Crisis, Biopower, Finance: Speculative Fiction resists neoliberalism

August 17, 2015 7:09 AM

"Like all cultural works, SF is situated in a political and economic context. In ours, people are noticing that whatever carrot of prosperity capitalism seems to offer, the stick is all they ever get. SF’s heightened focus on inequality is a sign that the ideological basis of our current social order may be undergoing a significant shift." From Jacobin: "Unequal Universes."
posted by MonkeyToes (33 comments total)

Gibson still relies on Malthusian ideas and the goodwill of powerful elites to create a better world

i haven't read hist latest (not in paperback yet), but i searched for gibson in this essay because he's always made me a tad uneasy. does anyone else feel he's uncritically gung-ho about being privileged? seems like his books rely on jolly nice rich people taking time out to save others. sure, there are richer people, who may be baddies, but you can't argue that cayce pollard has a hard time of it. can you?
posted by andrewcooke at 7:19 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'll recommend (again) Greg Costikyan's First Contract, which posits a near-future Earth that is (all but) colonized by unimaginably powerful aliens. Released in 2000, feels like it could have come out yesterday.
posted by Etrigan at 7:20 AM on August 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

First Contract is pretty fucking great, but it's Greg Costikyan, so that's no surprise. It's not only insightful but also funny as hell.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:46 AM on August 17, 2015

So much Sci-if dystopia these days seems to be "what if things we do to poor people happened to people we care about?"
posted by The Whelk at 7:51 AM on August 17, 2015 [25 favorites]

his books rely on jolly nice rich people taking time out to save others.

I don't know...I never feel like there's much saving going on in a Gibson book. People are often either doing things at the behest of a rich employer, who either has opaque or otherwise mysterious reasons for wanting things done, or seem to be possibly motivated by some mysterious trauma or event in their past.

Cayce Pollard hasn't had a particularly hard life, I think, but it is hard to say since she, like most Gibson protagonists, is largely a cipher. I find the most memorable thing about her is her fashion allergy and subsequent clothing choices.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:53 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

So much Sci-if dystopia these days seems to be "what if things we do to poor people happened to people we care about?"

Oh, that goes back to War of the Worlds.
posted by Artw at 8:04 AM on August 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Newer works in SF demonstrate the same willingness to question standard economic assumptions. Historically, planned economies in Anglo-American SF novels have been a mark of dystopia. However, Francis Spufford’s 2012 novel Red Plenty positively re-envisions the Soviet dream of an economy of abundance and the passion that dream evoked. The Soviet researchers who worked to find a way to direct Soviet economic growth to serve everyone are drawn with a sympathetic hand, and even Nikita Khrushchev is treated respectfully.

While Spufford’s narrative is politically problematic in a number of ways, his book and its reception show us that in the post-crash, post-Occupy environment, a growing number of readers want to rethink questions of economy and society that were previously seen as settled.

Uh, did he actually read that book? The book was about how that dream spectacularly failed, up to the point of food riots being put down with gunfire. Or is that "politically problematic" aspect of the text?

Also, why do people keep putting Red Plenty is the Science Fiction bucket when it's clearly historical fiction?
posted by zabuni at 8:06 AM on August 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

i haven't read hist latest (not in paperback yet), but i searched for gibson in this essay because he's always made me a tad uneasy. does anyone else feel he's uncritically gung-ho about being privileged?

You know, I recently ran back through a Neuromancer and Count Zero, and I've read (and enjoyed) his somewhat less popular near-future trilogy (starting with Pattern Recognition), and they all maintain the same basic dynamic - there's a socially marginal (sometimes underclass, sometimes just middle-middle class freelancer) protagonist, a rich and mercurial employer (sometimes beneficent, sometimes not) encountering some sort of vast, emergent socio-economic phenomenon (AIs, fast-moving trends in Internet and economy, 9/11, the Jackpot, etc.) which act as the primary antagonist, with a secondary and usually extremely superficial and unrealized villain character adding an extra element of conflict.

