Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

by Jordan S. Carroll

Reveals the alt-right’s project to claim science fiction and—by extension—the future

Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Literary Criticism, Social Justice, Essays, Sociology

120 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 22, 2024

Reviews

[Gerhard]

'But perhaps the most formally sophisticated rebuttal to fascists comes in the unlikely form of Chuck Tingle’s queer absurdist science fiction erotica. Tingle has often parodied the far right: he created a fake version of Breitbart.com that included the “Top 5 Alt-Right Basements,” and after Trump was elected he went on a mission to reverse this “timeline mistake.”'

Wow, a really important eye-opener on how the alt-right has appropriated SF's 'licence to imagine' as an ideological and epistemological affirmation of 'white' technoscientific supremacy. Um, the Terminator as an ubermensch? Interstellar as promoting Aryan cultural superiority throughout TIME???

Carroll rightly points out that SF has always been vulnerable to being hacked by extremists and reactionary ideologues, simply because that's how the genre started out.

It’s how reasonable fans respond to such misguided incitement that will be the true test of the genre's continued relevance, readability, and appeal to a global audience.

#Decolonise SF!!! #AfricaRising

[Rachel Ashera Rosen]

A fascinating and chilling examination of the far-right's claim to science fiction. If you lived through the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies debacle or were baffled by the reactionary temper tantrums over Star Trek getting "woke," this won't be unfamiliar to you, but the author goes much farther in untangling the assumptions about time, technology, and colonialism that underpin sci-fi from its very roots. For antifascists who are also giant sci-fi nerds, this is a must-read.

[Silvana]

Not the most readable book out there but an important one for the SFF genre. And maybe time to read those Chuck Tingle books if that is really the "most formally sophisticated rebuttal" to these fascists.

[Dale Stromberg]

Written in straightforward prose but with scholarly rigour, this slim volume packs in a great deal of insight about how speculative fiction, particularly science fiction, has long been and continues to be ridden with a strain of white supremacist thought. Carroll traces out the illogic and the paradoxes of such thought, showing how it crops up not only in overtly racist fiction but in otherwise “respectable” Golden Age or libertarian sci-fi, as well as offering examples of how the progressive movements within the genre have successfully resisted “Faustian” fascist strains.

[Grace]

I think all science fiction fans should read this book. Additionally, anyone who has ever giggled at elon musks “dark gothic maga” needs to be slapped in the face with this book.

[Oleksandr Zholud]

This is a non-fic about which SFF books US alt-right consider a must read for their ‘cause’, their views and interpretations of mainstream SFF from Dune and Lord of the Rings to movies like Terminator.

The book starts with one James H. Madole, a science fiction fan who led the first major neo-Nazi party in the United States. Then it discussed several famous texts, not necessary fascist per se, but used by neo-Nazi to ‘prove’ their points, including but not limited to the ideas that only whites have imagination (both to invent in general and write SF in particular), they are endangered, their birth rate is artificially suppressed and similar nonsense.

The pluses of this book are that it gives what alt-right see e.g. in Dune, where they see a new feudalism and a white savior as ‘proofs’ of white superiority and return to good old times. It also gives the books cherished by this group but relatively unknows elsewhere, like French Archeofuturism and The Turner Diaries.

The minuses IMHO are related to often anachronistic views on older SF, simplifications like linking libertarians (who are individualists) with totalitarian (i.e. anti-individualistic), but yes, there are people who support both in the same time. Some views are just assumed right-wing, which actually shows lack of knowledge of e.g. Soviet pulp SF of the 1920s, which e.g. supported eugenics. A fun episode from the book: “Faye has less to say about the Muslim immigrants and other people of color who were ethnically cleansed at the founding of the Eurosiberian Federation. When a visitor from the Indian Empire asks what happened to them, the protagonist pauses for a moment before explaining that they were forcibly deported to Madagascar. Nazi official Adolf Eichmann considered this island as an evacuation site for Jews before he oversaw their deportation to concentration camps to be murdered. Whether Faye is engaging in irony or prevarication, his Faustian future expels almost all nonwhite populations from history.” In “Эскадрилья всемирной коммуны” (1925) after the communist revolution took the globe, all forces of darkness, including Mussolini, Rockefeller and Poisson, fortified at Madagascar.

