-slave labor within the necropolitical space of capitalist globalization—and also, perversely, because it deprioritizes the burden of care that children inspire. After all, the image of the sick/abused child gives potency to the image of societal sickness. Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973), for example, is superficially about a food-taster, an expendable inconvenience to keep the body politic healthy. At a deeper level, the fantasy is that of the epidemic—localized disease-affected bodies—that keep the transnational capitalist system functioning with the illusory veneer of utopia. Whether the utopia is located in the global north, away from the expendable diseased or dysfunctional global south, is immaterial. The fractures internal to societies everywhere mirror and bolster the system.
In her counternarrative challenge to Le Guin’s classic story, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” (2018), N.K. Jemisin speaks instead to the burden of confronting injustices perpetrated in the name of purity and cleanliness worldwide, where health is maintained in one space at the cost of debility in others. Pandemics are the painful poster child of globalization. The pandemic shows that while some might see the “normalcy” of injustices as unsustainable if the inhabitants (including nonhumans) of this planet are to survive, it is precisely the unsustainability that for others has the chaotic potential to further cleave and destroy democratic societies, exacerbate exclusionary politics, and rebirth fascisms with genocidal intent. The values of “life” and/versus the “economy” are the rhetorical battleground of this unsustainability. Those who will deploy the pandemic as a means of control will try to ensure that while the movement of people, locally, nationally, or internationally, is brought under even greater regulation, creating wider physical distance with social distance, the flow of goods and consumption will remain undisturbed to maintain necro-economics. This is the rehashed logic of colonialism underlying the normalcy of neocolonialism. Indeed, the pandemic has always been here, revealing its murderous grin in the passage of numbers, statistics, and the taxation of one’s life-value as a non-performing unit in death tolls.
Sf has shown that these patterns have a precedent, and also a future potentiality. Epidemics, pandemics, and catastrophes in general are staples, especially in post-apocalyptic narratives of collapses and resurrections. Lockdowns, surveillance states, ghettoization are quite prominent themes in banal dystopias susceptible to managerial techniques. But we have also seen these wastelands of disaster set in global-south narratives or in sf by marginalized communities where catastrophe is just Tuesday. Whether laced with hope or not, the fight in and against the wasteland in these other narratives makes the condition of permanent catastrophe appear historical, not for catharsis, but possible strategy. For example, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) describes a pandemic that has always been with the indigenous people: a future predicated on differentially paced destruction of indigenous futures. Dreams built on top of stolen dreams. Or take the words of the father telling his son in Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2009) that the future was stolen from Mexico when it was turned into a corporatized dystopia. How can one use the science-fictional imagination as a way to think past the dystopic to futures with an ever-increasing emphasis on equity and equality? Does the pandemic offer us ways to transform our politics, at both systemic and personal levels?
What science-fictional thinking can offer us at a time like this is the chance to rebuild the narrative of solidarities for possible futures, seizing control from the closed futures of disaster capitalism. At our moment in history, closed futures have an irresistible gravity. A permanent state of crisis closes off the future in its potentiality and makes history appear cyclical: the developed parts of the world and all their infrastructure seem to be collapsing and their oil regimes coming to an end, which makes the poorer parts of the world—with their supposed poverty, failed or undemocratic governments, and smothered cultures, long kept trapped in the rhetoric of backwardness or belated modernities—now suddenly appear futuristic. Yet sf narratives, especially from marginalized communities for whom the dystopian is an everyday reality, have developed futures without the need for cyclicality, offering visions of alternative futures instead in their many alternative futurisms, whether Afro or Africanfuturisms or Indigenous futurisms or Latinxfuturisms or any such movements around the world. Mythic cyclicality closes off the future, while history opens the future by being sensitive to possibility. The quests for these futurisms have been to find antidotes to dystopia, sometimes through their own history and sometimes through imaginaries of the future, to find moments of solidarity in the chaos of the everyday, and to find meaning in survival within cultures of protest and resistance. Or, as Nnedi Okorafor says it: From Broken Places to Outer Spaces (2019).
What is needed next is a further move: solidarity across futurisms without devolution into comparative or ethnofuturisms (for that will return us to the fractures of our pasts and presents). I have termed this move cofutures: complex, coeval, and most importantly, compossible. Compossibility requires solidarity despite, and often because of, a recognition of difference. Things are not completely smooth and never will be, but we will get through this together to build just futures for all if we can work together as a people. But how do we do it? One face of the pandemic is grief over the loss of both lives and livelihoods, compounded by violence and uncertainty, revealing fractures in global systems that rely on greater atomization of labor, tremulously fragile supply-chain webs, and the precarity of life. The other face of the pandemic has been solidarity-building across peoples and communities. The globalization of care-work comes with the recognition of transnational connectivities of the disaster from which no one is protected. A template has been made. What is needed for our cofutures is a theory of compossible futures based on solidarities. This theory will require us to jump back and forth among the positive futures we want, the present we have been given, and the futures we are making in our everyday lives. And science-fictional worldbuilding based on possibility can exhibit such compossibility. Thinking in terms of compossibility—thinking compossible futures—will require practice, for only then can cofutures become possible. I keep my hope.—Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, University of Oslo
Learning from Lauren. When the viral pandemic hit, the devastation was weirdly familiar. I found myself thinking like Lauren in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998): should I pack an emergency backpack? What seeds should I be collecting and storing? Annotating J.G. Ballard’s 1960s ecocatastrophe fictions and John Wyndham’s “cosy catastrophes” for my summer term teaching on the Anthropocene, I was similarly eking out an unexpectedly apocalyptic existence—struggling to source food and living in a decelerated temporality of lockdown confinement. It was somewhere between Mitchell and Webb’s apocalyptic gameshow “Remain Indoors” (first broadcast in their comedy sketch show in 2006) and Bill and Josella’s Sussex pastoral enclave in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), with hints of the narrator’s phantasmagoric journeys beyond the wall of her flat in Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor (1974).
For me, ecocatastrophe narratives contain odd moments of pleasure amid the societal wreckage in utopian glimpses of a world beyond capitalist productivity. This combination of disaster and possibility—what Rebecca Solnit calls “disaster utopias” (21) in A Paradise Built in Hell (Penguin 2009), drawing on Michael Barkun’s 1974 Disaster and the Millennium (Syracuse UP 1974, 7)—was evident in the crisis unleashed by the novel Coronavirus. Since COVID-19 was named a global pandemic, explicit utopian political demands that were previously unthinkable have become thinkable—calls for the reduction of the length of the working day and the working week, which date back to socialist agitation in the mid-nineteenth century, or the implementation of Universal Basic Income (UBI). Such demands would finally enact the late nineteenth-century dream of utopian socialist tales of a world beyond scarcity, as seen in the pneumatic mechanization of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) or the automated chemical production of food in Mary E. Bradley Lane’s eugenicist feminist text, Mizora: A World of Women (1890). Such narratives liberated the downtrodden working subject into leisure and imagined how we might spend our newly found free time in creative pursuits such as painting, dancing, cooking, and cultivating aesthetic taste. This older utopian imaginary was similarly echoed in the best lockdown television I’ve seen so far: Grayson Perry’s Art Club on Channel 4. Encouraging us into the everyday practice of aesthetic pleasure and non-utilitarian expression and creativity for its own sake, Art Club is explicitly utopian—as is the national collective project to curate an exhibition of UK lockdown art that it documents. In the 27 April 2020 episode, Anthony Gormley talks about the “opportunity to dream under lockdown,” a statement that strongly resonates with the importance of our everyday experience of wishful dreams and their latent utopian content outlined in Ernst Bloch’s magisterial three-volume Principle of Hope (1954-1959).
The crisis unleashed by COVID-19 is one that has been with us for more than a decade—at least since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis formalized a long economic downturn and political and social retrenchment into austerity in the UK and elsewhere. As someone who specializes in utopian theory, I’ve been struck by the undeniable resurgence of utopianism over the past 12 years. The cycle of protests, occupations, and struggles in 2011 was unlike anything we have seen since the cultural revolution in 1968, following the May protests at the Sorbonne in Paris and the alliance between student radicals and exhausted workers. Activist- and youth-led protest movements, now including the rhizomatic, decentralized global Extinction Rebellion, as well as the Black Lives Matter campaign that has been ignited in recent weeks, frequently make explicit reference to the utopian slogans of 1968: another world is possible, demand the impossible, la lute continue. In the graffiti, banners, and protest chants of recent years we hear that radical energy in slogans such as: Give us back our future (from the anti-tuition fee protests in the UK in 2010 and the student occupations of 2011), calls for a General Strike, assertions that Another World is Possible, System Change Not Climate Change, Capitalism Isn’t Working, Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible echo the demands spray-painted across Parisian pavements during the uprising.
The question before us is: how can science-fictional thinking respond to the current crisis? Many of the texts that I study would not be categorized as science fiction, at least not in any straightforward way; my analysis of such texts as secreting utopian temporal possibility is arguably as much a strategy of reading as it is an unorthodox taxonomic exercise. In their generic discontinuities and networked novelistic structures, texts such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Bone Clocks (2014), or Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love (2010), enact what I call non-contemporaneity: bringing ancient phylogenetic times before modernity into contact with the planetary scale of distant geological futures. To take a more obviously sf example, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017) does this masterfully, blurring the boundaries between human and geological time scales within individual subjectivity, through the explicitly posthumanist process of becoming-lithic. I think these novels contain a vital message, particularly when read within a moment of crisis: we must remember how to hope, even when things seem at their lowest ebb. Utopian thinking teaches us about what E.P. Thompson referred to in William Morris (Merlin Press 1977) as the “education of desire” (791).
For me, a utopian reading of contemporary narratives uncovers the science-fictional commitment to imagining alterity, no matter the genre(s) in which the narrative presents itself (and arguably, given the climate catastrophe, even literary fiction is now science-fictional if it is doing its job of representing reality properly). With its likely origins in the destruction of previously untouched habitats, which facilitated the transmission of disease from wildlife to humans, COVID-19 presents us with an undeniable historical crisis of Anthropocenic capitalism. It forces us to confront the apocalypse and its uneven distribution, ongoing since venture capitalists began plundering the New World; as Kathryn Yusoff reminds us in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (U of Minnesota P 2018), settler colonialisms “have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence” (xiii). Here, amid the wreckage of our current world order, we can glimpse the utopian seeds for building a better world. As Lauren learned in Butler’s Parable series, this becomes possible when we realize that to persist under the illusion of human exceptionalism is to entertain our own extinction.—Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, London
Viral World Systems. The juxtaposition of sf and the current pandemic invokes at first cinematic, televisual, and literary landscapes of airborne diseases and infectious transmission. Between The Andromeda Strain (1971), AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010-), and Larissa Lai’s Tiger Flu (2018), as well as more figurative texts such as Ben Marcus’s Flame Alphabet (2012), this is hardly surprising. There is, however, a less obvious medial form that potentially provides more than thematic reflections on the pandemic: speculative video games. The most immediate examples gravitate toward such titles as Plague Inc. (2012) and Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (2019), both of which foreground epidemics diegetically; or to every single survival horror in which a zombie apocalypse possesses a modicum of scientific justification; and to incidents such as the 2005 Corrupted Blood plague in World of Warcraft (2004), which (although originating in a fantasy spell) had every characteristic of an sf viral epidemic. The listing of speculative titles featuring viruses, contagions, and infectious diseases is much longer, but a far more productive line of thinking about science-fiction games and the pandemic is related to the invisible layer of ludic signification: systemic complexity and contingency.
Five months into the pandemic, the COVID-19 outbreak has already taught us many lessons. It has exposed the fragility of economic networks based on unsustainability and exploitation, emboldened authoritarian tendencies dormant in many national and regional centers of governance, and cast into sharp relief—once again—class and geopolitical disparities. But, to my mind, the most important of these lessons is making visible at least some of the workings of contemporary societies. The arcane interconnectivity of the globalized world may be, per Fredric Jameson’s dictum, extremely resistant to mapping, especially when the globe seems to be merrily chugging along. It becomes more accessible to insight when it breaks down. The domino effect of the pandemic has affected entire industries, professions, and social strata. Some of the resultant collapses and disruptions are fairly predictable, others not so much; but an avalanche of reporting, opinions, and forecasts has lifted to the surface the previously occulted dependencies, links, and symbioses. A more permanent awareness of these connections may improve our chances of changing things, but there is nothing that ages faster than news. This is where both science fiction and video games come in.
