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Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality
How does science fiction imagine forms of life that are plausible, and yet different from anything that we already know?
Fluid Futures is about how science fiction imagines an open future. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will actually happen in times to come. But it offers pictures of potential developments; it narrates the unfolding of possibilities for change that are already implicit, or incipient, in the present moment. As Rod Serling said, science fiction is “the improbable made possible.”
The book starts by looking at three tools that are commonly used in science fiction to address futurity: extrapolation, speculation, and fabulation. It goes on to consider concrete examples of how science fiction texts employ these tools to illustrate ways in which the future might be different from – but not entirely discontinuous with – the present-day conditions with which we are familiar. Fluid Futures insists upon the aboutness of science fiction, as it depicts situations and ideas that are at once possible and difficult to grasp. The book then explores how the genre embraces fictionality and narrative, reconceives time, and projects images of possible worlds. The point of the book is not to give a theory of science fiction. Instead, it emphasizes the ways that science fiction texts themselves propose theories, leading readers to reconceive concepts that we have taken for granted.
Fluid Futures is about how science fiction imagines an open future. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will actually happen in times to come. But it offers pictures of potential developments; it narrates the unfolding of possibilities for change that are already implicit, or incipient, in the present moment. As Rod Serling said, science fiction is “the improbable made possible.”
The book starts by looking at three tools that are commonly used in science fiction to address futurity: extrapolation, speculation, and fabulation. It goes on to consider concrete examples of how science fiction texts employ these tools to illustrate ways in which the future might be different from – but not entirely discontinuous with – the present-day conditions with which we are familiar. Fluid Futures insists upon the aboutness of science fiction, as it depicts situations and ideas that are at once possible and difficult to grasp. The book then explores how the genre embraces fictionality and narrative, reconceives time, and projects images of possible worlds. The point of the book is not to give a theory of science fiction. Instead, it emphasizes the ways that science fiction texts themselves propose theories, leading readers to reconceive concepts that we have taken for granted.
- GenresPoliticsScience Fiction
424 pages, Paperback
Published August 13, 2024
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Did Not Finish
February 13, 2025DNF, but I think it’s my fault, not the book’s.
First of all, I’d like to thank NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book, and at the same time, I apologize for not finishing it.
I have to say that under normal circumstances, this is the kind of book I usually enjoy, but this time, due to personal reasons, it caught me at the wrong moment. I’ve restarted the book several times, but in the end, I’m giving up. Again, I believe this is due to my own circumstances and not the book itself. I don’t think it would be fair to rush through it or read it half-heartedly.
My opinion on what I have read so far: the book offers a very meticulous theoretical analysis of the subject matter. This insistence on accuracy and precision in the exposition makes it a difficult read—or perhaps I should say a challenging one. Very, very briefly, among many other things, the backbone of the book is the author’s proposal of a theoretical division into three perspectives on science fiction: extrapolation, speculation, and fabulation, which are thoroughly argued and then explored in greater detail. One notable aspect is that, as is often the case with books like this, it opens the door to discovering other readings, including both additional essays and key stories related to the arguments presented by the author.
First of all, I’d like to thank NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book, and at the same time, I apologize for not finishing it.
I have to say that under normal circumstances, this is the kind of book I usually enjoy, but this time, due to personal reasons, it caught me at the wrong moment. I’ve restarted the book several times, but in the end, I’m giving up. Again, I believe this is due to my own circumstances and not the book itself. I don’t think it would be fair to rush through it or read it half-heartedly.
My opinion on what I have read so far: the book offers a very meticulous theoretical analysis of the subject matter. This insistence on accuracy and precision in the exposition makes it a difficult read—or perhaps I should say a challenging one. Very, very briefly, among many other things, the backbone of the book is the author’s proposal of a theoretical division into three perspectives on science fiction: extrapolation, speculation, and fabulation, which are thoroughly argued and then explored in greater detail. One notable aspect is that, as is often the case with books like this, it opens the door to discovering other readings, including both additional essays and key stories related to the arguments presented by the author.
December 2, 2024
This is Steven Shaviro's fourth theory book on science fiction criticism (following Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society, Discognition, and Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life) out by Repeater press in 2024.