Overall, an interesting research.

[Jessica]

Gooooood NIGHT. Chilling and very readable deep dive into the Alt-Right's "colonization" of science fiction and fantasy for their own purposes. Holding up utopias and dystopias as evidence of white supremacy, created beings like the Terminator as an "Ubermensch" and all the stuff that people with morals and souls would never in a million years think about.

*I am not rating books read for the World Fantasy Award.*

[Yuri Krupenin]

Я что-то думал что тут будет про феномен ностальгии по старому стартреку у людей которые не могут смотреть новый по причине "too woke" (я тоже не могу но по другим причинам) и попытки аппроприации творчества Бэнкса Маском, такого рода вещи

А здесь разбор широкого спектра попяченности от whatever the fuck Peter Thiel's worldview is и до полноприводной нацистской сф-шизы — книг где арийцы сбежали в будущее чтобы приготовиться к битве за будущее белой расы в прошлом или там еще цикла произведений в которых пробуждение расового сознания позволяет герою останавливать время

В целом очень интересно но непонятно зачем мне эта информация

И еще дай бог здоровья автору — там 150 ссылок на источники, и мне страшно представлять какие последствия имела вычитка всего этого

[Megan]

I read this for the Hugos, so I'd say I'm not really the target audience for this book (political science acadamia), but I'm not really sure what argument this book was trying to make, which means I don't know whether it succeeded in making it. There was a lot of information about selected people within the alt-right movement and their interactions with selected science fictional concepts, but you could make those sorts of connections between pretty much any movement and any genre. It felt more like cherry-picking to me than saying anything deeper about either the inherent nature of science fiction or the inherent nature of alt-right thinking.

Also, what is my takeaway supposed to be? Is there something I, as a progressive and a science fiction fan, am supposed to do about what I've read? If there was any sort of call-to-action in the book, I missed it.

[sophie]

lowkey forgot i finished this but it was very good!! technically dense + reads like a thesis (I think maybe it is a thesis?) so if you're not into academic writing (understandable) this might not be for you, but I'm going to purchase my copy just for the wealth of citations alone. there were SO many things mentioned that could easily take you down an information rabbithole. i can totally see why this won a Hugo, it's a super important piece of work for a genre where a lot of racist tropes/themes/ideas still go unquestioned and rewritten. good stuff~

[Miquel Codony]

(3,5/5)

[Natasha den Dekker]

I fear this is too intellectual/academic for me however it's incredibly interesting and it's made me think of the crossover into other genres (fantasy) (romantasy) and how the alt-right is given credibility.

I really enjoyed how the author brought in references to Trek, Silvia Moreno Garcia, The Boys, N.K. Jemisin, Chuck Tingle and many more! To highlight that while sci-fi used to be the bastion of male/right wing thinkers it is changing. The obsession with 'owning the future' and how it ties to eugenics etc is disturbing.

(I especially enjoyed the mini chapter about Dune, we all know how that story pans out which is why the alt-right loves it).

It's not an easy read but definitely *worth* the read. That othering and orienalist approach coupled with colonial ambivalence is something that is such a *trope* in scifi and fantasy.

[Steph | bookedinsaigon]

When I saw this work’s title and the fact that it won a Hugo, I knew I had to read it. It’s long bothered me that the reading community for my favorite literary genre, speculative fiction, is overwhelmingly white and male. r/Fantasy and other related subreddits look like Antarctica with how white they are. Why is this?

Turns out it’s NOT just me, as Carroll unpacks for us in this academic thesis… except that this is really, really dense academic writing, which means that it’s not going to be most people’s cup of tea.

In the simplest of terms, Carroll argues that the ideology of “speculative whiteness” consists of these key tenets:

1. White people, and only white people, have the mental capacity to imagine and innovate. All other races are inherently concerned more/only with surviving day by day or indulging in base desires.

2. As a result of the above, speculative fiction is the realm of white people. All other people, be they authors or characters, don’t belong in this world.