I think that Gibson retains a certain skepticism regarding idealistic, broad-based social movements for societal change that characterized cyberpunk, which focused on the need to get by, the role of vast, emergent phenomena within society (driven by capitalism, globalization, and by mass human self-interest, whether defined by monetary accumulation or by something else - like self-expression or religious preoccupations, both of which turn up in his work repeatedly). The role of Olympian super-rich usually act as a gateway into a broader canvas for the protagonists, who otherwise would be trapped by the smaller dramas of their own lives and corner of society.

So much Sci-if dystopia these days seems to be "what if things we do to poor people happened to people we care about?"

Yeah, I yearn for the days of those Golden Age sci-fi writers, who were all about caring about the plight of poor people qua poor people.

Also, why do people keep putting Red Plenty is the Science Fiction bucket when it's clearly historical fiction?

I never read it, but I was under the impression that it diverged from "real history" in significant ways, and alternate history tends to get stuck into the sci-fi bracket.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:06 AM on August 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'll just chip in that Gibson does an interesting job of creating a tension between classes in most of his work.

The middle-ish-to-lower-middle-class protagonists are almost always enabled by one superwealthy entity, in the service of destroying or creating conflict with another superwealthy entity.

Also, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The rich are different.' should pretty much appear in on the back of every Gibson novel, IMHO.
posted by mrdaneri at 8:14 AM on August 17, 2015

i haven't read hist latest (not in paperback yet), but i searched for gibson in this essay because he's always made me a tad uneasy. does anyone else feel he's uncritically gung-ho about being privileged?

I used to feel this way about Gibson, based on reading his early work. I guess what I'd say now is that Gibson is mostly writing about marginal creative class people and their weird relationships with big money; I'd speculate that this derives from his own experience as a picker/vintage dealer and as an SF writer. I think Gibson isn't a prescriptive writer - he's not especially trying to talk about how to live. I'd contrast him with KS Robinson or Joanna Russ or even Cory Doctorow; basically, I'd contrast him with any writer interested in utopia/dystopia/anti-utopia a la Tom Moylan's theories. Gibson is really descriptive, as AdamCSnider kind of implies. (Another descriptive novel that folks might find interesting if they like Gibson - Gwyneth Jones's novel Life. It's sort of the domestic/women's novel version of cyberpunk, plus she shadowed a bunch of scientists as part of writing it, so there's a lot of very recognizable lab-life stuff.)

I think Gibson is writing about what he sees, both in this world and in the one he's designing. He's not really writing about how to be a good person or what kind of world he'd like to see - although there are certainly utopian elements, especially in his later work. A lot of very good science fiction is basically didactic (Le Guin, Russ, Robinson, some Mieville) and I think that's part of what science fiction is for. But there's this other strain that has a strong descriptive/morally relative streak (Gibson, Delany) that I think is a bit tougher to parse.

I think it's quite reasonable to say that you don't want to read books about the creative class and its relationship with big money. I don't really want to read that kind of thing when it's straight literary fiction, but Gibson is using that template to do so much else that I find it interesting.

I've ended up with a lot more time for Gibson for two reasons - first, I read a LOT of the early straight white dude cyberpunk stories and realized just how left wing Gibson was in comparison, and second, I started to see how he's always tried to write gender-equal and multiracial futures. In his early work, he does this in ways that I find troubling, but it's obvious that he's giving it a shot at a pretty reactionary moment in science fiction.

I thought the Jacobin article was an odd sort of jumble, and I'm not sure what its purpose is.
posted by Frowner at 8:28 AM on August 17, 2015 [16 favorites]

That is, the kind of critique that you find in a "descriptive" novel is more difficult to parse.
posted by Frowner at 8:29 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

So much Sci-if dystopia these days seems to be "what if things we do to poor people happened to people we care about?"

I'd be interested to know which dystopias in particular you're thinking about. I'm in the middle of running an SF class/discussion of some environmental dystopias and - at least considering the ones we're reading - I don't feel like that's what they really do.
posted by Frowner at 8:34 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I thought the Jacobin article was an odd sort of jumble, and I'm not sure what its purpose is.