One can feel this was a book long in the making with examples gathered and directions traced with the utmost patience. A treasure house of ideas and insights collected during a lifetime (or as mentioned in the introduction- during a 6 decades-long love affair with science fiction). What I'm trying here does no justice to the scope of this book.
One could safely say that today Shaviro is not only one of the towering figures within the small academic subfield of SF studies (he also got a well earned SFRA2023 award for Lifetime Contributions to the field), but a friend and a companion for all those who cannot abandon this vital domain into the lap of right-wing space billionaires or completely give into what Mark Fisher aptly diagnosed as "capitalism Realism" (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?) as the time "when it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to [capitalism]"(quoted by SS).
Shaviro excels at close reading, always incredibly entertaining, conceptually fresh and engaging. Yes, one might be a highly educated [and thus privileged] US academic (as Shaviro often admits on several accounts), but he demonstrates first-hand the best of non-isolationist non-Ivory Tower academia, always totally immersed in today's planetary debacles, on an adventure of mind and body of galactic proportions, even if ready to admit that we are living through very grim and dark times, indeed, what is undoubtedly the sixth mass extinction (The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History).
He's a scholar that will never abandon SF authors and their texts or just use them as mere raw materials for complicated theoretical elaborations. As a critic, he never disparages or belittles (or moralizes) and always tries to go along and think through the content pushing it to its furthest reaches. Following Shaviro, at the start of the 21 century, non-naturalistic genre fiction like fantasy, horror and SF are 'as radical as reality' (a quote from Lenin also repeated by Brecht).
Certainly, it does help to know some of the literature Shaviro is quoting, mentioning in passing or trying to build on - especially when he feels the generalizations have gone overboard. At its best, every chapter of Fluid Futures offers ample food for thought and provides nearly perfect summaries and teasers for many authors that one may feel emboldened to check out later (be it Charlies Janes Anders, Pat Cadigan, Chris Beckett, Adrian Tschaikowsky, Kameron Hurley, N. K. Jemisin etc). The philosophy parts or literary criticism ones are as pleasurable as getting on with the science fiction matter itself. Another commendable thing is that even as he rescues Lovecraft from the charge of rejecting "cognitive logic" to demonstrate how weird fiction shows reason itself as inadéquate ("and for this reason a problem"), he's not mincing his words as to "Lovecraft's racism, misogyny, and erotophobia". Lovecraft's stories keep challenging and poking "the unexamined assumptions that the world is [absolutely and totally] intelligible and that it is therefore subject to our mastery". Gained knowledge is not automatically "accompanied by any power to change things". Lovecraft doesn't reject cognition but problematizes it, while even asking if our inability to correlate all dissociated (and. multiplying) knowledge about reality and our place in it, purveyed by the sciences on a daily basis, isn't some of sort of adaptive trait. Yet Lovecraft's own bigoted response (out of a range of possible ones to a newly found human irrelevance) is fear, loathing and hysterical panic in relation to both non White immigrants and modernist art movements alike. There's also a wave of new Lovecraftian revisionist novels and stories that Shaviro highlights - who take on the central dilemma of weird fiction - that there's "no possible appeal beyond the weakness and finitude of human cognition" and that the encountered horrors (cosmic or all-too actual and everyday) are not easily transmitted or conveyed (The Ballad of Black Tom or Winter Tide and The City We Became to name but a few).
Some of the subchapters of Fluid Futures were freely available in nuce on Shaviro's The Pinocchio Theory Blog, a place full of reviews from his extensive and impressive readings.
I would warmly recommend some of his online talks that work like a preparation for Fluid Future or at least a much better appetizer than I could provide here (check for example his fabulation/speculation/extrapolation tripartite theoretization of SF).