Long-form narrative media are perfect sites for reflections on legal and ethical concerns or ruminations on historical and political processes. In their speculative flavor such texts open avenues for thinking about long-term transformations, both desirable and not, set into motion by the virus. Many video games are narratives, too, but they are also, or—perhaps—first and foremost, performative speculations. While fantastic scenarios in literature, film, and television represent global interconnections, video games force us to work them out, to try out the consequences, always in the shadow of the game system’s structure of “rewards” and “punishments.”
It seems to me that sf video games possess singular potential not because they are predictive simulations, but because they engender certain structures of thinking that are informed by but also shape a more active and consequential sense of worldbuilding dependencies. Certainly, pandemic-themed games may pit their players against specific viral scenarios, some of which may go deeper than diegetic dressing, as Cameron Kunzelman very perceptively notes in “Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism” (Vice [2 April 2020]). Way too often, though, the viral spread provides a thin justification for action-driven carnage. This was certainly the case with Epidemic (1996) for PlayStation 1 and it is certainly the case with Outbreak: Epidemic (2019) and dozens of other titles in between. There are, however, game subgenres that sensitize us to the complex enmeshing of places, people, and processes that are so important for understanding the world during and after the pandemic—even when they do not feature viruses. This is true for many role-playing and adventure games that bring the navigation of the world to the level of a player-driven individual, but also for strategy games that may adopt a top-down, godlike vantage from which the player manages communities or societies. Finally, there are what I call, for the lack of a better term, world simulations: games like EVE Online (2003) and No Man’s Sky (2016), whose levels of complexity begin to approximate our perceptual reality.
It is important to note that such games are not free-form fantasies of imaginative wish-fulfillment. In the same way in which real-world movements for change have to reckon with the existing state and economic apparatuses, the players’ creativity and ingenuity are, in most games, curbed by unconsciously ideological constraints and limitations coded into the games by their designers. Some of these can be exploited to the players’ advantage but many are unmovable. When combined with speculative scenarios, science fiction RPGs, strategies, and world games may become invaluable tools for thought, fostering a more active perception of the tangled networks of contemporary life, both when it comes to thinking through the immediate ripple effects of social distancing and the possible lines of flight of the post-pandemic world.—Paweł Frelik, University of Warsaw
Mycorrhizal Thinking: Reading My Way through the Pandemic. Here are the last five books I have read, all since 8 June according to my plague diary: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (Penguin Random House 2020), Ghost Species by James Bradley (Penguin Random House 2020), Rosewater by Tade Thompson (Orbit 2016), Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival by Velma Wallis (Epicenter 1993; 2004), and Theory for the World to Come: Apocalyptic Anthropology by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer (U of Minnesota P 2019). Obviously, I have been coping with sheltering in place by reading, and my reading has been influenced by the pandemic to some extent, but I don’t think I had expected that fungi would be so helpful in letting me see the connections among these books in a mycorrhizal way, as “a complex network, complete with the bidirectional movement of information and resources” (Sheldrake 215). “Look at the network,” Sheldrake says, “and it starts to look back at you.” These five books, one on popular science, two sf novels, a retelling of an Athabascan legend, and a book of theory, have been networking in me while I have been absorbing the ups and downs of COVID-19 and the rise and spread of the Black Lives Matter movement, both while the slow catastrophe of climate change continues to unfold. And all those catastrophes—the pandemic, the systemic racism that BLM makes impossible to ignore, and the ongoing sixth extinction—illustrate what Wolf-Meyer claims is Wyndham’s rule: “The apocalypse is never singular: it is always multiple.” Wolf-Meyer goes on to say that “in its multiplicity, the apocalypse is unimaginable” (4). But fungi don’t worry about prediction or theory or control. Instead, they rule the world by underground colonization, seeking, sending out filaments of connection, adapting, sometimes helping, sometimes not, but constantly adjusting.
James Bradley is an Australian writer whose last two novels have used science fiction to grapple with the climate catastrophe. In Ghost Species, he imagines a billionaire not unlike Mark Zuckerberg who uses his vast wealth to fund the reconstitution of extinct creatures in order to re-engineer the climate. The billionaire is fungal in his approach, with secret plans to bring back vanished species extending throughout the world. The plan fails: too big to succeed, too tangled in theory. But we are left with the hope that one species, the Neanderthals, might have the adaptability to survive in the altered world, as a few individuals simply try to live in the world they have inherited. Alien fungus erupts through Nigeria in Thompson’s Rosewater, transforming the world in a mycorrhizal way both literally and figuratively. Simultaneously healing and hurting, not with intent but simply to establish its own life, it performs a mimicry of the ways in which humans operate in the novel: trying one thing after another as they struggle both with and against the fungus. Both works imagine ways of dealing with exponential change through small steps rather than heroic measures, and we might look upon this as mycorrhizal thinking.
I had thought that Velma Wallis (Gwich’in Athabascan), in this retelling of an old story handed down to her, would offer a change from these themes of exponential change. Instead, she offered a way to manage it. The two old women are abandoned by their tribe because a particularly hard winter makes it difficult to feed everyone. Instead of giving up, the women take one small step after another to survive. As one says to the other, “If we are going to die, my friend, let us die trying, not sitting” (16). And that, really, is all we can do, in our own ongoing catastrophes, our own slow-moving apocalypse: send out filaments, try to connect, try again, keep taking little steps, abandoning big theory for small actions. Chaos theory champions small causes for large effects. So do fungi.—Joan Gordon, SFS
Post-crisis SF: Decolonizing the Future. It’s deeply strange to be a science-fiction scholar during a global pandemic. All of a sudden, everyone seems to be talking about the genre’s predictive function: speculative genre films such as Dawn of the Dead (1978), Contagion (2011), and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) have not only found sizable new audiences during the COVID-19 lockdown, but have been used to make sense of current events. Surely, it is tempting to reach for sf as a model for thinking in such bewilderingly unpredictable times. But it is growing increasingly clear that the situation we’re facing isn’t just a health crisis; the pandemic has been the catalyst for a Pandora’s Box of developments that have made the painful reality of racial capitalism starkly visible. And as the Black Lives Matter movement gathers unprecedented momentum and wide public support, real hope for a better future seems to glimmer faintly on the horizon once more.
But at the same time, I wonder whether sf and its massive cultural footprint really is all that helpful in moving us forward. As John Rieder has documented in Colonialism and Science Fiction (2008), the anxieties about the future expressed through sf narratives have overwhelmingly reproduced the social power of white masculinity. From H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897) to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), sf has often operated by simply reversing the colonial gaze and imagining what it would be like for a white man to be stripped of his privilege and undergo the terrors and hardships that continue to be inflicted routinely on people of color.
The simultaneity of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global antiracist movement is therefore most helpful in understanding the fundamental problems that haunt sf to this very day. First, it reveals the moral cowardice of post-apocalyptic survival narratives and the social Darwinism they commonly express. Zombie narratives and alien invasion movies take such pleasure in exposing how vulnerable is our social contract, anticipating how a contagious pandemic would unleash a dark “human nature” eager to exploit and take advantage of other humans’ perceived weakness. As thrilling as they can be, the endless variations on I Am Legend’s “last man on Earth” template reproduce both capitalism’s systematic focus on liberal individualism and white male authors’ solipsistic focus on protagonists who look like themselves. And second, the Black Lives Matter movement can help make us more aware of the ways in which sf has historically reproduced whiteness as the primary expression of desirable social power.
Now is therefore not the time for white male sf scholars like me to mansplain to what degree the pandemic is “just like an sf movie,” or what the work of white male sf authors may or may not be able to teach us about how to deal with the actual ongoing crises. In the same way that we’re collectively reexamining the monuments to racists and imperialists that still litter our public spaces, we can contribute to this epochal movement by reflecting on how the “classics” of the genre, and large parts of the culture and fandom that surround them, remain devoted to white straight masculinity. And we might use genre fans’ familiarity with these storyworlds, from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1951) to Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), to illustrate what Cedric J. Robinson in Black Marxism (2005) so powerfully theorized as racial capitalism: a system of social, cultural, and economic power whose most basic organization has always been grounded in the racialization of oppressed groups.
In her recent book The Dark Fantastic (New York UP 2019), Ebony Elizabeth Thomas connects racial capitalism’s ineffable global power to the mythological franchises that occupy the horizons of our popular culture. The deep logic that permeates western fantastic fiction unfailingly reproduces capitalism’s racial foundations by attributing qualities such as innocence, beauty, and goodness to an inherent whiteness. Even seemingly benign texts such as Star Trek, in which diversity equals access to white privilege, endlessly reproduce a colonial worldview of racial colonialism by projecting racial capitalism’s required otherness outward onto more “primitive” life forms
Just as the 2020 pandemic and its interlocking set of simultaneous crises have made the systemic injustices of racial capitalism more starkly visible, this moment can also help us reckon with the legacy of sf and its enduring association with whiteness. Now is the moment to invest in what are still considered “alternative” forms of sf—Afrofuturism/Africanfuturism, Indian sf/f, Chinese sf—and flip the colonial center/periphery dialectic that has kept these forms on the margins of mainstream sf. As we are starting to see articulated in proliferating public debates, racism and capitalism are one and the same system, and following through on antiracism as a cultural, social, and political movement therefore also means embracing an explicitly anticapitalist agenda. In other words: emerging antiracist utopias are also anticapitalist utopias.
Considering sf not just as a platform for thought experiments but also as one of the primary cultural archives of collective imagination, the radical decolonization of sf is surely the most urgent task for contemporary sf scholarship. If we want to imagine a better future, we must first come to terms with the fact that the sf canon keeps us mired in a worldview defined by racial capitalism. Or, as Thomas sums up so perfectly at the end of her book, “emancipating the dark fantastic requires decolonizing our fantasies and our dreams. It means liberating magic itself. For resolving the crisis of race in our storied imagination has the potential to make our world anew” (175).—Dan Hassler-Forest, Utrecht University
Pulp Pandemic.“The year is 2020”: sometime in the future, the apocalypse ... oh, wait, that’s now, and the future collapses back on to the present yet again, catching us flatfooted just as it always does.
“No one can escape”: we’re all in this together, aren’t we? It’s no time to be a rugged individualist (besides, humanity looks pretty good, if very white, in a body-hugging futuristic fuschia thing with built-in high-heeled mules.)
“The invasion from COVID-19”: it comes from outside and penetrates our abjected bodies (no wonder humanity is played by a girl) and destroys them from within ... oh, wait again, it’s the Anthropocene and we’re at least partially responsible (some of us more than others) for the emergence of these alien colonizers. So much for the idealized “clean and proper” bodies (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror [1982], 8) of our human exceptionalism. Things have become weirdly intimate. As far as the virus is concerned, the pandemic is a feature of the times and not a bug.
There are many ways to insert the pandemic into discourse—as an unintended consequence of the Anthropocene, as a punishment from some disembodied Superpower, as a world-wide health emergency, as fake news, as the eventful outing of deeply embedded social inequalities, as very large-scale geopolitics, as the confirmation of Foucauldian biopolitics—and each has its own implications. I want to make a point here, by no means a new one, about how science fiction can function as a discursive mode of the social imaginary, in contrast to and in conjunction with its work as a narrative genre. As “science-fictionality,” sf is a performative discourse, “a response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction” (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction [2008], 2). Pace Fredric Jameson’s classic commentary, this does more than simply historicize the present; it also encourages us to consider the shape of things to come and to think carefully about how our own actions will inevitably contribute to that shape, even if, in Jameson’s terms, sf doesn’t really have the capacity to imagine “otherness and radical difference” (“Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” [SFS 9.2 (1982)], 153). This is how I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s powerful performative utterance: “we are now living in a science fiction novel that we are all writing together” (Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction [2014], ed. Gerry Canavan and Robinson, 255). This is more than metaphor; it’s also a persuasion to take some collective responsibility for where things—humans, trees, fish, rocks—are heading. Sf discourse, even in the iconography of pulp parody, appeals to a particular kind of meaning-making, one that, at its best, can help to recognize the current situation as an ongoing process in which the present is always becoming the future.
