Doris Lessing was one of the most restless novelists of her generation. She toggled between realist bildungsromane, autofiction, postmodernist experimentation, and speculative fiction. Despite her restlessness, she remained committed to the novel of ideas, using these different subgenres to entertain philosophical debates about autonomy, group membership, racism, and social progress. Surprisingly, as this chapter demonstrates, Lessing’s swerve into speculative fiction was conditioned by her status as a target of MI5 surveillance. Although Lessing knew she was being watched, she did not turn to the paranoid style of George Orwell. Instead, she used her fiction to suggest that an imperialist intelligence network could be outwitted by individuals who harness the powers of intelligent perception, or ESP: reading minds, forecasting future events, even communicating across species. The way to beat a repressive police network was to mimic its capabilities, bringing the arts of surveillance into the fold of human consciousness itself.

The erosion of democracy has shown itself to be a necessary political precondition for the implementation of neoliberalism. Utopian culture quickly attuned itself to this crisis of democracy, and while there certainly are not many works of utopian culture that uncritically embrace the dominant post-1989 narrative that hails democracy as the universal cure for whatever ailment may exist in the world, we begin to see the emergence of works that foreground the profound danger inherent in the waning of democracy precisely in times of its instrumentalization by Western capitalist nations and the forces of economic globalization. Authors reveal neoliberal utopias as antidemocratic dystopias against which democracy must be defended. Moreover, we also see the emergence of novels that address a second pressing question: how can democracy survive when populations decide to democratically abolish it?

This chapter discusses Afrofuturism with reference to a wide range of literary works, influential critical and theoretical accounts, and artistic manifestos, identifying its overlaps and distinctions from the broader speculative turn apparent in African American literature from the 1980s onward. The chapter focuses on two rubrics that lend cohesion to the array of genres, styles, and aesthetic principles associated with the label of Afrofuturism: the politics of time and the idea of race as technology. Through various devices of temporal dislocation, Afrofuturist works invent revisionist histories, shatter consensus narratives about the present, and challenge prevailing discourses of futurity. In addition, the chapter argues that Afrofuturist literature at its best defamiliarizes established ways of reading race through its innovative engagement with race-making techniques and technologies ranging from genre conventions to genetic engineering.

In N. K. Jemisin’s science fiction short story “The Effluent Engine” (2011), Jessaline, a Haitian spy and “natural” daughter of Toussaint Louverture, arrives in New Orleans in the early years of Haitian independence. Her world is both like and unlike our own: in the tale, Haitians have learned to convert gases from sugarcane distilleries into fuel for airships. Turning “our torment to our advantage,” as Jessaline puts it, Haiti effectively bombed French ships to win the Revolution; became the world’s leading manufacturer of dirigibles; and secured diplomatic standing in the United States, even constructing an embassy in New Orleans.1 And yet, despite Haiti’s steampunkesque political and technological power, there is much in “The Effluent Engine” that recalls a less optimistic history. The French are still “hell-bent upon re-enslaving” the nascent republic; although the United States begrudgingly recognizes Haiti, it remains “the stuff of American nightmare”; and Jessaline confronts white supremacist terrorism and the threat of racial-sexual violence in the US South, where she fights the Order of the White Camellia.

This chapter reads Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad as a Janus-faced text in American literary history that looks back toward the persistent political conundrums illuminated by twentieth-century American fiction and reconfigures them in generative ways for the twenty-first century. Like earlier twentieth-century neo-slave narratives by Ishmael Reed, Octavia E. Butler, and Toni Morrison, Whitehead’s novel critiques a naïve historical story of inevitable Black progress, and it even flirts with the notion that American democracy and African American oppression are inextricable. But Whitehead rejects fatalistic narratives of inevitable injustice by showing how American normative myths can still be politically efficacious. Establishing himself as a key literary figure in contemporary Black political thought, Whitehead uses the speculative fiction genre to transform celebrated concepts in American political theory – e.g., individual freedom, legal equality, constitutional rights, representative democracy, popular sovereignty – by contextualizing them within Black experiences across time. Ultimately, his political vision amounts to a wary optimism, which Whitehead himself has called a politics of “impossible hope.”

Many Black intellectuals and artists have called for a counter-historiography that would redress the silencing of Black voices and the inadequate representation of Black experiences in earlier comics. This chapter identifies three categories of graphic historiographies, each with thematic and formal recurrences: those that propose a frontal look at the context of enslavement, from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the violence of the plantation world; those focusing on the political and social struggles of Black communities after the Civil War, from the Jim Crow era and the courageous actions of Civil Rights leaders to twenty-first-century police brutality; and, finally, those that imagine new Black futures in the mode of speculative fiction, while metaphorically referencing past forms of exploitation and repression. The chapter studies the specific devices of several of these works, including the use of temporal shifts in the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reliance on oral history and photo-based illustrations in John Lewis’s Run, Book One, the depiction of Black women’s subordination in Shirlene Obuobi’s ShirlyWhirlMD webcomic, and the futuristic metaphors of slavery and capitalism in Roxane Gay’s The Sacrifice of Darkness.