Self-described (most endearingly) as a "kitsch Marxist"(not a pun on Greenberg's Avant-Garde and Kitsch - but a pejorative tag coined by Negarestani turned into a positive by Shaviro)he takes on the pulp and philosophical material with equanimity. Be it with comics, musical videos, modernist cinema, Chat GPT's biographical inventions, rhythms and modulations, panpsychism, contemporary horror and non-continuity post-cinematic affects, Shaviro is at home everywhere in our global village ready to absorb all the novums at hand. When discussing or qualifying 'estrangement', 'cognition', 'appetition' (a Whiteheadian term for experiences of adversion and aversion that generate novelty) 'alterity', 'synesthesia' or 'potentiality' to name but a few of the key concepts that have shaped his understanding of SF, rest assured that there is no better guide than Shaviro. His continuing dialogue with Whitheadian process philosophy, time philosophy and cosmology, Blochian Vorschein and Prinzip Hoffnung, McLuhanite changing ratio of the senses, Seo-Young Chu's SF définition as high intensity realism, or with strains of speculative realist philosophy, as well as with Marxist cultural criticism or assessing the impact of financialization, Jamesian radical empiricism, eliminativism (The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self and the aftermath of The Kantian Catastrophe? Conversations on Finitude and the Limits of Philosophy make him one of the most up-to-date English writing thinkers of the 21st century to my knowledge.
What is equally important is that while Shaviro is not a scientist nor a philosopher of science, he is well-versed in natural history, cutting edge research and conceptual histories of science (especially new biology - How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology). SF is not just a fertile terrain to hone one's skills of theory crafting, but a theoretical and philosophical laboratory in itself. Early in his career, Shaviro was an important smuggler of high octane French continental high theory into the confines of US academia. It is also interesting to follow the role transgressivness played in his ample oeuvre from 1990 Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory towards today's critical stance on transgressiveness as it became increasingly weaponized by the alt-right - ending with his playful use of invented terms from Sun Ra's repertoire (such as "transmolecularization"). There's the sense that French theory has still much to give after many years, just that it's Simondon and individuation maybe not deconstruction. In siding with science fictional synesthesia and representational daring, Shaviro markedly repudiates all modernist and postmodernist opponents of representation (including Baudrillard). Open-endedness of processes is paramount and science fiction that makes worlds anew as opposed to "the settled world" (Whitehead quoted by S.) of naturalistic fiction. Incompossibilities and discrepancies thrive within ample fhe folds of SF.
One of the striking (for me at least) fragments of the book is when he discusses how inadequate some of the preferred formal strategies adopted by high modernism have become nowadays. If SFF (the SF + Fantasy binome) sticks together then non-naturalistic genre boundary policing feels more arbitrary now than ever before (thinking of SF, fantasy, and horror as entirely separate categories or genres makes no sense today). This fluidity of genres would also posthumously vindicate Romanian SF writer Vladimir Colin (Capcanele timpului) lyrical fabulative continuum that flows unconstrained from new children's tales and made-up (anti-monarchist as opposed to Tolkien) mythologies towards SF proper. If modernist techniques of estrangement are defanged, catering to and flattering the self aware consumer in each of us, completely absorbed by advertising industry and web.o3, one feels only justified together with Shaviro to take some distance from modernist formalisms. On a personal note - the small Grosz Museum (Das kleine Grosz Museum) in Berlin recently closed (which is saddening and annoying in itself) but doubly inopportune when thinking about Afd rising popularity in Germany plus being there at the closing it felt like the critical position of Grosz and Berlin Dada represented got entirely privatized, barely accessible to a large public outside the narrowing confines of café society and art collector circles. Or even more clearly one has to remember how incessant calls for 'disruption' work today in favor of Uberization and asset stripping.
One important corrective that Shaviro brings to the earlier (1970s) era definitions of SF (and related SF criticism) is a thorough critique of cognitivism. To be sure this is not an abandonment of reason per se that risks succumbing to Heideggerian or Nietzschian irrationalism in the midst of all-enveloping neoreaction (as implied by eco-socialist author John Bellamy Foster account of new materialism and ooo in a recent interview that harks back to The Destruction of Reason).