This is an incredibly reusable sentence.
posted by PMdixon at 8:39 AM on August 17, 2015 [14 favorites]

As has been noted, Marxism isn't that different from world-building utopian SF, and there's been a strong thread of socialism from H G Wells through to today (especially in Scotland). Some of it was as mainstream as you could hope for: Star Trek solved the problem of having a classless, post-money, utopian society - which is pretty ideal end-game communism - by presenting it as an obvious evolution, sugar-coating it with quasi-militaristic frontier dynamics, and never engaging with any of the contradictions. Endless fan blather about warp drive dynamics and Season 2 costumes; nary a word about how the hell that economy works. Which is just as well (cough, George), but does rather limit the scope of how many consciousnesses it raises.

But this is all a bit old hat (even older than Kirk's titfer in A Piece Of The Action). Countless essays, collections and theses-on-the-edge-of-academia have been written on this. Some are dull, some sharp, most of them over-wrought and shapeless. This piece adds to that body of work.
posted by Devonian at 8:45 AM on August 17, 2015

Frowner, I had not known about Gibson being a former vintage picker! When I went to Google for more about it I turned up this interview he gave to a raw denim fansite about repro vintage workwear.

Am I the last person to know that he has his own capsule collection with a Japanese company that makes reproductions of vintage American military clothing? Because that's a) the most William Gibson thing I have ever heard in my life and b) amazing, and c) now if I ever meet him in person I will probably want to talk to him about vintage clothing.
posted by nonasuch at 8:54 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, just a shoutout to the ever-lovable Culture-- everyone's favorite post-scarcity AI utopia that's so left it hurts, except for their unusual proclivity for extreme violence and rather...evangelical viewpoints.
posted by mrdaneri at 8:55 AM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

they all maintain the same basic dynamic - there's a socially marginal (sometimes underclass, sometimes just middle-middle class freelancer) protagonist, a rich and mercurial employer (sometimes beneficent, sometimes not)

I actually asked Gibson about this, at a public event back in 2007. He was a little abashed; he seemed to think of it as a limitation of his craft, like, this is the plot he knows how to write.
posted by grobstein at 8:55 AM on August 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'd be interested to know which dystopias in particular you're thinking about. I'm in the middle of running an SF class/discussion of some environmental dystopias and - at least considering the ones we're reading - I don't feel like that's what they really do.

Hunger Games comes to mind, although it loses the labor rights fairly quickly. There was something surreal about reading it simultaneously to the controversies surrounding the Russian Olympics.

It might be the case that Butler's Sower might include this.

Beukes has mentioned this as a characteristic of South African science fiction with both Zoo City and Elysium as ways to re-frame economic problems.

And I can't plug the Terra Nova anthology enough, although the near-future dystopias are written from within Cuba and Mexico if I remember right.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:04 AM on August 17, 2015

The ultra rich in the Gibsonian universe are distant, barely human elites whose concerns are, when it comes down to it, usually utterly banal.

Kind of like the ultra rich in this universe, really.
posted by Artw at 9:16 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Till I got deeper into the comments I thought that SF meant San Francisco, it still fit though.
posted by boilermonster at 9:20 AM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, don't tell me Trump wouldn't be living with multiple clones of himself in an orbiting space villa guarded by space ninjas if he possibly could.
posted by sobarel at 9:22 AM on August 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

(I too assumed this was crazy old San Fran again.)
posted by Artw at 9:31 AM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Then there's Jupiter Ascending, in which the elites see our whole planet as walking fuel for their Immortality Juice dispensers. It almost approaches a critique of capitalism, except that instead of a mass uprising of the oppressed we apparently need a Chosen One who will bravely scrub toilets to save us.
posted by emjaybee at 9:34 AM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Hunger Games comes to mind, although it loses the labor rights fairly quickly. There was something surreal about reading it simultaneously to the controversies surrounding the Russian Olympics.