Because we’re writing an sf novel, “we” is also subject to change. The chapter we’re writing is the one about the global plague, the one we’re in right now; for now, of course, the most powerful player in this chapter is COVID-19. Because it’s sf, it’s almost impossible to imagine that we won’t somehow be different by the time we stagger through this apocalypse. We might be living the title of Joanna Russ’s great story, “When It Changed” (1972): this could be that moment when everything (or at least a whole lot) takes a new direction. The utopian strain in science fiction sees the opportunity to work toward the expansion of social and environmental justice; this would inevitably change us too. Russ’s title is actually about very negative changes, however, and the dystopian strain anxiously notes the possibilities for increased authoritarianism and ongoing ecological devastation. Almost as dismal, of course, and probably the odds-on likelihood, is the idea of a future that unfolds as simply more of the Same.
The COVID-19 pandemic is massively science-fictional. It is a species-level series of events propelling us into an unknown future, a vast process of weirdness and defamiliarization, a veritable hyperobject (Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects [2013]) of estrangement. If, for whatever reasons of human limitations, all we end up with is more of the Same on the other side of this, it will have been a tragic failure of the performative imagination, our failure as authors of the novel we’re currently writing/living together. We should not be trying to (re)write a “new normal”—our epigraph should be “Things will never be the same again.”
(Turnabout is fair play: my colleague Sylvie Bérard recently gave a talk titled “La Science-fiction, un genre contagieux.”)—Veronica Hollinger, SFS
Toward a Slow Science Fiction. The science of the pandemic is fast. Perhaps never before have the relays between science and society been so direct and so immediately perceptible to a public who can no longer deny that we are all participants—subjects and objects of a collective event that is highly dynamic, situated, global, and messy. As a novum that creates ripples at every level of social life, COVID-19 is both a material and a discursive entity that brings to light what Bruno Latour understands as “strange imbroglios of politics, science, technology, markets, values, ethics, facts, which cannot easily be captured by the word Science with a capital S” (Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies [Harvard UP 1999], 19). The figureheads of the pandemic are virologists, immunologists, and epidemiologists, such as Sotirios Tsiodras in Greece, Fernando Simón in Spain, Massimo Galli in Italy, Anthony Fauci in the US, and Christian Drosten in Germany, who in the spring of 2020 have reluctantly entered the public stage as explainers-in-chief, expert facilitators of what Isabelle Stengers calls “a public intelligence of science” (Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science [Wiley 2018], 14). What their widely received communiqués reveal in real-time—Drosten’s podcast interviews were screened almost daily from February to June and recently received a prestigious science journalism award—are the processual and provisional realities of science-in-the-making. Far from offering the miracle cure, the technological fix, or the unassailable fact, they provide a rare glimpse into how scientific knowledge production works in a nonlinear situation where the parameters are constantly changing in response to ever-new data and often conflicting interpretations. In other words, the pandemic accentuates that science is messy, embedded, and plural, especially when its results are immediately fed back into a public milieu that has little in common with idealized laboratory conditions. Let me argue that this, in fact, is not an image of fast, capital S Science; the pandemic calls for a slow, lowercase science attuned to its attachment to the social and aware of the preliminary status of the answers it provides.
Stengers makes a passionate plea for precisely such a “slow science,” a “demanding operation that would reclaim the art of dealing with, and learning from, what scientists too often consider messy, that is, what escapes general, so-called objective, categories” (120). The proponents of a slow science are “civilised scientists” who “would make it public, a matter of exoteric knowledge, that the reliability of their results is related to matters of concern as well as to competent knowledge; and that the very particular conditions required by the latter come at the price of ignoring what may be important factors outside the laboratory” (101). One might justifiably object that the pace of science during the pandemic is the very opposite of slow, proceeding on the heels of accelerated pre-publications, limited case studies, and sometimes hasty interpretations with little time for proper peer review. Yet the same science also comes with an unprecedented degree of public discourse, a circumspect engagement with “facts” as temporary coagulations of ongoing collective debate, and a reluctance to promise “a return to normal.” In their resistance to the simplifications of conservative pundits rushing for headlines, the scientists of the pandemic seem to echo the slow science call for “time to digest” and “time to misunderstand each other” (98). “Slow science,” as Stengers emphasizes, “does not provide a ready-made answer; it is not a pill. It is the name for a movement in which many paths to recovery might come together” (124).
Beyond the polarity of an impending normalization or apocalypse, the scientists of the pandemic are spokespeople for the uneasy recognition that we may have to learn to live with the virus. Following this line, it has already become a truism that the pandemic and the ecological crisis are structurally related. Both demand the difficult task of coming to terms with what David Abram calls “the invisibles”—the unseen dimensions of influence that ceaselessly “structure and transform the breathing terrain we inhabit” (“The Invisibles: Toward a Phenomenology of the Spirits,” The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey [Routledge 2014], 127). Slow science, as understood by Stengers, acknowledges the same condition of reciprocal exchange as its modus operandi. Rooted in an “ecology of partial connections,” the participants of slow science “need to learn how to connect with each other in order to learn and draw new consequences from each other’s experience” (Stengers 127). Agency in this setup does not sit in the individual but emerges as a property of “assemblages,” a condition that Stengers finds condensed in the mantra “She changes everything She touches, and everything She touches changes” (130).
What would it mean, then, for science fiction to take slow science as the premise of its post-pandemic imaginary? What would a slow science fiction look like that does not home in on the dystopian or glorified outcomes of scientific innovation but instead highlights the reality of science-in-the-making as a public, hesitant, circulatory, and contingent process? Such a slow science fiction would integrate aspects of hard, mundane, social, and utopian sf aesthetics. It would not provide easy answers, nor recapitulate the instructional mandate of Gernsback’s scientifiction; instead, it would portray science itself as an exercise in narrative and discursive negotiation. Stengers’s book ends with a call for “other tales, for a weaving of regenerative, slightly transgressive imaginations” (156). If in the wake of the pandemic a type of slow science fiction were to answer this call, it might be informed by the ecology of touch in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993)—a literalization of Stengers’s understanding of assemblage if there ever was one, famously opening with the lines “All that you touch/ You Change/ All that you Change/ Changes you” (Parable of the Sower [Four Walls Eight Windows 2000] 3). If slow science fiction wants to hold on to the cybernetic organism, its ethics, like those of slow science, could proceed from the apprehension of a “life that perceives itself Changing” (Butler 126), an ongoing hybridization whereby the observer always participates in the fluctuating system she observes. As with the pandemic, there is no outside of the laboratory. Everyone is exposed, everyone exposes.—Moritz Ingwersen, University of Konstanz
Science Fiction in the Time of Face Masks: On Chen Qiufan’s “The Smog Society.” Through the wearing of masks and public announcements in the grocery store reminding us to stay six feet apart, there is the overwhelming sense that we are living in a slow-motion science fiction, as we retrain ourselves to form new habits of distanced interaction that make space for the invisible corporeality of the virus. Yet despite all the talk of social distancing, it is precisely distance itself that science fictionality has lost in this moment—for to call the now “science fictional” is to collapse the two into one, to experience the science fictional as immanent. Distance has been key to certain definitions of science fiction, such as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s description of science fictionality as “characterized by two linked forms of hesitation, a pair of gaps” (The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, [Wesleyan UP 2008], 3).The first gap concerns the space between an imaginary future and its actualization, while the second gap concerns the ethical and social implications of a possible change. Together, these gaps create an attitude or mood of anticipation, the expectation of something not yet realized. It follows, then, that the continuing collapse between sf and life in the pandemic has the effect of neutralizing science-fictional thinking, of short-circuiting its critical function. Thus, while one response to the pandemic has been simply to watch and read a lot of pandemic-themed sf and learn the patterns, another response might be to answer the question: what kinds of science fictions are distant enough from COVID-19 so as to be able to retain their critical function?
I find myself reflecting on a story that I taught in Spring 2020 that is not directly about contagion, but about the experience of being masked and isolated from the world. Chen Qiufan’s short story “The Smog Society” (2015) follows Lao Sun, an aging and lonely man who is participating in a citizen science project to monitor and sample air pollution. The name Lao Sun has a nice crossover to English; Lao means “old” and Sun is a surname, but of course in English we associate “sun” with the sun in the sky. True to his name, Lao Sun is in the twilight of his life, reminiscing about his wife who left him and about how they began their life together happily, but gradually had less and less to say to each other.
Another character in the story is, arguably, the smog itself—described often through insect imagery as boring its way through everything and tunneling into the human body. Chen paints a visceral scenario of being saturated by smog, of the smog disrupting normal body functions including breathing and cognition. He writes:
the most immediate consequence of the smog was the sense of removal from the world. Whether you were dealing with people or things, you felt as though you were separated by a layer of frosted glass. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t really see or touch. That the masks meant to protect from the smog added a second layer was especially ironic.... The city was cocooned. The people were cocooned. (Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, ed. John Joseph Adams, trans. Ken Liu [Saga 2015] 425)
To say that the city and people are “cocooned” can be an image of horror (being wrapped up alive). But it can also suggest hope and transformation—if one can emerge from the cocoon reborn. And I think right now we can all relate to the experience of wearing a mask and feeling separated from others, wondering what will emerge from the cocooning of the lockdown.
Yet the novum of the story has to do with a literalization of the pathetic fallacy. The Smog Society completes a report that describes a “bioelectric field” (428) associated with the smog, noting that smog lingers in traffic corridors but lightens in areas with young children. This leads the scientists to conclude that smog is not only “caused by how we feel” (428) but that it also causes how people feel, caught in an out-of-control feedback loop of intensification. This makes the smog anthropogenic in two senses: it is produced not only by the pollution of human technologies, but also by human psychic conditions. Harrowing as this is, the anthropogenic nature of the smog is also what makes it accessible to change, if one can figure out how to break through the feedback loop of depression-causing and depression-caused smog.
At the end of the story, Lao Sun puts on a mask and rides his bike to visit Sunflower Daycare. As people react to him with smiles and stares, we find out that the bike “was festooned with lights and streamers of every color … like a Brazilian parrot zipping through a desert, brilliant, colorful, and noisy” (432). When he gets to Sunflower Daycare the children stop their games and press their faces to the window to watch him. The story ends with him playing a melody “so cheerful that it verged on the absurd” (433), causing the children to laugh “unabashedly, singing, dancing, crowing, every bare face shining golden” (433). In a way, Lao Sun does become a sun, putting on a joyful performance which causes all the faces of the children, or sunflowers, to turn to him in a kind of heliotropism. Yet they too are not just plants but also little suns, their “face[s] shining golden” (433), a force for helping break through the psychic and physical smog. “Lao Sun looked up at the sky. The smog seemed to be thinning too” (433).
Masks don’t have to produce only social isolation or a barrier. A more colorful or decorative mask can provoke interaction and other social responses—like causing children to laugh. I think about this when I see small children around sporting unicorn-themed or rainbow-hued masks of their own. Yet as Lao Sun stands and juggles outside, “breathing heavily” (433), we remember that the clown mask has replaced his filtration mask, and that he has sacrificed his health for the sake of inciting joy. Though he has broken through the psychic feedback loop of the smog, it materially returns to affect his body.—Melody Jue, University of California, Santa Barbara
Pandemic Cinema. A pandemic called the “Italian flu” sweeps the planet. Images of dead animals, civil disorder, overwhelmed hospitals, and devastated cities sweep across the screen. Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus (1980), a Japanese disaster film with an international cast of well-known faces, shows its age but still seems relevant. Can it, and motion pictures like it, give us insight into how to handle and survive a plague with our humanity intact? A significant plot point is the origin of the superpowered virus, MM88, in a US-based military bioweapons lab. Capitalist greed and bad luck inject it into the world. The virus’s provenance in a US lab is a fictional variation of the current conspiracy theory blaming the new coronavirus on a military lab in China. Cinematic fictions such as Virus guide the public response to COVID-19, conditioning our fears of the world we live in.
