https://www.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hjr97eaywoq2qot0z3tt-e1439568004160.jpg
At the Jacobin magazine website (which we’ve been reading a lot lately), Mark Soderstrom surveys contemporary English-language sci-fi literature and film. In the 1970s and '80s, English-language sci-fi tended to portray dystopias that looked a lot like Soviet Russian. But today’s sci-fi dystopias resemble neoliberal Western democracies:
Game of Thrones isn’t the only one cribbing from the real world. The financial crisis; the 1 percent’s abandon and abandonment; the mysteries of value, globalization, finance, and speculation; banking and currency — all of these have seeped into many recent works of Anglo-American speculative fiction, or SF (a broad term describing work across the often-blurred boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, horror, and other genres).
Though certainly not new, explicitly economic leitmotifs in SF works have been increasing in importance and centrality. Award-winning contemporary authors like Paolo Bacigalupi, Ann Leckie, and William Gibson have focused on themes of crisis, biopower, finance, and the potential for societal change. Works like Cory Doctorow’s Chicken Little depict finance as an arena for point scoring among ultrapowerful oligarchs, while recent films like Elysium and Snowpiercer portray resistance to growing economic stratification.
Amid gaping economic inequality and environmental crisis, the prevalence of these themes is no accident. To be sure, these works often have striking limitations. If inequality is a common motif, its source (capitalism) and its cure (collective action from below) are often muted or completely ignored. Yet despite their shortcomings, these new works exhibit a refreshing willingness to question dominant elements of our economy and social life.
Image: Art from the cover of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. Via Jacobin.