3. White supremacist thinking is SO sure of their superior nature that they believe that a high-tech speculative future, such as the ones often described in sci-fi, are the inevitable due of white people. In other words, for them, the speculative future isn’t so much an imagination or a prediction as it is an inevitability. White supremacists read sci-fi as if those worlds of possibility are bygone conclusions for them.

4. Alt-right white readers therefore “read” this white supremacist version into almost all works of speculative fiction. Many of them are incapable of noticing irony or satire, such as when a sci-fi writer is actually critiquing fascism by writing about a fascist sci-fi future.

I find this fascinating because it makes it clear, to me, why there is no point in using facts to try to get these kinds of people to change their minds. Their neural pathways are LITERALLY programmed in a totally different way. This is why engaging in debates with people like He Who Must Not Be Eulogized in a Positive Light is fruitless. Their brains cannot ever conceive of a different reality in which people of color, women, etc are as equally capable and deserving of the future as themselves.

Now, it’s really too bad that “Speculative Whiteness” is written for a really niche (read: academic) audience. It’s only around 100 pages long but took me a loooong time to get through with how dense and academic it is. I mean, read the following and tell me if you understand it:

“Whiteness appears as consubstantial with speculative futurity.”

Confused? The whole thing is written like that. Fortunately I have extensive experience speaking academia, but it’s definitely not for everyone lol. Which is a shame, as the points are really important and illuminating.

[Julie Capell]

Fascinating investigation into the obsession with science fiction by some in the alt-right. This first came to my attention when a group called the "Sad Puppies" hijacked the Hugo nominations in 2015 with a slate of works characterized by many as racist, fascist, misogynistic and homophobic. Most of these works were, not coincidentally, written by white males. The Hugo awards are chosen by members and attendees of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) and that year, they soundly rejected the reactionaries by voting "No Award" in every category where only Sad Puppy nominees made the ballot.

While the average scifi reader may not have paid much attention to the Sad Puppies controversy, for the hard-core fan (I include myself in this group, even though I've never attended WorldCon or voted for a Hugo), it was a wake-up call. I think most of us realize that a lot of scifi, especially older, military scifi and space opera, contains heavy overtones of racism and authoritarianism. But I, for one, always glossed over that aspect of the genre, focusing instead on the witty banter, cool technology, and weird aliens. After WorldCon 2015, I started paying a lot more attention to the underlying themes of what I was reading, and who was writing it.

Speculative Whiteness dives back into the fray to reveal the deeper motivations of some of the people involved in the Sad Puppies controversy as well as other culturally influential individuals who are at the forefront of advancing neo-Nazi and white supremacist thought today. I'm not going to give these disgusting excuses for human beings the honor of typing their names, but suffice to say, I recognized many of them as prominent podcasters and thought leaders whose words have instigated and/or inspired many of the worst atrocities that have occurred in the last several decades.

This book did an excellent job of explaining many of the historical touchpoints that form the basis for today's alt-right and neo-Nazi fantasies of why straight, white men are the only ones who can save the world--and, by extension, why non-whites and women are the enemy. I learned a lot about Faust and what Faustian means in alt-right circles: to be capable of taking great risks in order to access the infinite spoils awaiting humanity out in the cosmos--of course, only white men are deemed to have this "Faustian" capacity. It also shows how the alt-right takes seminal science fictional works, including Dune and Star Wars, and twists them into supporting their own dreams of an authoritarian cosmos led by white men. Even works whose authors described them as anti-fascist satire are taken by the alt-right at face value and lauded as road maps for a white supremacist vision. The final analysis of the author reveals the self-contradictory nature of the alt-right's assertion that white men are the only ones with enough vision to lead humanity into the future by colonizing the stars . . . a vision that is surely more stuck in the distant past than it is a view of a bold, new future.

[Laura]

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll examines the intersections of racist / white supremacist thinking and the development of science fiction as a genre. With numerous examples spanning decades, he argues that “the alt-right seizes upon the speculative genres to dictate who has the right to speculate in the first place.”