What I got from the Whelk's comment was more "dystopias today are morally trite because they are saying 'gee, it sure would be awful if these bad things happened to nice people' when those bad things are already happening to people in the real world but we don't care about those people so it doesn't matter to us".

In a way, I think that's the point of dystopian writing - to say "you care about these people who are suffering; you should also care about other people who are suffering in the world today just like the fictional characters". The estrangement of the dystopia is supposed to "render strange" the world we actually live in, so that we can recognize the suffering of the people we've been ignoring. On the one hand, yeah, this type of dystopia is written from a privileged standpoint because it's assuming that "we" need to be made to perceive "their" suffering; on the other hand, I don't think it's just a matter of 'you care about human suffering in the book but don't care about it in life'. I've actually had a lot of conversations with people about why they read science fiction and what it's meant to them, and when people talk about this kind of dystopia, they virtually always talk about how it opened their eyes to important things in the real world.

But I think there are many, many dystopias - like Butler's parable books - that are written from the inside. The point clearly isn't to make us see how "they" are suffering but to make us able to recognize the events around us, which include our own suffering and precarity. I'd say that the Margaret Atwood's Maddadam books are of this kind.

There are also dystopian short stories, like those in the recent Octavia's Brood, which are about the response of "them" to their own marginalization. Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl In The Ring and Midnight Robber or Nicola Griffith's Slow River also come to mind.

Also, I think it's important to bear in mind the audience and conditions of production - science fiction that is produced for an audience which isn't especially interested in science fiction (whether that's the Maddadam books or Jupiter Rising) tends to work really differently from in-genre books. Science fiction which is produced with the expectation that it will make a really big return is different from science fiction where the publisher will be happy enough to cover their costs. I think it's very easy to talk about "science fiction" as if it's exhausted by the Hunger Games books and Jupiter Rising*.


*To be totally honest, in my head I barely think of those as science fiction at all. They seem like adventure stories where the SF tropes are mostly aesthetic and where neither reader nor writer/producer is particularly interested in science fiction in general. They both sound quite interesting and fun, but - again, in my head - I just don't really put them on the list with Ancillary Justice or even something like an SM Stirling novel.
posted by Frowner at 10:05 AM on August 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

The bottom of that Jacobim article quotes Ursula K. Le Guin's MBA acceptance speech. The one that gives me goosebumps every time I hear or read it. She's my hero. It's really worth it to hear it from her own voice.
posted by newdaddy at 10:10 AM on August 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

That's a relief. I'm kind of tired of all the smart people who were turned libertarian by Heinlein.
posted by clawsoon at 10:15 AM on August 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

It makes me happy to know that someone else keeps saying Jupiter Rising instead of Jupiter Ascending.

I'm not sure we should go down the "what's *really* science fiction" path. That way lies unhappiness.

JA, is a terrible/goofy film in many ways, but it meets the criteria for dystopian; whole planets slaughtered and sucked dry (and Earth is next!) by unstoppable overlords for personal gain.

Like a lot of bad sci-fi movies, it raises some really interesting questions that it completely fails to answer, or even understand. That seems to be a Wachowski thing, step right up to the line of saying something profound, then get distracted by shiny stuff and run off chasing it.

Which makes me wonder if the Jacobin article is right in that critiques of capitalism are "in the air" right now, and perhaps the Wachowskis didn't so much come at it from an ideological standpoint as from a "this is a thing right now, let's build a story on it" standpoint. Take Occupy's idea of the 99%/1%, add, pretty girl and space boots and gorgeous visual effects.

Just finished Ancillary Justice and I'm still thinking it over, which is a good sign. The central character was extremely compelling, if not terribly pleasant to be stuck in the mind of. I'm not sure I buy the world (or, rather galaxy) building itself, yet, though.
posted by emjaybee at 10:29 AM on August 17, 2015

AdamCSnider, I think that description of Gibson's work could be embarrasingly spot on.