In the 1970s SF was struggling to be accepted as worthy of an academic study and the foundational role of Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre) was both steeped in high modernist tropes and Marxist-Hegelian historical materialist thought. Sometimes Shaviro feels a bit too acidic with Darko Suvin's cognitivist biases and modernist faiblesse (maybe rightly so), but he always tries (to his credit) to contextualize and historicize Suvin's dictum (SF as the "lit of cognitive estrangment"). More importantly, he tracks Suvin's own readjustments up till recently. In conclusion, Shaviro points out that in contrast with Suvin's insistance on formal innovation (that may be less important today for SF), we should appreciate its innovative content dressed in more or less conventional realist (and representational) dress. Not only has modernism provided all the tools for today's corporate culture, but SF today is fully embedded transmedia culture. A lot of discordian dialectical acrobatics feel utterly boring today (check Shaviro discussing Zizek). Maybe utterly ungfashionable, but one might come around to discuss in a new light the embittered relation of modernism with socialism realism. Altough Shaviro might not agree here, maybe it is even time to somehow revisit the controversial soviet aesthetician Mikhail Lifshits and the metaphysical foundations of realist aesthetics (my first thought when reading about a radical or revolutionary content in a more or less realist envelope).
Such familiarization with the alterity (or the unthinkable and the impossible)or be it the strange, eerie or weird is maybe more important than ever, especially when imagination struggles to keep up with systemic uncertainty and overlapping polycrisis. In this ongoing polemic with Suvin's thesis, he also makes good use of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation to show how especially aspects of reality that defy representation become central for the genre and its mimetic efforts. This is important theoretical move from the previous attention given to literary form and style towards its referential content, thus Chu is placing the Suvinian theory of SF (and Jameson by extension) for the first time (according to Shaviro) firmly on its feet (echoes of a famous quip by Engels about Marx grounding Hegel's dialectic). In the most extreme cases the "elusive referent" could even be hyperspace-time of most time travel narratives (Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative), a kind of literalization of the transcendental Kantian structure (according to Shaviro following Chu). This also entails a break with previous anti-representational "consensus that dominates modernist and postmodernist aestethics" and hold sway over earlier theoretizations (for Scholes, Suvin or Jameson for exemple). In this light, Chu's groundbreaking study on SF poetry and prose published in 2010 announces and anticipates subsequent speculative realist (SR) philosophy and its critique of correlationism, even if no one knows if she would accept being labeled a SR thinker as such.
After Chu, metaphoric claims get literalized (Literal Fabulation chap in Fluid Futures), "as ontological facts within a narrative universe" and this ontological claims is "basic to the genre" (also a big departure from the epistemological Suvinian stance). Many theorists of SF and the fantastic (Tzvetan Todorov, Le Guin, Samuel 'Chip' Delaney) have previously called for such a literalization of the metaphoric content, but nowadays SF seems to be the time when SF claims about bedrock reality hit us full on.
I really appreciate all these various observations and the contrast with earlier (Suvin's) emphasis on de-familiarization and formalist estrangement. That said, Shaviro largely agrees with Suvin that one should actively dare think the unthinkable and never accept today's world as inevitable or final. The future must flow, if there is a future left for us indeed.
William Raymond's structures of feeling are constantly changing and this books helps us tune in and keep track. Even those structures of feeling or subcultural styles, attitudes, and postures so characteristic of cyberpunk let's say (to take just one salient example among many given by Shaviro) seem today completely inadequate, oddly outmatched and frankly superannuated in a world of Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading and The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism: Software as Right-Wing Extremism.
Some important developments such as 1990s technofeminism have become self-understood and normalized while others such as combatting the worst effects of anthropocentrism are now considered indispensable. Indeed, decentering the human has not been just the task of various post-humanist philosophers but one of the most important functions of SF today.
It is perhaps not so hard to admit that cyberpunk authors have been "usurped and commodified by the powers they had hoped to oppose" (Semley 2019 quoted by Shaviro) if you think about how Cyberpunk 2077 crowd-funded game ended up being one of the most expensive games ever. One can almost say that if Shaviro feels an affinity to more exotic Marxisms (see China Mieville apophatic Marxism), that's because today's left-wing seems sadly very ill-equipped to confront today's exterminism (Four Futures: Life After Capitalism and asset manager capitalism/Wall Street Consensus. I must say that's why it is so refreshing reading a delightful 'kitsch Marxist' wade through vast expanse of SF literature, rather than capitulate in front of anarkocapitalist (techbro) fascistoid leaders prowling the X platform, formerly known as TW. Looking forward to a book of his about SF with examples drawn from other media such as film, music and music videos (and why not Tiktok!). Till then there's so much more potentialities to glean from this current book than I could ever possibly discern here.