The film, based on Fukkatsu no hi [Day of Resurrection, 1964] by sf novelist Satyō Komatsu, represents a global cycle of disaster movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Fueled by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, pandemic films joined invasion and future war stories as a way of processing both the twin threats of superpower competition and domestic social change (in first-world nations). Virus takes us into the Oval Office and gives us a government riven by military paranoia, scientific complicity, and political impotence. It is an unlucky mix that dooms human civilization. A frustrated but well-meaning president wonders why any reasonable person would foster this situation. A senator gives him a dry response: “History can tell you that a rational mind is not always a prerequisite for a position of power.”
Other near-contemporary films in this vein mine similar territory: The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Omega Man (1971), and Night of the Living Dead (1968). If we consider that they are reflections of historical epidemics such as, for example, the recently recalled 1918 pandemic (the Spanish flu), it is tempting to ask what kinds of lessons can be drawn from them. Can they be used as thought experiments to reveal solutions to our own physical and social predicaments? Can pandemics, both real and imagined, be used to advocate for or create more just, equitable societies?
The current COVID-19 pandemic has given us stern notice about the fragile state of public health in the United States. It is a system that rations care unequally. Race and class determine the probability of life or death. We also know that while the virus is blind, information about it is politicized. Science fictions that privilege competence, expertise, and good will cannot account for a reality in which corruption, stupidity, and grievance hinder viable solutions. In the pandemic film, the spectacular decimation of the human race is a way out of this bind. The surviving remnant is reduced to a state that limits their ability to harm either themselves or the planet. They must work together or face species extinction.
Virus gives us a modestly hopeful ending: some remnant of the human race will survive. The last few men and women of its international cast cling together, with their children, in Antarctica. One of them has created a vaccine that will make it possible for survivors to repopulate a world devastated by both the virus and a final, automated nuclear exchange. The film intends that extreme as a cautionary, reassuring lesson: a corrupt and arrogant species has been winnowed (the bad guys all die), but their children will have a second chance at civilization. There is no guarantee, however, that the next generation will grow in a direction that ensures benevolence or fair play.
In fiction and film, the global disaster genre is more likely to inspire reactionary solutions. The fictional business of destroying the world is often a critique of contemporary society. It sweeps away those things that make its authors, and their readers, uneasy. That disease may be inspired by social ideas such as women’s rights, racial equality, democratic governance, distributive justice, or modernity itself. In reference to the genre of British disaster novel represented by John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), this space-clearing gesture has been called the “cozy catastrophe.” What is saved is a world in which patriarchy, whiteness, and a feudal economy rebuild human civilization. It is a vision that finds hope in the ruin of a world that needs to be reminded who is boss. It is women, most directly, who must be reminded of their place, but the convenient devastation of non-white populations is a clear demonstration of who else must be brought to heel.
Virus touches on this potential in a scene that establishes how the last humans will survive the MM88 pandemic in their Antarctic redoubt. The disease strands 850 men on the continent with eight women. The inevitable happens when the women confront the governing council, demanding justice for a raped colleague. The response is a deliberately, as well as inadvertently, awkward discussion of how the relation between men and women must change, given the drastic difference in their numbers. The lone woman on the council speaks—for the first and last time—to endorse the idea that “natural,” consensual pair-bonding is no longer possible. If this were a novel, we would be treated to tendentious moralizing, justifying this position as the only way to insure human survival. Virus instead treats us to comic scenes of confused paternity and tragic episodes of pained longing. In either case the scenario renders any dignified alternative unthinkable.
An infectious disease that ravages entire populations is a ruler that writers and filmmakers have used to measure the human condition. A goodly number of us will have read, for example, Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947)in high school. Revisiting that story will help us understand the limits of human ability and sympathy in the face of an existential threat. In science fiction the plague narrative is often the precondition for adventure and the prelude to new society built on the ruins of the old. The pandemic is often a social-Darwinist eucatastrophe. It consoles the conservative heart by wiping away anything contrary to its preferences. This expectation makes sf a difficult genre for those of us hoping for thought experiments that inspire progressive solutions.—De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Indiana University
Racism in the Time of COVID-19. Ready or not, the pandemic has arrived. It lingers and malingers with us now, months later into the summer, and it will continue to thrive well into the future of the US and the globe. Fortunately, science fiction has forecast and reflected upon infectious diseases throughout its history. See Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) for some of the fascinating answers to various plagues from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. You will see panicked reactions from the public and the same from governments in these imaginary scenarios. Sometimes you will see people working together to survive, but more frequently you won’t. Differences divide people in these stories. Our science fictions highlight the fears of a biological extinction caused by nature, brought about by an alien attack, or developed in a lab.
Right now, we have a case of interest convergence, to borrow an idea from Critical Race Theory, where the white racial regime in the US, to maintain collective, enduring, and steady legal, cultural, and social power over its Black and Brown peoples, has manipulated a presidential election to place the worst possible person in power at the worst possible time in the country’s 244 years of existence—and during a global health crisis.
It feels like we are in a science-fiction novel.
Celebrity businessman, womanizer, and racist Donald J. Trump (let’s call him Orange Hitler) has stoked a much older, more insidious and tenacious social disease that has debilitated the US for centuries—racism. Aside from telling his die-hard constituents to inject disinfectant, to take the disproven and dangerous antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine to combat COVID-19, and not to wear masks in public spaces, he has done his best to spread the disease of racism by recently calling COVID-9 the “Kung-Flu”—clear and obvious racist language demeaning all Asians regardless of nationality—at his failed rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 20 June 2020. In a political maneuver to abate racial tensions, he moved his rally from its scheduled date of 19 June, popularly known as Juneteenth among Black Americans in celebration of the end of slavery in Texas nearly two and half years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation; and he even had the brazen mendacity to claim he deserves recognition for making Juneteenth “very famous”!
Like COVID-19, an incurable racism had been spreading yet again, if it ever truly subsided, at Trump’s behest. Disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown people are impacted by the disease, across the entirety of the social spectrum. The resources to fight this pandemic simply don’t exist for most Black Americans because of the wealth gap generated by centuries of systemic oppression embedded in the fabric of America—a condition that enables White race patriots to stand on the steps of their respective state government buildings fully decked out with nine-millimeter handguns and AR-15 rifles, looking like terrorists as they demand that their governors open up their states for businesses without consequence. The economy is actually valued more than human life as supported by Orange Hitler. These White supremacists look like Deathtroopers from Rogue One (2016), but a Black person in a hoodie is deemed a more credible threat. While I already think of racism as a socially designed pathogen with high lethality that has spread throughout the world, this isn’t science fiction, this is our reality! Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, chased, hunted, and murdered by two White men for jogging in a suburb on the Atlantic Coast of southern Georgia on 23 February 2020; Breonna Taylor, a Black woman, murdered by narcotics police who raided her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, with a “no-knock” search warrant in the early morning hours on 13 March 2020; and George Floyd, a Black man, murdered by a cop kneeling on his neck while he was face down and handcuffed on a street in Minneapolis for nearly nine minutes pleading for air on 25 May 2020. The hyperreal violence loop continues unabated during this pandemic and the US is ground zero—while simultaneously asking its Black and Brown citizens to risk their lives by returning to work to re-open the country early to avoid economic collapse. And now President Trump threatens to quell nationwide nonviolent, peaceful protestors demanding racial justice with the full might of the US military. The world watches America as its deferred dreams explode yet again.
We often hear people touting the US’s medical system as the best in the world, but I don’t even want to imagine the financial cost of surviving a COVID-19 hospitalization, let alone the psychological one for any person in this country. People first should be a global mantra!
Looked at another way, political and social resistance beats death at the hands of these diseases, and science fiction can help us see racism and the harm it causes to people and to the environment in which we breathe. Butler partially envisions such a scenario in her Parable novels (1993, 1998), in which a multicultural and multiracial band of people, led by black teenager Lauren Olamina, are crazy enough to start a new religion called Earthseed in a right-wing, failed, Christian America. Despite the convergence of political, environmental, and economic crises, social bonding can make us stronger together and see us through the global chaos. Change is the necessary cultural mechanism for humanity’s very survival as we reshape the forthcoming world.
Listen, I sometimes wonder if racism, the daily stress it causes me when I set foot out the door, will kill me one day; or, worse, my wife or one of my sons. Most Black people do wonder this very thing on a daily basis. Of course, I simply don’t know. But Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd didn’t know either. That’s my point about the racism of White supremacy. Just because you don’t see it in your daily life doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It certainly exists in our science fiction. You don’t even have to look very hard. Think about robots, aliens, or zombies ... and you are there! Read some Black-authored science fiction, Indigenous-authored science fiction, Latinx-authored science fiction, Asian-authored science fiction, Queer-authored science fiction, and reflect on the alternative futurisms they provide: petite planets (raced, gendered, queered, spiritualized, etc.) where you can find answers. Then let us hope, let us be brave, and let us talk about racism as we stand together during this global health crisis.—Isiah Lavender III, University of Georgia
COVID Blast. What do sf and literature more broadly teach us of time, and how might their lessons help to make COVID a genuine transition from the hegemonic stalemate of the present? “No one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences,” writes Albert Camus in The Plague (1948; Vintage 1991, 37). His words reach back to the birth of cholera in the Sundarbans of the nineteenth century under the British Raj, and forward into the jungles of the Belgian Congo, as HIV emerged there in the early twentieth century. Colonialism hasn’t been free: the so-called colonized know this, living through apocalypse. How many iterations of plague will teach history’s ecological resonance to the colonizer? “It is a just disease,” says a Mexican priest, Father Jude, to a Spanish physician in the eighteenth-century storyworld of Alejandro Morales’s novel Rag Doll Plagues (Arte Publico 1992, 21).When the doctor expresses disbelief that a disease can be just, Jude explains: “I mean this disease does not exclusively kill Indians, like the many European plagues your people brought to the New World” (21). Camus might respond to Jude that such logic gives Europeans headaches: “A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away” (37). In The Plague, the virus is akin to Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic (1975), that which defies belief—and yet demands both belief and action if we are to survive (morally, physically) in a world where plague lives. Camus warns, “it doesn’t pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions” (37).
A humanism that cannot see beyond the human scale—beyond things “made to man’s measure”—is fatal. A humanism that fails to understand the slipstream of past/present/future, time that is intergenerational, historical, and ecological, is also fatal.
To invoke Kyle Whyte’s discussion of settler-colonialists’ limited sense of time, the worlds that our ancestors dreamed of giving to us, where “we” are the beneficiaries of empire, are worlds where the Indigenous are marginalized and dispossessed and, inextricably, they are worlds of climate crisis, mass extinction, pandemic (“Indigenous science [fiction] for the Anthropocene,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1.1-2 [2018], 224-42). As Sonia Shah reminds us in Pandemic (2016), the loss of wildlife habitat and the global wild animal trade create ideal conditions for viruses to spill over into humans. Within the framework of global extractivism, spillover and “jump” (i.e., viruses jumping species, to humans) are new words for haunting. Bertha Mason paces in the attic, Mother Legree haunts her prodigal son—in Gothic fictions, we Euro-Americans know intergenerational time. In genre fictions, including sf, we tend to know interdependence, too, with other humans and even other forms of life. Ghosts, like plagues, are explicitly embodied and historical. The ahistorical humanism of those who fail to imagine the dreams of our ancestors, dreams that landed us in this moment, this plague, or to anticipate the dreams of our descendants—such ahistorical humanism is allied to a sociopathic, fatal freedom.
“No one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences,” says Camus, from his post-WWII philosophical milieu of absurdity and moral heroism. An ecological existentialism, to riff on Deborah Bird Rose’s concept (Wild Dog Dreaming 2011), celebrates moral heroism within post-humanist entanglements. How to live well within dense, more-than-human togetherness? The suburban yard sign that many of us see daily this COVID year, “We’re All in This Together,” ought to be understood as provocation, even threat. Its message sounds a death-knell to crumbling hegemonies: neoliberalism, individualism, Americanism, humanism. “We’re All in This Together” names the central insight of the Gothic, even of horror. The abject—vomit, mucous, the corpse—these are symptoms of more-than-human togetherness. What will it take to understand the homily of being “in this together” as a novum, under which all living, from economy to culture, shifts? The stock market does not read the room, says the New York Times (6 June 2020), because the very rich continue to be immune to pestilence. After all, there is no “just disease.” So many Black and Brown lives taken by COVID, so many unemployed, and the market soaring. Its health is declared at the start and endpoint of every news report, like the sun and moon, transcendent. Whose nostalgia perpetuates this framing?
Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018) names plague as the “break,” the “severance” or “disturbance of the present” that Fredric Jameson associates with futurity in Archaeologies of the Future (Verso 2005, 231). Ma understands pandemic as a break with the present. But she also sees the present as itself a disease of the past, an emanation of nostalgia and habit. Ma’s Chinese-American protagonist Candace contrasts herself—an immune survivor—to victims of Shen Fever, the fictional illness born in a free-trade zone that renders its victims capable only of repetitive rituals, such as setting a table. “The fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us?... Our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop” (160). In Severance, the radical act of imagining a break with the present immediately falls to nostalgia, such that Ma’s novum isn’t a novum, not really. In Severance, a facility for collective living touted by one survivor turns out to be just the suburban mall where he loitered as a teen, as he has failed to launch from nostalgia. Candace’s break with the present leaves her striding through an urban landscape of wrecked cars—an imitation of the zombie apocalypse stories she has criticized as irrelevant. Yet we can’t really blame her for taking pleasure in familiar infrastructures, warm media. Emotionally stranded between her parents’ Fujian homeland and a plague-ridden New York City, abused by a fellow-survivor, she hides out in intertextuality. Perhaps there is only the present, and the present is looping memories.
What can sf do with our current break in the present, with COVID—and how can it resist the return of hegemonies so few can afford? As one of the most resilient forms of subcultural, counterfactual thinking worldwide, sf has done pretty well at puncturing settler temporalities and spatial logics. More than many genres, including so-called serious fiction, it remembers intergenerational time, respects the intimate omnipresence of aliens (i.e., marginalized humans, more-than-humans), and showcases the complex pleasures of the Social. Also, it calls communities of practice into being. More of all that! And please, more eroticized futures—not as blueprints for politics, but as objects to desire, to lift us from the fever of memory, over the break.—Stephanie LeMenager, University of Oregon
Don’t Allow Troubled Visions in Science Fiction to Become Reality. China’s science-fiction community was the earliest group on the Chinese literary scene to respond to the COVID-19 crisis when it officially began in January 2020. On the one hand, this community foregrounded discussions of both local and international science-fiction narratives and films about virus pandemics. On the other, it thought beyond the current COVID-19 moment, actively pondering future scenarios that we might create through our choices going forward about how to implement new advances in science and technology.
In early February 2020, the Chinese sf writer and critic Wu Yan gave a lecture entitled “The Long Shadow of Plagues in Chinese Science Fiction.” He surveyed several Chinese sf narratives on the theme of microbial epidemics: Gu Junzheng’s London Plague (1939), Ye Yonglie’s “Performance Not Postponed” (1978), Wu Yan’s own Waterborne Invasion of the Needle-Virus (1991), Wang Jinkang’s Cross (2009), and Bi Shumin’s Corona Virus (2012). In addition to the works mentioned by Wu, Xiao Xinghan’s The Xiayang Era (2020), Chen Qiufan’s “Zombie Inc.” (2009), and several works by Han Song—The Association of SARS Survivors (2003), “Aids: An Airborne Disease” (2012), and the three novels in The Hospital Trilogy (2016-2018)—also feature microbial epidemics. In an interview published on the website China Writer Net on 31 March 2020, Wu explained the enduring appeal of pandemic fiction: fears about the collapse of society and even human extinction, along with doubts about whether our scientific advances could actually come to the rescue in the event of such serious crises.
Later that same month, Gu Bei, a member of the Shanghai Pudong Science Fiction Association, interviewed about two dozen Chinese sf writers for the series “Microbial Epidemics from the Perspective of Science Fiction Writers.” The interviewees include such internationally renowned writers as Liu Cixin, Wang Jinkang, Han Song, Chen Qiufan, and He Xi. Gu asked each of the writers the same four questions: What do you make of COVID-19? What sort of positive impact might the COVID-19 pandemic have on human society? Could you envision what sort of measures humankind might eventually adopt to deal more effectively with a future pandemic? What type of future pandemic would be the most terrifying?
The answers were surprisingly similar from one writer to the next. First of all, the novelists agreed that humankind had to transcend narrow national interests and work together as a whole to overcome a major pandemic. They seem to echo the oft-heard sentiment that “we are all in this together.” As Han Song noted in another interview on the pandemic published on the website Xinhua Daily Tele News on 22 February 2020, “From SARS to COVID-19, we have seen humankind as a collective force marshalling political mobilization, international cooperation, and a range of socioeconomic and scientific strategies. At the same time, we must also recognize the limits of what humankind can achieve.”
Another common point that Chinese sf writers made was about environmental ethics. They stressed the ways in which COVID-19 has put us in awe of mother nature’s power, forced us to reexamine our interactions with nature in general and animal species in particular, and compelled us to question the arrogance and recklessness with which humans have cavalierly dominated the planet’s flora and fauna. Contagious viruses have been one of nature’s ways of revealing the serious limitations of humankind’s instrumental domination of other species. Humankind should view itself as one tiny constituent of the biosphere, instead of its dominant species that can overlook the consequences of that reckless domination.
As to what the novelists saw as the most terrifying prospect of a future pandemic, their unanimous response was a lab-created viral pathogen. For example, Liu Cixin remarked to Gu Bei that the most dangerous viruses of the future would be lab-created viruses engineered by genetic splicing or nanotechnology. These viruses would be significantly distinct from natural viruses. Natural viruses do not specifically target homo sapiens, and often die off or subside when they run out of suitable hosts to infect. Lab-created viruses, however, could possibly be weaponized to target humans alone, or maybe even a specific group of people. These viruses could be as easily transmissible as measles and even before symptoms arise, as with COVID-19. Wang Jinkang noted that viruses could be engineered to overwhelm the human immune system while remaining resistant to any vaccine that medical scientists might develop. He Xi envisioned probably the most dangerous scenario of all, in which a military lab would use AI to complicate the transmission pathways of lab-created viruses. Chen Qiufan went so far as to conceptualize a type of virus that would spread from one person’s mind to another, as explored in his novella A History of Hallucination (2015).
Han Song has warned that a pandemic triggered by a lab-created super virus could spread so rapidly that its death toll would be devastating in a matter of days. Homo sapiens might even become extinct within a week or so. Han concluded that we should be concerned about the possibility of viral pathogens and the disastrous consequences that would follow in the event of their release. We should try our best to prevent these troubling visions of science fiction from becoming reality.—Hua Li, Montana State University
“It’s Over, It Ain’t Going Any Further”: Antidotes to the End in the Time of the Rona. It’s the end of the world! Apocalypse! Dystopia! The horrific absurdity of this new reality and normal—crises colliding, piling up, multiplying exponentially—things sliding, as Leonard Cohen once darkly prophesied, in all directions: a dizzying matrix of collapse.
But whose world, exactly, was collapsing? How “new,” really, was this “new” reality—for whom, and in what ways?
Among other dis-eases, the Spaniards who arrive with Columbus bring a virulent apocalyptist-utopian narrative which they apply to the “New World” they’ve “discovered.” According to the vision of the future in the Book of Revelations, arrival in these “new” lands represents the first of the prophesied events that will lead to apocalypse, then utopia. Later, the Puritans similarly transmit their own apocalyptist-utopian take on the “New World” and their role in it. The horrific world-ending consequences of this future-orientation are immediate for Indigenous peoples subjected to genocide, and for African peoples stolen and brought to work these stolen lands as slaves. Apocalyptic catastrophe quickly unfolds through rapacious greed unleashed by utopian-inflected European imperialism and colonization, which makes dystopias of others’ worlds in the pursuit of biblical/mercantile “utopias” and a humanist self-construction premised on brutally violent dehumanization of these same peoples.
The “dystopia” of our current moment stretches back through centuries of the same anti-utopian virus concealing itself in mutating sheaths of New World Order utopianism. The Spaniards’ sixteenth-century El Dorado. The Puritans’ seventeenth-century New Jerusalem. John O’Sullivan’s nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny. Friedrich Hayek’s twentieth-century Neoliberal Free Market mapped in counterpoint to cautionary dystopian invocations of rising socialism as The Road to Serfdom (1944), a decade after Aldous Huxley’s classic sf novel Brave New World (1932).
This Brave New World has never been New.
Even as “post-apocalypse” narratives continue to proliferate, we must remember that the “post” in this term is relative. As Kul Wicasa scholar Nick Estes reminds us in his analysis of recent Standing Rock resistance as part of a centuries-long fight: Our History Is the Future (Verso 2019). And what of the etymology of “apocalypse” itself, from the Greek apokaluptein—to “uncover” or “reveal”? What has been uncovered? What has been revealed?
What has been revealed, for example, in the murder, pillaging, slavery, genocide, of this dystopian half millennium?
What has been uncovered in the mass masking of COVID-19—half a million dead, millions infected—disproportionately the poor and People of Color, “essential” workers who cannot afford to stay or work from home while maintaining “social distance”?
What has been revealed in the unmasking of police brutality and corporatist state violence as ongoing histories of white supremacist conquest, through defiant weeks of unprecedented popular resistance in support of Black Lives Matter?
When California, where I live, ordered lockdown on 19 March 2020, thousands of Mexican and Central American migrant refugee children and families were already locked up in concentration camps across this country. In 2019, at least 70,000 migrant children were processed in the US, many separated from their families and held in crowded, dangerous, unsanitary cages, which predictably has led to widespread illness, abuse by guards, disappearances (thousands remain unaccounted for), and death.
This is not a dystopian sf scenario. This is not Children of Men (2006). This is our children, right now.
And it is generations of Native and Black children and families during these 579 years of genocidal practice, too.
A primary logical flaw in the apocalyptist rhetoric of the Book of Revelation is the failure (refusal) of its utopian future to embrace the temporal contradictions of flux and cyclicality, a kind of infectious ontological dis-ease with change. This dis-ease with change manifests in teleological efforts to contain history in response to these anxieties. This is what is “revealed” and “uncovered” in Revelation: God’s “Truth,” which makes “sense” of history through the kind of measurement Leonard Cohen laments in “The Future” (1992) as the “blizzard of the world” leaves “nothing you can measure anymore.” Efforts at quelling anxieties of Cohen’s dystopian “white man dancing” amidst “phantoms” and “fires on the road” are premised on bringing history to a complete, final end. His line, “It’s over, it ain’t going any further,” articulates the apocalyptist’s anxiety-fueled final refuge. Eschatological before all else, Biblical apocalypse obsesses over the end—not simply of time, or humankind, or the world—but “end” itself as a rhetorical mechanism to assuage anxieties about the future and its inevitable horizons of change.
But as with any anxiety-based reaction, such responses generate precisely what is most feared—in this case: nihilism, war, plague, the “end of the world.”
And this brings me to what I value most, as a rhetorician, in what science fiction does, particularly in critical dystopian forms that have emerged since the 1980s. At its most rhetorically effective, it confronts this anti-utopian narrowing of possibility toward “the end” by blasting it open to multiple possibilities, maneuvering instead toward divergence, proliferation, ambiguity. It refuses efforts to end history by extrapolating and playing with possibilities in an ever-changing yet cyclical history of past, present, and future in perpetual narrative play—unfolding, doubling back, rearranging.
In so doing, sf doesn’t just engage change—it makes this engagement a central concern and driving force. As the “scraps” of utopian vision in Octavia E. Butler’s critical dystopias, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), remind us, “The only lasting truth is change,” and unlike the apocalyptists’ fixed future (and God), moreover, “God is Change” (Parable of the Sower [Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1993] 3). Butler’s embrace of change is not about passive, disempowered acceptance. Rather, it is a kind of antidote to anti-utopia, premised on changing our very relation to change itself, through the narratives we construct and live in response to change.