This is a predominantly historical book. There are contemporary figures discussed – both right-wing racists and the diverse sff authors who directly oppose them while visioning futures for everyone – but the bulk of the focus is on older texts. Television and film are mentioned (ex. the right’s hate for Star Trek’s vision of the future and the particular vitriol Nichelle Nichols has received) but written science fiction is the primary focus. The book is short, and quite narrowly focused – I can think of a lot more examples & issues in contemporary sff that I’d be keen to read an article from Carroll on in future.

The text is academic and rigorous, and the endnotes are very much worth reading for further exploration. As someone with an academic background I’d say this is quite readable to non-academic audiences for the most part. I’m glad this book won a Hugo – it’s well deserved, and an important read for all of us invested in science fiction’s potential to be liberatory.

Content warnings: discussion of racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, colonialism; mentions mass shootings and hate motivated violence

[mouwwie]

real rating 4.5

this is excellent work with so, so many very interesting ideas. but yes this is very much academic work and i do not say this lightly. walk into this and prepare to engage every single one of your braincells

[H]

this book made me download a dictionary app because i was so sick of looking up words and getting the google AI summary. dense but good. the kind of reading that made my brain work for it. my god but white supremacists are just breathlessly self-obsessed and stupid.

[anri]

Deep, well-written analysis that is crucial for understanding what's been happening in the US and other Western countries for decades and now more than ever. Highly recommended!

[Victor]

Short, but accomplishes everything it sets out to do tidily.

[Ştefan Tiron]

ISOLATIONIST SF
I was long overdue in reviewing this winner of the a Hugo award for the best non-fiction. Recently, a number of historians managed to provide a series of new counter-intuitive, necessary, and updated research regarding on what grew on the ruins of neoliberalism, a right-wing technolibertarian ideological glue that is infused with SF tropes (or SFF if one considers the role Tolkien plays in right-wing narratives). SF served as a terrain for speculative wagers and claims for today's neoreactionaries and technolibertarians with more or less openly fascistoid sympathies.
The conservative counterrevolution has been as much one of trad wives & overturing reproductive rights as well as futurist inroads and pseudo-scientific pretentions (see discussions around the "new fusionism").
But to my knowledge, this slim focused volume by Jordan S. Carroll (including David M. Higgins's Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-victimhood issued in the Forerunners: Ideas First University of Minnesota collection is the first to analyse not just Alt-Right futurist & science-fictional dimension, but also confrontung science fiction studies, eminently Marxist, Blochian or Brechtian in orientation (Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Critical Theory and Science Fiction) with its own blindspots, mainly the way of how much of today's totalitarian energies of capitalism have been nurtured under the geeky umbrella of science fiction and speculative fiction. Choosing the Alt-Right as focus might limit the scope of this book (another anthology of essays with contributions ranging from Poland to South Asia co-edited by Jordan S. Carroll Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice aims to fill this gap). Even if seemingly a very US-centric and US- domestic politics-specific issue, the spillovers and manospheric impact of the Alt-Right and of US-influenced or flavored politics will be with us for years to come. Today's "Reactionary International", brings together Vedic "Science" and Dacian Protochronism, Muskist Fortress Futurism space colonies and Romanian neo-orthodox survivalism.

I take the liberty to include one non-US example from my own regrettable experience (bc I myself platformed it unknowingly), a small textual dystopia from years ago in the context of a festival in Timișoara/Romania made by a local SF fan. I do not want to go into more detail here, but this small piece was written well before the Trump win and way before the Sad Puppies Hugo debacle. Still, it had all the characteristics discussed in Speculative Whiteness. Suffice to say it was depicting a sort of racist Romanian dystopia where in the future, the whole population was forced to make "black" or "colored" (read Rroma or Sinti-like) skin grafts as part of the new Romanian multiculturalism agenda (which never truly materialized and one could say was easily dismantled under US Trumpist pressures). Clearly local SF fans and clubs also dabbled in "speculative whiteness". A local feminist anti-racist group took aim at the piece. I just want to point out that these struggles over who gets to live in and invent a high-tech future for the few or for all are universal, even at or perhaps even more so at the ex-Socialist semi-periphery. A crumbling healthcare & educational system & constant anti communist smearing campaigns against political opponents brought cynical attitudes & disdain for the poorest of the poor to the fore. In a sense there is coming of age for sf studies and sf fans, in realizing that the vaunted progressive potentials could be contested and rolled back (like the gains of the sexual revolution, feminist, queer and anti-capitalist movements), nor were they inherent, and that in times of fascist inducing political economy (see Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defense of Affordability, Dignity, and Democracy), it's probably to be expected that we get mass shooters manifestos inspired by antisemitic and racist futurist sf visions and that Musk and his cohort of ultra-rich techbros spread disinformation and hate online and actively embrace and shape their programs based on their active misreadings of sf classics.