This chapter argues that there is a special relationship between Blackness and speculative fiction (SF). Taking Afrofuturism as a point of departure, it shows that Black SF offers unique and important ways of theorizing key concepts in contemporary Black studies, including pleasure, power, and death. After examining these qualities, it engages in a close reading of the Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah short story “The Finkelstein Five” to show the relevance of Black SF to scholars and authors writing in what poet Elizabeth Alexander calls “the Trayvon Generation.” While Alexander uses the term to describe children coming of age under the post-millennial regime of anti-Black policing and BLM protest, this chapter uses it to explain that authors and scholars entering the profession in the same period have turned to the speculative to critically interrogate the violent rupture of police murder against oxymoronic promises of racial advancement. The speculative thus offers important framing for both the lived experiences of racial violence and fantasies of making a just and livable world.

The making of the Asian Australian novel is the unmaking of oppressive notions of history, subjectivity and literary form. Locating ethnic representational politics within power structures of race and nation, this chapter contends that Asian Australian identity is a site of hybrid instability realised through nonlinear forms of storytelling. The chapter examines national and diasporic paradigms across historical and contemporary trajectories of this literature: earlier Chinese Australian novels that blur boundaries between fictional and factual claims; Bildungsroman novels that trouble ethnocentric narratives of either assimilation or return; multicultural novels that unveil ongoing racism in liberal-pluralist ideals; and transnational novels that reimagine the Australian relationship with postcolonial and globalising Asian modernity. Reflecting on the limits of a critical humanist agenda, the chapter identifies an alternative paradigm of Asian Australian storytelling that employs speculative tactics to depict the land, species, climate change and Asian–Indigenous connections. This ecocritical paradigm challenges a normative ideal of the modern, autonomous and sovereign individual as one the migrant subject should integrate into, while pointing to an under-explored terrain for Asian Australian writers whose focus on diversity and justice would offer important insights into the shifting human condition.

This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.

Since the turn of this century, science fiction, fantasy, and horror have become cornerstones of African literature. This chapter looks at speculative fiction from across the continent that radically reimagines slavery, examining the ways writers have sutured questions of subjection and desired freedom into cyberpunk worlds, revisionist histories, invented mysticisms, and alien encounters. What, this chapter asks, is the function of the sizable body of African speculative fiction that imagines slaveries removed from the middle passage and chattel slavery in the Americas, including works with no clear historical analogue?

In Latin American literature almost all paths lead to the fantastic; the region has the distinct anomaly of giving the fantastic mode a central place in its narrative tradition. This essay will not discuss the similarities or differences between fantastical literature, science fiction, and horror, given the numerous hybridizations between subgenres and the fact that this conceptual discussion escapes the limits of the current work. Instead, I have chosen to group them under the rubric of speculative fiction. My aim is to point out some of the possible paths and bifurcations that the genre has taken since 1980, conscious of the possibility of multiple other readings. This essay will discuss the way in which the transition to democracy, neoliberal policies, and technological and social changes in Latin America were portrayed in literature through fictional universes, dystopias, and alternative histories; cyberpunk, hackers, and cyborgs; Chile’s “freak power,” virtual reality, and internet fictions; monsters and other fantastical creatures, eco-horror, and stories from the Anthropocene.

Chapter 1 introduces the book's key concepts: utopianism, speculative fiction and the Anthropocene. I start by defining utopianism in terms of the "education of a desire for alternative ways of being." The chapter then shows that the current climate crisis necessitates a fundamental reorientation of our cognitive and affective frameworks. This can only be achieved, I maintain, with the help of various kinds of social dreaming, spurred by theory building and storytelling. In a second step, I discuss the background against which my analysis proceeds – the Anthropocene. In a concise fashion, different interpretations of, and objections to, the basic premise of a "human planet" are reviewed. Third, the chapter outlines the disciplinary perspectives informing this approach: political theory, utopian studies and the environmental humanities. Another section covers the book’s methodology and explains two central ideas behind my case selection: constellation and plot line. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of the ensuing argument.

This chapter examines how aspects of post-capitalism have been imagined by speculative fiction, with some emphasis on utopian and dystopian fiction. There are some methodological issues around the best way to read speculative fiction in relation to post-capitalism. One influential distinction is between “blueprint” utopias and “critical” utopias. Blueprint utopias, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), are held to offer rigidly instrumental plans for reorganizing society. Critical utopias, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), supposedly destabilize deeply-rooted assumptions, freeing readers to explore possible economic forms that appear neither in reality nor fiction. However, this chapter emphasises that the distinction between blueprint and critical utopias is a blurred one. It further suggests that instrumentalizing interpretations of speculative fiction are part of its status as culture, rather than a mere misuse of speculative fiction. Reading speculative fiction critically and creatively, including attention to its instrumentalities, may help to transform what constitutes the field of “the economic” in the first place, and enrich our understanding both of capitalism and its alternatives. However, already existing practices of the more-than-capitalist world often far exceed what speculative fiction has been capable of imagining.