One can feel this was a book long in the making with examples gathered and directions traced with the utmost patience. A treasure house of ideas and insights collected during a lifetime (or as mentioned in the introduction- during a 6 decades-long love affair with science fiction). What I'm trying here does no justice to the scope of this book.
One could safely say that today Shaviro is not only one of the towering figures within the small academic subfield of SF studies (he also got a well earned SFRA2023 award for Lifetime Contributions to the field), but a friend and a companion for all those who cannot abandon this vital domain into the lap of right-wing space billionaires or completely give into what Mark Fisher aptly diagnosed as "capitalism Realism" (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?) as the time "when it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to [capitalism]"(quoted by SS).
Shaviro excels at close reading, always incredibly entertaining, conceptually fresh and engaging. Yes, one might be a highly educated [and thus privileged] US academic (as Shaviro often admits on several accounts), but he demonstrates first-hand the best of non-isolationist non-Ivory Tower academia, always totally immersed in today's planetary debacles, on an adventure of mind and body of galactic proportions, even if ready to admit that we are living through very grim and dark times, indeed, what is undoubtedly the sixth mass extinction (The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History).
He's a scholar that will never abandon SF authors and their texts or just use them as mere raw materials for complicated theoretical elaborations. As a critic, he never disparages or belittles (or moralizes) and always tries to go along and think through the content pushing it to its furthest reaches. Following Shaviro, at the start of the 21 century, non-naturalistic genre fiction like fantasy, horror and SF are 'as radical as reality' (a quote from Lenin also repeated by Brecht).
Certainly, it does help to know some of the literature Shaviro is quoting, mentioning in passing or trying to build on - especially when he feels the generalizations have gone overboard. At its best, every chapter of Fluid Futures offers ample food for thought and provides nearly perfect summaries and teasers for many authors that one may feel emboldened to check out later (be it Charlies Janes Anders, Pat Cadigan, Chris Beckett, Adrian Tschaikowsky, Kameron Hurley, N. K. Jemisin etc). The philosophy parts or literary criticism ones are as pleasurable as getting on with the science fiction matter itself. Another commendable thing is that even as he rescues Lovecraft from the charge of rejecting "cognitive logic" to demonstrate how weird fiction shows reason itself as inadéquate ("and for this reason a problem"), he's not mincing his words as to "Lovecraft's racism, misogyny, and erotophobia". Lovecraft's stories keep challenging and poking "the unexamined assumptions that the world is [absolutely and totally] intelligible and that it is therefore subject to our mastery". Gained knowledge is not automatically "accompanied by any power to change things". Lovecraft doesn't reject cognition but problematizes it, while even asking if our inability to correlate all dissociated (and. multiplying) knowledge about reality and our place in it, purveyed by the sciences on a daily basis, isn't some of sort of adaptive trait. Yet Lovecraft's own bigoted response (out of a range of possible ones to a newly found human irrelevance) is fear, loathing and hysterical panic in relation to both non White immigrants and modernist art movements alike. There's also a wave of new Lovecraftian revisionist novels and stories that Shaviro highlights - who take on the central dilemma of weird fiction - that there's "no possible appeal beyond the weakness and finitude of human cognition" and that the encountered horrors (cosmic or all-too actual and everyday) are not easily transmitted or conveyed (The Ballad of Black Tom or Winter Tide and The City We Became to name but a few).
Some of the subchapters of Fluid Futures were freely available in nuce on Shaviro's The Pinocchio Theory Blog, a place full of reviews from his extensive and impressive readings.
I would warmly recommend some of his online talks that work like a preparation for Fluid Future or at least a much better appetizer than I could provide here (check for example his fabulation/speculation/extrapolation tripartite theoretization of SF).