HERMENEUTICS OF OBTUSNESS
Some reviewers here have been voicing some frustration or a sentiment of helplessness or powerlessness that has overtaken them after reading Speculative Whiteness. But I deeply disagree. This is the naivete of thinking that your precious and dearest (I surmise) genre and progressive redoubt might harbor some unwanted takeovers, be misinterpreted and deviously transformed into a devious speculative possibilistic laboratory, as a way not to question but to entrench privilege further, legitimize social and racial hierarchies and lay claim on the future - which in theory should not happen (bc yes, "Tomorrow Belongs To Everyone"). Still, struggles over emancipatory values and reactionary backlash are nothing new and will continue for the foreseeable future. What is new is a sort of denial, on par with climate denial, maybe that areas 'curtailed off' from reactionaries should become their favored terrain. For one, they were never cut off or isolated from right-wing incursions; some of the founding figures of US fascism were sf fans (as J. S. Carroll uncovers). Historicize, historicize, historicize should be the correct response probably when confronted with what Jordan Carroll calls a "kind of hermeneutics of obtuseness, [through which] alt-right critics wrest right-wing meanings from ostensibly antifascist texts" (Whitey on the Moon chapter, p 73). How come does it feel sacrilegious or mind-boggling to see how beloved books and worldbuilding efforts such as Dune actually "play a central role in white nationalist propaganda" (check out the LARB article by Jordan S. Carroll that served as a stub for developing the arguments in the book).
Yes, it is good a lot of indigenous and decolonial futurisms (see Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial, Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/Present/Future, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction) are flourishing around the globe and there is renewed interest in eco-socialist thinking (The Ecological Rift, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism), but we've been way too long complacent about how quickly "ethnically cleansed utopias" became mainstreamed.

NEOREACTION FLOURISHING UNDER LATE-STAGE (ALGO) CAPITALISM
I cannot shake the feeling that there's a larger issue when books such as this detonate the certainties of either the SFF fan community or liberal centrist sensibilities, or even academic certainties (meaning for those that should be in some way forewarned or in touch with social and political phenomena that only later spill over into mainstream).
For a long time, or at least since the declared "end of history" by Fukuyama and even before the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a certain complacency about right wing/reactionary or neoreactionary continuities after the Cold War, as if the Wars on Terror and the Green on the Outside Red On the Inside memes were not part of the "market of ideas". Avoiding what was considered a cesspool that did not merit any scholarly attention, let alone policing or even Secret Service attention. Most attention would be directed to "thinkers" or "high theory" primary sources (say Heidegger or Nietzsche - not particularly SF-prone thinkers), but as Jordan mentions, "American theorist Alex Jones does not need Heideggerian jargon to spook his viewers with predictions [...]about transgenic gorilla nad pig humanoids".
Did everyone sleep? Did the sleep of civic consciousness and liberal complacency towards anti-democratic and conservative revolutions produce these multiheaded monsters? Or can we afford to ignore the conservative counterrevolution (Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance)?