Origin stories of the economics discipline give considerable credit not only to philosophy, but also to poetry. And many canonical economists have reputations for polymathy. But interdisciplinary economic inquiry, like that which has become increasingly common since 2008, is often treated as both novel and ill-fated, in part because contemporary orthodox economists lack the commitment to pluralism necessary for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration. This chapter looks to a 2020 Climate Fiction (“CliFi”) novel, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future, for models of interdisciplinary collaboration between economists, critical theorists, and climate scientists. In particular, Robinson centers an unlikely pair of Utopian thinkers – British economist John Maynard Keynes and American theorist Fredric Jameson – who at crucial junctures in their careers took seriously what is also the project of Robinson’s titular Ministry: treating future generations as a political constituency deserving of political representation in the present.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) parodies the North American Free Trade Agreement, but it characterizes the fight over free trade in the same terms as NAFTA’s liberal supporters, who represent this fight as a struggle between “zero-sum nationalism” and an emerging network of transnational “enterprise-webs.” Just as NAFTA’s supporters imagine a global free market comprised solely of “human capital,” Yamashita imagines an "expanding symphony" comprised solely of "conductors" attuned to transnational complexity -- a vision which depends on a disavowal of the structural differences that make such collectives possible. Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005), meanwhile, suggests that framing the conflicts faced by Mexican migrants as epistemic conflicts is a mistake. His novel imagines an alternative history in which the “Aztex” defeated the Spanish and non-Western cultural and epistemic values have triumphed, but the violence of exploitation remains. At the same, Foster’s novel ultimately suggests that migrant workers can create the possibility of an “alternative future” by embracing a vision of a world defined by class antagonisms rather than by epistemic conflicts.

The fourth chapter traces Philip K. Dick’s adaptations of ancient East Asian cosmology to structure America’s ethnically heterogeneous future in the emergent North Atlantic world order. Dick finds inspiration in I-Ching, an ancient Chinese system of divination that arose to combat chaos in an era of warring states. Dick’s references to China in The Man in the High Castle belongs to a career-long hunt for devices that might delay the decay of traditional forms of belonging. The I-Ching must be distinguished, however, from the magic aerosols and hand-cast ceramics that appear elsewhere in the Dick canon, for it offers a means with which to imagine a culturally coherent America. Thanks to the I-Ching, three archetypal forms of totality—American suburbia, European totalitarianism, and Third World primitivism—that remain irreconcilable in Now Wait for Last Year constitute a functioning amalgamation in High Castle. Along the way, I place Dick’s interest in the I-Ching in an intellectual tradition at least as old as Hegel, which posited that the Chinese, putatively never afflicted by Cartesian dualism, retained access to a sense of totality foreclosed to Europeans and North Americans.

Critical questions about the relation between literature and climate are relevant both before and after the rise of environmentalism and today’s climate politics. How does literature write the encounter between biological bodies and climate? What trends in literary form and content do critics track when they study climate change? What concepts have they then created or rethought? To answer these questions, we need to look outside the contemporary moment and compare historical periods. This chapter looks at four topics: the ‘superorganism’, the climate theory of race, the concepts of ‘hyperobject’ and ‘trans-corporeality’, and the idea that literature can ‘model’ anthropogenic climates. The Anthropocene has certainly created new configurations of climate and embodiment coupled to changes in literary form, including what sort of narrative worlds seem real to their readers. But none of this is unprecedented. Present configurations of embodiment, climate, and form are still constrained by those of the past. Critics are only beginning to understand what they are, and how they change in historical time.

Focusing on Claire Vaye Watkins’s novel Gold Fame Citrus (2015), this chapter explores the dialogue between speculative climate change fiction and ecocriticism. Watkins’s narrative itineraries emplot some well-trodden themes, settings, and motifs of climate change fiction that have to some extent characterized the Anthropocene and the literary genre itself: desertification and extreme weather, toxic landscapes, uncontrollable environments, socio-economic and ecological collapse, the disposability of life, the prospect of extinction, and an imperiled future, all of which have been well theorized in ecocritical discourses. This chapter argues that the novel’s narration of climate change and the Anthropocene reads as theoretically informed, and, as such, anticipates (indeed provokes) its own paradigmatic theorization. What might be provoked in particular by navigating this generic terrain are theories of “reproductive futurism,” nonhuman agency, and scalarity, and, along with them, the opportunity to reflect critically on the limits and possibilities of the theory of climate change fiction, thereby revealing Watkins’s work as a form of meta-critical fiction. What emerges from this novelistic self-reflexivity are ecocritical complicities in the Anthropocene’s reification and histories of environmentally mediated violence and injustice, and the anthropogenesis of environmental catastrophe, otherwise screened by theory.