Self-described (most endearingly) as a "kitsch Marxist"(not a pun on Greenberg's Avant-Garde and Kitsch - but a pejorative tag coined by Negarestani turned into a positive by Shaviro)he takes on the pulp and philosophical material with equanimity. Be it with comics, musical videos, modernist cinema, Chat GPT's biographical inventions, rhythms and modulations, panpsychism, contemporary horror and non-continuity post-cinematic affects, Shaviro is at home everywhere in our global village ready to absorb all the novums at hand. When discussing or qualifying 'estrangement', 'cognition', 'appetition' (a Whiteheadian term for experiences of adversion and aversion that generate novelty) 'alterity', 'synesthesia' or 'potentiality' to name but a few of the key concepts that have shaped his understanding of SF, rest assured that there is no better guide than Shaviro. His continuing dialogue with Whitheadian process philosophy, time philosophy and cosmology, Blochian Vorschein and Prinzip Hoffnung, McLuhanite changing ratio of the senses, Seo-Young Chu's SF définition as high intensity realism, or with strains of speculative realist philosophy, as well as with Marxist cultural criticism or assessing the impact of financialization, Jamesian radical empiricism, eliminativism (The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self and the aftermath of The Kantian Catastrophe? Conversations on Finitude and the Limits of Philosophy make him one of the most up-to-date English writing thinkers of the 21st century to my knowledge.
What is equally important is that while Shaviro is not a scientist nor a philosopher of science, he is well-versed in natural history, cutting edge research and conceptual histories of science (especially new biology - How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology). SF is not just a fertile terrain to hone one's skills of theory crafting, but a theoretical and philosophical laboratory in itself. Early in his career, Shaviro was an important smuggler of high octane French continental high theory into the confines of US academia. It is also interesting to follow the role transgressivness played in his ample oeuvre from 1990 Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory towards today's critical stance on transgressiveness as it became increasingly weaponized by the alt-right - ending with his playful use of invented terms from Sun Ra's repertoire (such as "transmolecularization"). There's the sense that French theory has still much to give after many years, just that it's Simondon and individuation maybe not deconstruction. In siding with science fictional synesthesia and representational daring, Shaviro markedly repudiates all modernist and postmodernist opponents of representation (including Baudrillard). Open-endedness of processes is paramount and science fiction that makes worlds anew as opposed to "the settled world" (Whitehead quoted by S.) of naturalistic fiction. Incompossibilities and discrepancies thrive within ample fhe folds of SF.
One of the striking (for me at least) fragments of the book is when he discusses how inadequate some of the preferred formal strategies adopted by high modernism have become nowadays. If SFF (the SF + Fantasy binome) sticks together then non-naturalistic genre boundary policing feels more arbitrary now than ever before (thinking of SF, fantasy, and horror as entirely separate categories or genres makes no sense today). This fluidity of genres would also posthumously vindicate Romanian SF writer Vladimir Colin (Capcanele timpului) lyrical fabulative continuum that flows unconstrained from new children's tales and made-up (anti-monarchist as opposed to Tolkien) mythologies towards SF proper. If modernist techniques of estrangement are defanged, catering to and flattering the self aware consumer in each of us, completely absorbed by advertising industry and web.o3, one feels only justified together with Shaviro to take some distance from modernist formalisms. On a personal note - the small Grosz Museum (Das kleine Grosz Museum) in Berlin recently closed (which is saddening and annoying in itself) but doubly inopportune when thinking about Afd rising popularity in Germany plus being there at the closing it felt like the critical position of Grosz and Berlin Dada represented got entirely privatized, barely accessible to a large public outside the narrowing confines of café society and art collector circles. Or even more clearly one has to remember how incessant calls for 'disruption' work today in favor of Uberization and asset stripping.
One important corrective that Shaviro brings to the earlier (1970s) era definitions of SF (and related SF criticism) is a thorough critique of cognitivism. To be sure this is not an abandonment of reason per se that risks succumbing to Heideggerian or Nietzschian irrationalism in the midst of all-enveloping neoreaction (as implied by eco-socialist author John Bellamy Foster account of new materialism and ooo in a recent interview that harks back to The Destruction of Reason).