These arguments are not original, but they bear revisiting. Critical science fiction’s rhetorical mechanisms remind us that productive engagements with change require participation in a cyclical, organic process of radically collaborative effort beyond the brutal machinations of apocalyptist thinking. As a kind of rhetorical training that opens and cultivates new modes of perception, science-fictional thinking can help develop abilities to enter these engagements—with change, contradiction, paradox—so that we might contribute positively to these processes in agentive collaboration across time, space, and ways of being/becoming.—Rubén R. Mendoza, California State University, Northridge
Dreams of the Better. On 28 May 2020, The New Yorker uploaded a cartoon to its Facebook page that depicted an individual sitting under a tree pulling petals off a flower in a manner akin to the game of “Loves Me/Loves Me Not.” The caption accompanying the falling petals simply said: “Dystopian future, utopian future; dystopian future, utopian future …” On the same day as this cartoon went online, global cases of COVID-19 had reached 5.7 million with over 350,000 deaths worldwide, more than 100,000 deaths in the United States of America, and a spike in Brazil that registered the second-highest number of cases globally at that time. In my home country of Canada, cases in the same period hit almost 90,000, with 6,877 fatalities (Maryam Shah, Global News, 28 May 2020).This was actually a decline in reported cases, which, despite the tragedy, provided evidence of the benefits of a concerted strategy to deal with the pandemic. Lest Canadians felt smug, however, when looking at the (mis)handling of COVID-19 by our southern neighbors, just a week earlier Torontonians had flocked to Trinity Bellwood Park on the “May 24” civic holiday weekend. News websites were rife with condemnatory images like those crowded beaches and pool parties in California, Florida, and Lake of the Ozarks on the Memorial Day weekend. Torontonians sans masks preferred to abandon social-distancing protocols to enjoy the sun, the open air, and, quite likely, plenty of Corona, both beer and virus. Now, writing in late June, I’m discouraged by the prospect of a second or third wave around the corner in the fall while the coronavirus is upticking at alarming rates throughout the US—all while many politicians keep up with damage control and public spin.
One of the tasks contributors have been asked to consider for this roundtable is “what science fiction can do to help us recognize, theorize, and respond to dystopian tendencies and utopian possibilities within twenty-first century life made tangible and visible by the pandemic.” We are currently living through what has become common fare in literary dystopias, and are perhaps exhausted by the obvious failings of capitalist realism that the pandemic has highlighted. Noam Chomsky remarked in April that the pandemic is “another colossal failure of the neoliberal vision of capitalism. Massive failure. If we don’t learn that lesson, it’s going to recur worse next time” (Cristina Magdaleno, Euractiv, 6 May 2020). Given the distressing willingness of huge swaths of the general public to reject the discomforts of social distancing in favor of beach parties and public events, I find myself longing for a concerted resurgence of positive or deliberately hopeful visions of the future. While I’m not demanding that science fiction nostalgically return to the so-called Golden Age, I find it harder these days to disagree with Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer in their introduction to the Hieroglyph Project anthology (2014), published by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University that “Big dreams—infectious, inclusive, optimistic dreams—are the vital first step to catalyzing real change in the world” (xxiii).
The world seems to be stumbling through what Kaja Silverman, in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), calls “historical trauma,” one that “interrupt[s] or even deconstitute[s] what a society assumes to be its master narratives” (55). As we navigate this historical trauma, I return to The New Yorker cartoon for inspiration. It is too simplistic to use a binary to categorize the social dreaming of utopianism (as any scholar of literary utopias will attest), just as it is too reductive to contrast “dystopian tendencies” and “utopian possibilities” without acknowledging the territory in between. The petals of our future do not need to alternate between “dystopia” and “utopia”; instead, we can consciously decide more petals need to be of the positive or optimistic variety than the negative.
I admit that perhaps I am simply tired of pessimistic, dystopian-leaning visions of the future (particularly in film and television), and the ease with which the nightmarish visual spectacle is embraced by a general public; but in the midst of the uncertainties and disappointments surrounding this pandemic we need science fiction to continue to provide not only big dreams or even better dreams but, rather, dreams of the better. They are imperative to help inoculate us from simply returning to the “normal” of master narratives that have repeatedly failed us on nearly every conceivable level. Contributors to this roundtable were asked how we can “mobilize the resources of sf to go beyond ‘virtue signaling’ and into practices of being, thinking, and acting at home and in the world.” I’m not a writer of science fiction, so my demands (or pleas) for science-fiction stories that are more explicitly optimistic in their orientation to the future—i.e., perhaps a concerted resurgence of the critical utopia—can easily be dismissed by those artists who are actually doing the hard work of creating these storyworlds. But as a scholar who regularly teaches science fiction and literary utopia courses, often to students who only have a faint grasp of the wondrous possibilities of the “fantastic” and whose exposure to these fictions is often of a dystopian variety, it seems the most tangible step towards mobilizing the resources of sf on a local level. I try to structure my courses around optimistic texts that emphasize dreams of the better because, in so doing, I can perhaps help my pandemic-era students who have been living in a dystopia to reorient themselves and become more optimistic about the future. But then again, maybe I’m just a dreamer?—Graham J. Murphy, Seneca College
Hope in a Time of Radical Change. I suspect I was like many others when, on 11 September 2001, while watching the hijacked 747 flying into the World Trade Center on the news, I had the uncanny feeling that the world was replicating science fiction. And during the past few months I have heard the same kind of sentiment expressed more than once about scenes of deserted urban spaces or mass burials brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. It is not that sf “predicts” such events. It is that one of the most worthy and ongoing projects of sf has been and, I expect, will continue to be that of undermining the status quo’s fantasies of its own inevitability and permanence. Sf tells us that things could be different—and what do you know! now and again they do become truly, radically, and very suddenly different.
The pandemic has disrupted the routines of capitalism like no other event in living memory. If ever there were something that exposed the shortcomings of neoliberal ideology’s unbounded faith in the free market, COVID-19 is it. The pandemic calls for cooperation, not competition. It calls for shutting down economies, not revving them up. Its global connectivity is both tied to and a horrifying counter-instance of the boasted efficiencies of globalization and the border-crossing regime of flexible accumulation. It presents a problem that the free market, far from being able to solve, can only make worse—as the overly hasty, politically motivated reopening of state economies across the American Sun Belt has gruesomely confirmed. Of course, for decades now global warming and the sixth great extinction have already presented themselves as problems that unfettered capitalism could only make worse, but their timescales are so extended, their threats so distant and dispersed, that they have proven much easier to ignore. One can only hope that in the wake of the pandemic the ideologues of short-term profit-grabbing presently in control of much of the world’s corporate economy, as well as the US’s executive branch and senate, will find their grip on the public’s faith shaken, destabilized, and increasingly discredited. And if that does indeed come to pass, sf’s insistence that, contra Margaret Thatcher, there is an alternative can surely play some part in it.
The pandemic shutdown also has had its weirdly utopian side. Amid the tremendous suffering the disease was causing, the shutdown showed us what Los Angeles and Delhi look like with clean air. It reminded residents of my island, Oahu, what the ocean looks like and smells like when tens of thousands of tourists are not baking and bathing at its edge. Around my home, with the near cessation of traffic noise, it seemed that the birds sang more loudly, and in the weeks of the shutdown here I saw two species of birds near my apartment that I had never seen in this part of town before. The grimy face of the carbon-intensive, car-dependent city faded from view just a bit, and an abiding set of gentler presences peeked out from under it. No doubt the smog will quickly return to Los Angeles, but the utopian, quasi-fantastic memory of a quieter and cleaner city should survive as an intimation of what must come about if mitigation of the long-term catastrophes of climate change and species extinction is ever to overcome the “realism” inhibiting current responses to them.
I put realism in scare quotes to suggest there is nothing truly realistic about the kind of practicality and common sense that concludes systemic change is impossible, that social injustice and inequality are insoluble problems, that providing universal health care and free education are pipe dreams, that aiming at sustainability rather than capital accumulation is doomed to failure because human beings are inherently selfish. In the same way that the pandemic has exposed the limits of free market individualism it has suggested the immense power of collective action—first in the massive shutdowns that slowed the virus’s spread in China, Europe, and parts of the US, then in the worldwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd. And what has been put at stake in promoting or resisting these collective actions have been assertions of truth and authority—assertions made by medical science, assertions about the history of slavery, and street-level experiences recorded by cell phone cameras. All the simmering conflicts between denialism and scientific evidence, between disinformation and the free press, between privileged ignorance and the witnessing of injustice that have characterized public discourse in recent years have boiled over in the pandemic. The borders joining and articulating fiction, fantasy, and reality have been set into flux, and if imaginative speculation can be said to have a proper home, it is in those contested borderlands.
We can rely on critical intellectuals such as Kim Stanley Robinson, N.K. Jemisin, Ted Chiang, and many others to take up the speculative challenge presented by the pandemic—which, we ought to remember, has still only begun, and may be with us for years rather than months to come. What is much less certain, but surely at least as important, is whether and how the mass-cultural entertainment industry will magnify, trivialize, misshape, or simply ignore the task of thinking through the pandemic. Will Hollywood blockbusters show us some superheroes who act as healers rather than soldiers? Battles against misinformation instead of contests of violence? Well, as I said earlier, one can only hope. The inescapable lesson of the pandemic is that things can change, and they can change suddenly. Combining imaginative speculation with hope gives us a chance to make change for the better.—John Rieder, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
Saving Anakin, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Darth Vader. I hate to begin this essay on the power of alternative thinking by being trite, but in a time of constant social upheaval, it’s the mundanities I keep returning to. So I’ll just get this one out of the way: what first drew me to science fiction, like many, was escapism. Darko Suvin calls it cognitive estrangement, I’ll call it strategic dissociation. I grew up in a household defined by the all-powerful patriarch so common as to be a trope (or evidence of an oppressive sociopolitical structure, as critical theory would have it), and, like many, I found comfort in grand narratives of good vs. evil in which scrappy underdogs became not only the heroes of their own stories but also of their own worlds, worlds populated by strange and fantastic creatures and unfettered by the mundane physics of Earth.
No longer able to postpone a long-awaited move, my brother relocated from Tampa to Los Angeles a couple of months into quarantine. He stayed on my couch while looking for a place to stay. We passed the nights at home by re-watching all of the major sf/fantasy franchises: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter (a matter of comically bad timing: we were halfway through when J.K. published her transphobic screed), and Star Wars, episodes 1-6. I was curious about which touchstone of my childhood would most draw me as an adult. Of course, I remembered the appeal of each and their big-budget worldbuilding: the cozy cottages and countryside parties of the hobbits (complete with a firework show that was actually charming), the sexy immortality of the elves and their forbidden romances, Harry’s patronus spells that not only fought on his behalf but gave him the truth of himself in starlit, animal form. But it was the Star Wars universe that both brought me closest to my childhood self and made me reconsider the relationship between the will to escape a personal hell and the collective work required to build a more ethically and emotionally capacious reality.
My main memory of watching Star Wars as a child was of my anger over Anakin’s character arc. I had felt a strong connection to Anakin as a kid—his affection for quirky robots like my own habit of caring for half-feral stray cats. When he becomes Darth Vader in the third film, I was incensed over how the film effectively abandons that earlier self, leaving Anakin to be not only spiritually overtaken but also physically disfigured by evil. Only upon re-watching the series as an adult was I able to understand the reasons behind my youthful fury, the connections between the film’s understanding of Anakin’s character development and my mom’s understanding of mine. In my own reality, my mom had long refused to stand up to my father for his violence, believing that continued obedience would eventually quell his rage. A willful child, I felt as if it was left to me to embody what should have been our shared outrage. I picked fights with him constantly, calling him out on every abuse, every overstep. I held on to my anger like Bilbo’s precious ring, needing it to remind myself that our current life was unacceptable, outrageous. The result was that my mom started to blame me for the family turmoil, saying that I was just like him, a replica.
In “Willful Parts: Problem Characters or the Problem of Character” (New Literary History, 42.2 [2011]), philosopher Sara Ahmed posits characterization as a Foucauldian technology of control, in which the formation of character “types” works less to accurately distinguish individuals within the world of a given story than to discipline them into the writer’s (and, presumably, reader’s) desired worldview. Ahmed focuses on the emergence of willfulness as a character trait throughout nineteenth-century bildungsromans. She traces how the attribution of willfulness to child protagonists—often girls—works to justify their punishment within the narrative and consequent maturation (or disciplining) into respectable forms of womanhood, such as domesticity and marriage. Ahmed, in turn, argues for a feminist counter-reading of willfulness, in which readers learn to see the willfulness of girl characters as a promising sign of resistance to the heteropatriarchal social conditions that both inform and are reinforced by the narrative. To a feminist reader, “the fictional character can thus reach out of fiction, almost like a hand that comes up and comes out of the grave. The hand coming up and coming out can signify not only persistence and protest, or persistence as protest, but also a connection to others” (249).