Were it not for the fact that, well, he dresses it up so well. But not only is the world he envisages well done and the writing excelent; he doesn't write to exult that status quo, but (as mentioned) to describe it, and when I read it at least, it functions more as a warning than anything else. 'This is not a situation which is good for anyone except those with the power, and it sometimes is decent for those who are played as pawns, but they are always still pawns and can be sacrificed just as easily ... you think that's a nice way of living, being a pawn which can be sacrificed at a whim?'.

And, as scifi seems to often trend before reality, what I would like to see are two things: scifi about how power is wrested from the ultra-wealthy and more equaly distributed so that the poor and suffering don't have to be that way (and I'm not talking about Elysium hospital-ex-machina) and how we can live in that post-scarcity world which we have now almost reached thanks to long awaited (at least since the '70's) automation, science and production methods.

IE: how could we get from 'here' (the reality we now live in) to 'there' (a more equitable world with much less suffering for all)? Because we need to envisage, dream and imagine the posibility-space of those roadmaps before we start thinking and designing them for real, just as we needed Verne et al to go to the moon and Clarke to build satelites.

Becdause just as countries and corporations have decided on economic war over actual war (well, often...), there must be better ways now than bloody revolution.
posted by MacD at 10:41 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I agree that's one of the points of dystopian writing, even though it often is, as Le Guin points out, a thought exercise in overfeeding a culture a single form of badness to the point where it gets cancer.

Hunger Games and Jupiter Ascending are reasonable dystopias. The former is about the use of mass media to support class or military oligarchies, the latter is about inherited class privilege and social capital related to immigration. The use of science to create cognitive estrangement around those ideas is what defines science fiction if you buy into the Suvin/Mieville theory. And that allows us to approach them without the same degree of weary detachment that most people do regarding current events in Calais as an example.

Ancillary Justice/Sword does it better IMO, but I don't think they do it in a way that's fundamentally different.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:03 AM on August 17, 2015

I think there are actually two types of dystopic fiction. The first is "now you care about the people suffering, take this home and care about people suffering there", sure, but there's also "see the unintended consequences of this thing that you think is good but actually would be bad." Like Camazotz, or yes, any of the more libertarian SF. So they're superficially the same as to setting, but a very, very different feel.
posted by corb at 11:13 AM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

incidentally, there's a recent project that may be related to this thread.
posted by andrewcooke at 12:18 PM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

That seems to be a Wachowski thing, step right up to the line of saying something profound, then get distracted by shiny stuff and run off chasing it.

I reject your dichotomy. Shininess is itself profound.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:28 PM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

so left it hurts, except for their unusual proclivity for extreme violence and rather...evangelical viewpoints

Neither of which have been entirely alien to the Left, actually.

I always felt that Banks' books were less about how awesome everything would be in a socialist utopia, but rather pointing towards the question of what problems would remain, perennially, even after that transition occurred.

It's notable that the growth of, say, democracy and human quality of life in Europe and the West generally during the 19th and 20th centuries didn't necessarily lead to less oppressive relations with other populations elsewhere in the world - in point of fact, they dovetailed with extension and intensification of empire. Does (liberal, capitalist) Utopia in one society necessarily preclude dystopia elsewhere? Does it depend upon it? And of course before 1914, most Marxists and anarchists would have understood the achievement of a revolutionary society in one state to quite possibly be followed by a period of "extreme violence and evangelicalism", as the revolution went global - it wasn't until Stalin threw out Trotsky that "socialism in one country" was officially recognized as an option, at least within the USSR.

The idea that Utopia could or would be bloodless, in its present incarnation, is basically as postwar reaction to the two World Wars and their consequences, and the thirty years of seemingly painless (from the West's perspective - sci-fi written from a Chinese or sub-Saharan African or Middle Eastern viewpoint might have a very, very different feel) economic growth that followed. Which is part of what made cyberpunk so cutting at the time - it didn't just premise dystopia, it projected dystopia into the future. It asserted that things would not just keep getting better, that maybe what people thought was a temporary glitch in the '70s and '80s was the new norm.
posted by AdamCSnider at 3:55 PM on August 17, 2015 [6 favorites]