In the 1970s SF was struggling to be accepted as worthy of an academic study and the foundational role of Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre) was both steeped in high modernist tropes and Marxist-Hegelian historical materialist thought. Sometimes Shaviro feels a bit too acidic with Darko Suvin's cognitivist biases and modernist faiblesse (maybe rightly so), but he always tries (to his credit) to contextualize and historicize Suvin's dictum (SF as the "lit of cognitive estrangment"). More importantly, he tracks Suvin's own readjustments up till recently. In conclusion, Shaviro points out that in contrast with Suvin's insistance on formal innovation (that may be less important today for SF), we should appreciate its innovative content dressed in more or less conventional realist (and representational) dress. Not only has modernism provided all the tools for today's corporate culture, but SF today is fully embedded transmedia culture. A lot of discordian dialectical acrobatics feel utterly boring today (check Shaviro discussing Zizek). Maybe utterly ungfashionable, but one might come around to discuss in a new light the embittered relation of modernism with socialism realism. Altough Shaviro might not agree here, maybe it is even time to somehow revisit the controversial soviet aesthetician Mikhail Lifshits and the metaphysical foundations of realist aesthetics (my first thought when reading about a radical or revolutionary content in a more or less realist envelope).
Such familiarization with the alterity (or the unthinkable and the impossible)or be it the strange, eerie or weird is maybe more important than ever, especially when imagination struggles to keep up with systemic uncertainty and overlapping polycrisis. In this ongoing polemic with Suvin's thesis, he also makes good use of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation to show how especially aspects of reality that defy representation become central for the genre and its mimetic efforts. This is important theoretical move from the previous attention given to literary form and style towards its referential content, thus Chu is placing the Suvinian theory of SF (and Jameson by extension) for the first time (according to Shaviro) firmly on its feet (echoes of a famous quip by Engels about Marx grounding Hegel's dialectic). In the most extreme cases the "elusive referent" could even be hyperspace-time of most time travel narratives (Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative), a kind of literalization of the transcendental Kantian structure (according to Shaviro following Chu). This also entails a break with previous anti-representational "consensus that dominates modernist and postmodernist aestethics" and hold sway over earlier theoretizations (for Scholes, Suvin or Jameson for exemple). In this light, Chu's groundbreaking study on SF poetry and prose published in 2010 announces and anticipates subsequent speculative realist (SR) philosophy and its critique of correlationism, even if no one knows if she would accept being labeled a SR thinker as such.
After Chu, metaphoric claims get literalized (Literal Fabulation chap in Fluid Futures), "as ontological facts within a narrative universe" and this ontological claims is "basic to the genre" (also a big departure from the epistemological Suvinian stance). Many theorists of SF and the fantastic (Tzvetan Todorov, Le Guin, Samuel 'Chip' Delaney) have previously called for such a literalization of the metaphoric content, but nowadays SF seems to be the time when SF claims about bedrock reality hit us full on.
I really appreciate all these various observations and the contrast with earlier (Suvin's) emphasis on de-familiarization and formalist estrangement. That said, Shaviro largely agrees with Suvin that one should actively dare think the unthinkable and never accept today's world as inevitable or final. The future must flow, if there is a future left for us indeed.
William Raymond's structures of feeling are constantly changing and this books helps us tune in and keep track. Even those structures of feeling or subcultural styles, attitudes, and postures so characteristic of cyberpunk let's say (to take just one salient example among many given by Shaviro) seem today completely inadequate, oddly outmatched and frankly superannuated in a world of Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading and The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism: Software as Right-Wing Extremism.
Some important developments such as 1990s technofeminism have become self-understood and normalized while others such as combatting the worst effects of anthropocentrism are now considered indispensable. Indeed, decentering the human has not been just the task of various post-humanist philosophers but one of the most important functions of SF today.
It is perhaps not so hard to admit that cyberpunk authors have been "usurped and commodified by the powers they had hoped to oppose" (Semley 2019 quoted by Shaviro) if you think about how Cyberpunk 2077 crowd-funded game ended up being one of the most expensive games ever. One can almost say that if Shaviro feels an affinity to more exotic Marxisms (see China Mieville apophatic Marxism), that's because today's left-wing seems sadly very ill-equipped to confront today's exterminism (Four Futures: Life After Capitalism and asset manager capitalism/Wall Street Consensus. I must say that's why it is so refreshing reading a delightful 'kitsch Marxist' wade through vast expanse of SF literature, rather than capitulate in front of anarkocapitalist (techbro) fascistoid leaders prowling the X platform, formerly known as TW. Looking forward to a book of his about SF with examples drawn from other media such as film, music and music videos (and why not Tiktok!). Till then there's so much more potentialities to glean from this current book than I could ever possibly discern here.