Is it Anakin who fails or is it the story that fails Anakin? I understand the resistance to the latter reading: he comes across as whiny, and one of his final acts before becoming Darth Vader is to slaughter children. It’s not as if the distance between a downtrodden white guy and a burgeoning Incel is impossible to conceive. But I also can’t overlook the way Anakin’s anger is narratively linked throughout the series to the violence of the Empire and to his frustration with the Jedi Council for refusing to let go of the way things have always been done. I think here of contemporary writers, often women of color, whose approach to sf storytelling gives the anger of their characters room to breathe, allowing a felt sense of injustice to serve as an Ahmedian signpost towards a better future rather than as evidence of an inherently antisocial disposition. N.K. Jemisin’s Essun in The Fifth Season (2017), whose anger over her husband’s murder of their son fuels the narrative energy of the trilogy towards more sustainable worlds; the disobedient daughters in Alice Sola Kim’s ghost story, “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying” (2018); and the vengeful wives and daughters threaded throughout Carmen Maria Machado’s mixed-genre collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017)—these are all characters who refuse to be put in their place.
COVID-19 has introduced many new, semi-fantastical characters and character types to the collective imagination. Dr. Fauci, the unfortunate bearer of not only the nation’s hopes for escaping the pandemic unscathed but also its ever-present daddy issues; the notorious Amy Cooper, almost comical in the ways in which her backstory—a hedge fund executive who reportedly only talks to her neighbors via the ventriloquized baby voice of her dog—lines up with the trope of the neurotic, entitled white woman; the target of her racist attack Christian Cooper, whose heroic backdrop is equally stranger than fiction: an Audubon Society board member, a superhero fanboy and comic writer, a queer activist; the healthcare hero; the selfish partygoer; the selfless mask-wearer. The creation of good vs. evil characters has been convenient insofar as it has allowed us to individualize fault and let the government off the hook.
While it has reinforced the individualistic and moralizing tendencies of the American imagination, the science-fictional reality rupture of the pandemic has also laid the groundwork for the reinvigoration of social organizing for better futures. Most notably, the nation-wide protests against white supremacy and the public decimation of confederate statues, sparked by a shared sense of outrage over the state execution of George Floyd, have energized a collective reckoning with the violent histories and current unsustainability of the white supremacist social order. From an antiracist perspective, the anger embraced by protestors reads not as a marker of evil (as some would attribute to contributing organizations like Antifa), but as evidence of an increasingly uncontainable and—most importantly—shared dissatisfaction with the nation’s origin story. See, for example, the widely shared photo by Steve Helber of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond, VA, “disfigured” by the expression of public outrage. Read against Anakin’s forced transformation into Darth Vader, disfiguration here quite literally signifies a collective rejection of the state’s figuration of white supremacists as national heroes.
I’m not arguing for a simple reversing of codes, the revision of heroes into villains and villains into heroes. I don’t need to imagine Anakin happy. I like him angry. What I want is a world in which his political outrage doesn’t have to mean his social death, leaving the very Empire who caused it to write a story in which his anger and his anger alone burned him alive.—Summer Sutton, University of California, Riverside
Snowclones. From the exploitation of the Athsheans in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1972), to the degraded Troglyte miners of Ardana in Star Trek’s “Cloud Minders” (1969), to the battles over water management between the racially coded Tharks (who are savage and green) and Red Martians (who are civilized and white) on Burroughs’ Barsoom in A Princess of Mars (1912), to the debased Fremen in Herbert’s Dune (1965), works of sf have frequently paired environmental degradation with human (or humanoid) exploitation. The tendency is so strong it provides a barebones narrative template: a valuable resource (lumber, zenite, water, spice mélange) exists on a distant planet (Athshea, Ardana, Mars, Arrakis) that a colonial power (Terra, the Federation, Helium, the Landsraad) wishes to possess by any means necessary. This leads to violence, and it is only through the mediation of a foreign-born agent (a Lyubov, a Kirk, a Carter, a Paul) that the cycle can be broken. There are exceptions and permutations, to be sure, but it is precisely because of its ability to mutate, even as it persists as a recognizable form, that I want to discuss this pattern in relation to our current crisis. To do so, I employ the concept of the “snowclone.”
In spite of its sf-sounding name—it conjures up Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen (1980) in my mind—the origin of the snowclone is linguistic. Glen Whitman coined the term in 2004 in response to Geoffrey K. Pullum, who in 1989 debunked the myth that Eskimo people have a large number of words for snow. For Pullum and his ilk, the snowclone is a tool of the idle because it provides a mad-libs approach to content creation, especially among lazy journalists: “If Eskimos have N words for snow,” Pullman writes in his disdainful example, then “Santa Cruzans must have even more for surf or whatever” (Language Log [27 Oct. 2003]; emphases in original).
I’m sympathetic to Pullum’s critique, to a point. Such patterns become swiftly tedious, especially in the news. The emergent snowclone headline of our day—“X in the time COVID-19,” where “X” could be “love,” “sex,” “cooking,” or any number of random nouns—makes me twitch. It is a simplistic reduction that manages to dumb down both Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) and the science of epidemiology. But the device is more versatile than its use in journalism would suggest. Simply put, a snowclone is a linguistic template for relating one thing (x) to another (y) by swapping out one or both elements of the original structure. To use an sf-appropriate example, one of the first bona fide snowclones, named as such, derives from Alien (1979): “In space (x), no one can hear you scream (y).” This yields a tagline for Disney’s Wall-E (2008): “In space, no one can hear you clean,” among many other absurdities.
Snowclones are necessarily banal, overtly referential, by definition unoriginal, and only evolve clumsily through the exchange of discrete verbal chunks. And yet here’s a statement that might make linguists cringe: these same features govern all syntax. In English, we can consider any verbal expression in terms of its temporal (syntagmatic) and specific (paradigmatic) structures. This is a gross reduction of the rich complexity of language. But such simplification helps us recover something fundamental: paradigmatic shifts—and a snowclone is nothing more—are the engines of literary evolution. And if that sounds too lofty, then at the very least they function as essential genre markers. Consider the following sentence, excerpted from the final pages of a novel about an intelligent young woman who falls in love with an older man: “Reader, I married him.”
Readers of Jane Eyre (1847) will recognize this sentence as the culmination of a complicated romance. But let us also consider it as potent source of subsequent snowclones. With a single verb swap the genre shifts from Victorian-gothic-romance to, well, you decide: “Reader, I _____________ him.”
a) murdered
b) ensorcelled
c) ambushed
d) lassoed
e) atomizedScale matters, of course. The genre might shift in this single sentence, but as much as I’d love to see Mr. Rochester dispersed in space by a raygun-wielding Jane, I concede that this single substitution doesn’t stand up against the tide of the novel as a whole. But considered over time, such shifts can and do add up. In the case of Jane Eyre, they have. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a novel that wholly transforms one’s reading of Jane Eyre, even as it depends entirely upon Brontë’s novel. Is it a snowclone? Of course not. Like the snowclone, however, its success depends upon paradigmatic substitution. In Wide Sargasso Sea, such substitutions enable literary evolution because they keep in constant play their problematic literary legacy.
This technique is even more effective in science fiction, precisely because sf is a genre already marked by a proclivity towards paradigmatic substitution. Such substitutions are very often informed by extrapolative imaginings that substitute contemporary objects for future tech: from motorcar to rocket, shotgun to phaser, radio to ansible, etc. We accept this as part of the generic conventions of sf. Looking through the database dedicated to snowclones, it is no surprise that many have their origins in sf. Robert A. Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel (1958) is itself a snowclone drawn from the Western television series Have Gun, Will Travel (1957-1963); Heinlein’s phrase, in turn, spawned multiple sf versions of "have x, will travel.” Science fiction, perhaps more than any other genre, primes the reader for substitutions of various kinds.
The texts I mentioned above—Dune, The Word for World is Forest, A Princess of Mars, and Star Trek—were typical of the titles that I devoured as a child. These were the books available to me in public libraries in the 1980s and 1990s, and although I still cherish them, they have become problematic for me. They were predominantly written by white men, with the exquisite and unusual exception of Le Guin, and while their depictions of environmental and economic entanglement remain historically important, they are also rife with cultural assumptions that have thankfully changed over time.
But in the thirty years that have passed since then, the logic of the snowclone has not budged in our cultural imagination. And where are we now? In Denis Villeneuve’s forthcoming cinematic adaptation of Dune (2020), I fear the inevitability of Stellan Skarsgård in a fat suit. And yet the character of Liet-Kynes, the planetary ecologist upon whom the entire plot hinges, is played by a woman of color, Sharon Duncan-Brewster. This is promising, but we shall have to wait and see to what extent Villeneuve has updated, via selective paradigmatic substitution, Herbert’s novel.
But I am much more excited about entirely new texts that have emerged from this pattern, such as Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008), Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013), Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017). In these works, the pattern persists but has changed in fundamental ways. Perhaps the most visible shift is the crumbling of the sacred aura around the foreign-born male hero. Much more enticing are the characters who have taken his place: Essun, Adaora, Memo, Breq. Their powers are locally forged and formidable, and their narrative progressions are far more interesting than, say, the Missionaria Protectiva’s pre-cut prophetic path.
With all of this said, however, it has taken a distressing amount of time for mainstream markets to publish such works, and it may take even more time before this tired old pattern becomes illegible. I offer the device of the snowclone as a type of linguistic tesseract, one that might be especially useful to writers of science fiction who have, after all, always excelled at the compression and acceleration of time.—Lisa Swanstrom, University of Utah
When the revolution is suddenly (finally) here, it’s the people with an established vision who are positioned to achieve the change they desire. The climate crisis, the pandemic, and the ongoing emergency of anti-Black racism demand transformative imagination in the face of great danger. The danger is not just that of structural negligence, sinking us further into the preventable deaths and destruction of our time. A more insidious danger is that we continue to reproduce the world that made these crises, the world that Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (2005) calls racial capitalism; the resulting society lives as if that world were a given. Avoiding this requires approaches to technoscientific futures driven by vastly different desires.
Speculative and visionary fiction, specifically the work of feminist and antiracist imaginations, does the work of developing visions with which to seize the moment of inevitable change and wrest it out of the wreckage of history’s ongoing catastrophe, as Walter Benjamin so eloquently depicted through the figure of the angel of history shortly before his suicide in 1940 (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”). Science and technology, “technoscience,” has become the primary infrastructure guiding our collective futures. This is why fiction is so important as a political tool for imagining material realities that resist the empiricism of the world according to history’s victors.
The role of desire and imagination in scientific projects has been a central part of my research. I often start essays or class lectures by asking my audience how they imagine a given group of researchers got to a point where something made sense to them. For example, how did labs in both the US and Japan get to a point where they found it imperative (and fundable!) to develop an artificial uterus in the early 1990s (a question I consider in “Re-Imagining Reproduction” [Somatechnics 5.1 (2015): 88-103])? It was already clear then that the planet was overwhelmed by its growing human population, and there was ample evidence that pregnancy and gestation were far more complicated than the acrylic containers and cell culture bags in the design prototypes. Meanwhile, exciting scientific imaginaries based on more accurate understandings of human gestation and women’s bodies inspired promising research, such as fetal cell microchimerism, but were sidelined and not funded. Immunologists recently revisited this neglected research and discovered that these cells, exchanged between the fetal and maternal bodies, have important research potential, while also refuting the idea that the bodies of the fetus and the person gestating it exist in complete separation.
Technoscience practitioners and designers face the same problem that all of us do under late capitalism: when we try to imagine different futures, we can’t even know what it is we can’t desire. The history of conquest, enslavement, forced mobility, genocide, and dispossession wrote the singular world of racial capitalism on top of those other worlds. The material world itself seems unified and given, where once there were multiple references for how and what people know about the world and our existence. Politically motivated speculative fictions have been a place to experiment with what futures might be possible, if difficult to imagine, through the endeavors of science. Less burdened by the seeming obvious empiricism of the given world, feminist speculative fiction, Afrofuturisms, and Latinx futurisms, among other examples, can be practices of creating worlds that embrace a politics of imagining against the reproduction of structures of gender and racial domination in the present. The writings of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin have been central to Donna Haraway’s teaching and writing about how a feminist anti-racist practice and politics can remake the world without revolutionary violence or the passive reproduction of the exploitative social relations of the present. In “Queer OS,” Kara Keeling writes about how technology can disturb, or queer, the reproduction of capitalist society (Cinema Journal 53.2 [2014], 154).