August 11, 2025
It's hard for me to write an insightful review about this book. I have more experience in reviewing novels or short story collections. And I have reviewed non fiction books, but those were a bit less academic compared to this one (or I had more knowledge about the field e.g. evolutionary biology at the outset so it felt like that to me). Luckily there's a great review on here that goes into the philosophical depths that I cannot plumb: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This is a philosophical/literary criticism mash up about science fiction - and more specifically about SF's relationship with the future. To answer the question if SF is 'about the future' one first has to define what the future is - what is the nature of time? Does the future has any relationship with the present? Is it possible at all for us to say something about something that is not real (yet)? Interesting questions! Then it is about the ways in which SF goes about approaching the future, not in the way of direct prediction or representation, but in the form of extrapolation, speculation and fabulation. It is fascinating stuff - but hard for me to repeat, as I was not that familiar with all the jargon. I did get new insights from it. It must be said that for a pretty dense, academic text this was surprisingly readable, filled with humor, sly asides and examples from pop culture.
What I appreciated most in this book was the deep analysis of several SF-texts. Ranging from short stories, to novels, to music even, from golden age authors and H.P. Lovecraft by the way of Philip K. Dick up to modern authors like Adrian Tchaikovsky, N.K. Jemisin, Kameron Hurley and more there is a lot of exploration of themes and the way these stories illuminatie philosophical discussions. It gave me a deeper appreciation of the thematic depths of these works.
So - will I recommend this book to you? Only if you have an interest in exploring the philosophy of science fiction (and literature in a broader sense) and want so see how SF can illuminate philosophical thought.
Will I read more books in this vein? Yes - I found myself challenged to broaden my horizon and think more deeply about my favorite genre.
This is a philosophical/literary criticism mash up about science fiction - and more specifically about SF's relationship with the future. To answer the question if SF is 'about the future' one first has to define what the future is - what is the nature of time? Does the future has any relationship with the present? Is it possible at all for us to say something about something that is not real (yet)? Interesting questions! Then it is about the ways in which SF goes about approaching the future, not in the way of direct prediction or representation, but in the form of extrapolation, speculation and fabulation. It is fascinating stuff - but hard for me to repeat, as I was not that familiar with all the jargon. I did get new insights from it. It must be said that for a pretty dense, academic text this was surprisingly readable, filled with humor, sly asides and examples from pop culture.
What I appreciated most in this book was the deep analysis of several SF-texts. Ranging from short stories, to novels, to music even, from golden age authors and H.P. Lovecraft by the way of Philip K. Dick up to modern authors like Adrian Tchaikovsky, N.K. Jemisin, Kameron Hurley and more there is a lot of exploration of themes and the way these stories illuminatie philosophical discussions. It gave me a deeper appreciation of the thematic depths of these works.
So - will I recommend this book to you? Only if you have an interest in exploring the philosophy of science fiction (and literature in a broader sense) and want so see how SF can illuminate philosophical thought.
Will I read more books in this vein? Yes - I found myself challenged to broaden my horizon and think more deeply about my favorite genre.
December 15, 2024
I always enjoy Steve Shaviro's writing because, while he consistently addresses pithy philosophical and literary questions -- in this case, questions regarding definitions of science fiction and the science-fictional imagination --, he does so in prose and approach that aims intentionally and generously to bring the reader along. And his scholarship is top-notch. I just wish he could have added an index because I want to return to so many different passages and examples without having to thumb all the way back through the text. A truly great ride!
November 3, 2024
Steven Shaviro has a very entertaining way to make a topic as interesting as Science Fiction into a deep and philosophical conversation. It has been a very rewarding lecture so far, I keep learning and at the same time amused by all the themes. There are many descriptions of works that either changes you the way you used to see them or make you extremely curious about them and wanting to go and read them. There is a vast collection of references that makes this book also an encyclopedia for further research. I'm loving it too much. One of my favorite parts has been a story about a human becoming a dog and suddenly realizing the implications/limitations of being a dog are. It's like throwing Spinoza and Deleuze with a vast array of science fiction writers and put them into a blender. I love this mix. Shaviro's point of view makes you feel close to the text and to the author.
Manuel
Manuel
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