The epilogue to my most recent book, Surrogate Humanity (2019), written with Neda Atanasoski, discusses sex robots and desire; its title, “On Technoliberal Desire, Or Why There Is No Such Thing as Feminist Artificial Intelligence (AI),” was meant to start a constructive argument with the challenge that feminist AI cannot exist. We weren’t trying to start a fight, but after completing a book about the ways that racial capitalism structures the technical history of AI and robotics, it was important to point out that feminist AI, by any definition, has not been a part of the imagination or desire driving tech design.
An example: what do sex robots desire? It can’t even be asked in earnest, because sex robots are designed to be unfree, animated service objects. In fact, the technoliberal subject we outline in the book requires proof of its own freedom, only tangible through consuming the unfreedom of others. The question of desire from a position of unfreedom is tethered to the long history of racial capitalism and its positioning of some people (or in this example, sex robots as their surrogates) as unfree objects of desire defined by the desiring subjects. Feminist AI, where power and hierarchy would exist only as checked by consent and responsibility, cannot exist in that world. Hence the subtitle.
The book ends there, but it raises the question of what feminist AI would be, if it could be. In my classes on science and technology studies, I bring this question to students at the end of ten weeks of reading feminist and antiracist critiques of technology design alongside speculative fiction. We read treatises on futurisms from the margins, we look at films, music videos, speculative tech design, and read short fiction, Then I ask them if, rather than doing individual final projects, they would prefer collectively to design a feminist AI. Everyone will get the same grade. If I have done a good job with teaching them the value of feminist methods, and built rapport and trust, they enthusiastically choose to collaborate. And then, they speculate the design for a feminist AI with whatever collective skills and tools the class happens to have that term. They design empathic, vulnerable interactive machines, providing backstories, ads, 3D models, ad campaign storyboards, bills of robot rights, illustrations, and more, to manifest their visions, as if we lived in a world where it was possible. Kodwo Eshun says that Afrofuturist speculative world-making can “[expose] and [reframe] futurisms that act to forecast and fix African dystopia,” instead authoring a world imagined apart from postcolonial realities necessitated in politics and practice within African countries (“Further Considerations on the Question of Afrofuturism,” CR 3.2 [2003], 293). The futures of worlds written over by colonial languages and cultures, by genocides, natal alienation, dispossession, and forced mobility can play out through this world-making. As I argued in Life Support (U of Minnesota P 2015), “Fantasy, a structure of desire and imagination that also produces social relations, representations, and the different ways that bodies become appropriate for particular types of labor, is an organization of individual and collective imagination” (18). These visions, this organizing, is prepared for revolution, with material imaginaries for social life and technoscience infrastructure at the ready—sometimes even 3D models and storyboards!
Speculative fiction imagines as if different material worlds could exist. Living in the ongoing catastrophe of racial capitalism, we need to practice “a persistent critique of what [we] cannot not want” (Gayatri Spivak, “Introduction” to Derrida’s Of Grammatology [1998], 28). Both writing and reading speculative fiction provoke us to desire things we might not even know we can want. Those desires can support visions that seem empirically impossible yet are already in place when the revolution suddenly (finally) arrives.—Kalindi Vora, University of California, Davis
Reading “A Letter of the Twenty-Fourth Century” in the Twenty-First Century Pandemic Classroom. One of my favorite things about Georgia Tech is that our students take to heart the institute’s motto, “progress and service.” Georgia Tech was founded as a public institute in 1885, at the same time science fiction was establishing itself as a unique literary genre with its own artists, audiences—and, of course, heroes. Indeed, in many ways, the goal of Georgia Tech has always been to produce exactly the kind of heroic scientists and creative engineers celebrated in both sf and American culture in general at the turn of the last century. But the COVID-19 pandemic has changed all that. As my students confess with increasing frequency and in increasingly panicked tones, they feel paralyzed by conflicting advice from political, medical, and community leaders. How can they begin the task of building better futures for all when they can’t figure out how to act in the present? This, I propose, is where sf comes into play. As I’ve been powerfully reminded by my experience teaching the history of American sf online this summer, sometimes art really does hold the answer when all other modes of discourse fail to make sense of the world. In particular, sf can connect us to the past and reorient us to the present in ways that suggest new directions for truly new and better futures.
As a cultural historian of sf, I have always taught my classes with an eye to helping students understand the history behind seemingly novel new scientific and technological situations, but this summer one particular story, Leslie F. Stone’s 1929 technotopian vignette, “A Letter of the Twenty-Fourth Century” (Amazing Stories 4.9) has taken on new significance. Stone’s tale takes the form of a letter from an inhabitant of the twenty-fourth century who is prompted to write to his archaeologist friend upon finding a trove of early twentieth-century sf magazines in his basement. The author of the letter is alternately amused and bemused by old stories that imagine human futures “torn by wars” against rampaging robots and bug-eyed monsters, when new medical practices and communication technologies pioneered by humans at that time actually result in a future marked by global peace and prosperity. Generally speaking, students like the story because it is funny and short—and because it anticipates the Internet six decades before its official advent in the form of “mirror and radio sending and receiving sets” that “make the whole world kin,” allowing all people to participate equally in politics, education, and culture from their “own living rooms” (860-61). And so I was not surprised that students taking classes online this summer would find Stone’s story extremely prescient.
What did surprise me is how deeply they dove into the why of Stone’s story. As a few of the best readers in class quickly noted, the inhabitants of Stone’s world seem to have moved online for the same reasons people in our own world are doing so right now: to get away from “death-dealing scourges” amplified by “crowded traffic” (861, 860). At that point others began to look carefully at the date of Stone’s story in relation to science history. And that’s when things got exciting as they realized: Stone wrote “Letter” just a decade after the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic! And she lived through the pandemic herself in Pittsburgh, which was famous for allowing mass gatherings that caused the highest per capita death rate in the nation! In short—Stone knew what we would go through in our own present because she has lived through it in her own past. And so sf knit past and present together in ways that suddenly made new sense to my students, giving them an anchor in history and a frame through which to process their own experience of life in a high-tech, pandemic-ridden world.
Stone’s story has also given my students new ways of thinking about the present as the starting point from which we must build new and better futures. After identifying all the similarities between our own moment and Stone’s imagined future, students realized they also had to confront all the differences. In “Letter,” humans make public policy based on science and “we have done away with kings and presidents and each of us has his little say in carrying out new policies, in deciding what is best for our planet” (861). In turn, they are rewarded with the elimination of pollution, disease, and social injustice. In our own world, however, humans enjoy the fruits of science but grapple now more than ever with all the same medical, environmental, and political problems—as one student succinctly put it, “we get all the techno, but none of the utopia.” It was clearly a distressing realization for students to acknowledge that progress and service do not always or naturally go hand-in-hand.
But will such insights actually help our students build better futures for all? I remain hopeful that the answer is yes. As Joanna Russ famously noted, science fiction can’t change our minds about anything, but it can “crystallize an awful lot of things [people are] already feeling” (qtd. in Dream Makers II by Charles Platt [Berkeley UP 1983]). Ever since the breakthrough with Stone, my students have been articulating their feelings with a vengeance. Reading Isaac Asimov’s “Reason” (1940) led to intense debates about how different kinds of logic are mobilized in the rhetoric around COVID-19; meeting Samuel R. Delany’s asexual spacers in “Aye and Gomorrah” (1967) prompted an in-depth discussion of the relations between trans and cis-gender people; and, most recently, students were excited to connect P. Djèlí Clark’s “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” (2018) with the Black Lives Matter movement and Elizabeth La Pense’s side-scroll video game “Thunderbird Strike” (2017) with the indigenous protests at Mount Rushmore and Dominion’s decision to halt the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. All this, they told me, with astonished voices, while they were having fun. But does fun—even serious fun—help shape our future scientists and engineers? Again, I remain hopeful. A recent graduate of my sf lab who majored in biochemistry told me that she is pursuing a career in new reproductive technologies because “if I’ve learned one thing from reading science fiction, it’s that we can’t wait for creative engineers or space jocks to save us. We sisters will have to do it for ourselves.” Maybe some of the students from my current class will feel the same about those issues that most interested them this semester. And so I remain hopeful that we can save the world through science fiction, one story and one student at a time.—Lisa Yaszek, Georgia Tech
Rob Browning
Nietzsche among the Aliens in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
Abstract. -- An intriguing commonality among Nietzschean readings of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is the scant attention they pay to the representation of aliens, one of the film’s most thought-provoking sf elements. If one moves beyond allegorical readings and takes the film’s storyline about extraterrestrial entities guiding human evolution literally, it is apparent how 2001 mounts a challenge to Nietzsche’s staunchly human-oriented, terrestrial philosophy. An important basis for this challenge is the Christian-influenced branch of sf defined by Arthur C. Clarke, Olaf Stapledon, and even John Milton, which the film reflects in both its plot and sublime aesthetics. The film’s musical evocations of extraterrestrials prompt us to contemplate otherworldly possibilities that Nietzsche dismisses, but Kubrick’s extensive effort and failure to create a viable visual representation of the aliens creates a lacuna that makes the final part of 2001 profoundly ambiguous and agnostic.
The Alien Within: Divergent Futures in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9
Abstract. -- In the contemporary crisis of race relations two schools of thought pursue the project of Black liberation: Afrofuturism and Afropessimism. Through a close reading of Neill Blomkamp’s Afropessimist film District 9 (2009) and Nnedi Okorafor’s Afrofuturist novel Lagoon (2014), written in response to the film, this article analyzes these projects’ futures. While Afropessimism offers incisive critiques of historic and contemporary racism, the future it imagines is either a repetition of the past or a violent revolution. Afrofuturism, in contrast, imagines a future that breaks from colonially inherited racism by emphasizing traditional and indigenous African cultures. By narrating human being through something other than the framework of an imposed colonialism, Afrofuturism can imagine an end to the alienation District 9 depicts as largely inevitable. In order for Afrofuturism’s future to be realized in white majority or white dominated societies (such as South Africa), however, the burden of eliminating these racist conceptions falls on white people. Afrofuturism can provide this much needed alternative model of African diasporic humanity and therefore serve as a conceptual foundation for a future that does not look like the past.
Jessica Valisa
To the Stars! Space Exploration and Futuristic Visions in Late Soviet Science Books for Children
Abstract. -- It is the general scholarly consensus that the space enthusiasm that characterized the Khrushchev era, which envisioned high hopes for a technologically advanced near-future where humanity would reap the fruits of realized communism and explore the universe, gradually subsided until disappearing during the subsequent years of economic and social stagnation. A close look at non-fiction literary production aimed at children and teenagers illuminates a different perspective, however. In this article, I analyze the narratives and discourses in several children science books published during the years 1974-1985 in the Soviet Union. Surprisingly, themes connected to the so-called Space Age are omnipresent in these publications. The narratives intertwine and overlap to create a peculiar blend of communist future-oriented ideals and sf motives. In order to explain this tendency, I propose that this phenomenon may be linked to a strong feeling of nostalgia felt by the adult authors toward this recent "future-past" of Khrushchev's times, which was then transposed into their popular science works. Thus, during times characterized by multiple crises, the myth of Space Conquest provided a strong counter-discourse, an escapist utopian vision appropriate to the original communist idea, which the official political discourse itself employed in its propaganda, but obviously devoid of its transformative content. This study sheds a new light on the connection between the sf imagination, popular science, and politics in the late Soviet era.
Jesse S. Cohn
The Fantastic From Counterpublic to Public Imaginary: The Darkest Timeline?
Abstract. -- As the fantastic has gone from subculture to mass culture, it has moved from a counterpublic sphere to the public sphere, forcing us to rethink its political role. In “post-normal times,” the structuring role that the fantastic has come to play in the public sphere means that we need to pay attention to its rhetorical uses—the ways in which it sets and transgress political boundaries.
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