One could equate the lassitude of the NSS (national security state) and policing in Germany elsewhere, whose priorities were shaped under waves of neoliberal restructuring, dismantling of the post-WW2 welfare state and private outsourcing produced historical ground for toxic offshoots and more virulent strains of racist and xenophobic ideologies (see Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy). As the state's sole function ultimately appeared to be reduced to insulating vested private interests from democratic accountability, ethnopopulism, IQ pseudoscience, and sociobiological social Darwinism gained pop- appeal in certain corners of the Internet. But there are structural reasons for this.
Outside of the US one has to think of the Hanau racially-xenophobic-motivated shootings and assassination of migrant background Germans and the entire NSU-Komplex right-wing continuities and still unclarified judicial mess - where they actually blamed the victims instead of an in-built inability to pursue and dismantle right-wing underground networks right under their noses. That ANTIFA is being declared a terrorist organization and right-wing terrorism goes unabated appears to be (on the surface) a recent phenomenon, but I assure you it is not. Books like Jordan S. Caroll have done the work for the mainstream culture at large (and critical theory included), bc there has been a sort of relative apathy and ignorance regarding right-wing ideological fountainheads, alliances (or disputes, as with the nativist wing of Bannon vs the Network State faction of Balaji Srinivasan), as well as definite bias for promoting such voices online on the Big Tech platforms.

Sorry to say that Matrix becoming the plaything of the right wing and terminally (the online subcultures is no longer an exception but clearly the unspoken metanarrative for today's techlords and uber-rich Faustian elites (is one allowed to call these metanarratives after their supposed demise during postmodern attacks?).
Living in the Former East, I was able to see how some of the early adopters of tech came out of the neo-traditionalist corner (thinking how GRECE cofounder quoted by Jordan Girogio Locchi hoped "to reconcile Evola and Marinetti", something like this was happening in Romania (and Russia) with neo-Orthodoxy becoming a version of a majoritarian (religiously) organization that was actively embracing the Internet and high tech in order to spread anti-liberal, reactionary and red-baiting nationalistic messaging (with the usual Eliade & Cioran glaze). After 1989, future ideologues like Aleksander Dugin travelled West (and even had access to 'banished' books such as neo-traditionalists like Guenon through their private ties) and connected very early on with Italian fascists and French Nouvelle Droite (even before Bannon came on the scene).

Jordan's S. Carroll's Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right is perhaps the painful coming-of-age of realizing one needs to pay the closest attention to what was previously dismissed as mere pulp, (or "subzeigeist" The Secret Life of Puppets), not just commercialism or a source of juissance, because white supremacist politics has been busy mining it. Even if Rob Latham wrote that from the 1920s sf was like other genre fiction institutionally isolated from mainstream (or relegated to adolescent or pubescent readerships), they did not stop spilling over into the mainstream.
He does the tough labour of systematizing what would otherwise seem (and probably also is) an unsystematic, under-theorized and frankly nauseating and despicable literature where EUrabia antisemitic Replacement Theory conspiracy meets Oswald Spengler and online right-wing streamers chide Europe about not producing enough prestige space operas like Star Wars. I don't think many will take it upon themselves to delve into the Arktos publishing catalogue and summarize what is to be found there, and he has done this job for us, so we don't have to 'dirty' our hands in the process.

Sentences like "Richard Spencer may be one of the most significant unrecognized science fiction critics of our time." already point out the fact that right-wing strategies of "flooding the zone" are already flooding science fiction criticism and commentary via neoreactionary podcasters, YouTubers, Twitch, and other channels, even if they will be contested by antifascist fans everywhere. To say that today's right-wing ideologies are not up to the level or fixated to the past willingly misrecognizes (and is also intellectually dangerous and lazy) that pop culture and especially SFF has become the go-to domain for today's "oligarch intellectuals". The readership for SFF is not just today's young generation but also techbro technocracies the world over (just thinking about the engineering platform states Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future). SF is truly global in reach and a Speculative Whitheness is a sign that we're far from being in a post-ideological world (no matter how that argument sounds for some Imperialist Realism). The fictional is completely infused with capitalist realism, even if it pretends to be 'realistic', it is constantly getting hard to separate novelistic from non-fictional materials. But I think this was already visible with genre's that influenced early SF (such as lost races narratives), particularly how the work of racist American lawyer, anthropologist, and proponent of eugenics Madison GrantThe Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History makes its way into Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Decolonisation and anti-Imperialist struggles during and before the Cold War have been a source of deep anxiety and fear-mongering amongst representatives of eugenics, so-called muscular Christianity. In fact the only think I was missing in this book was a mention of how "white fear" speculative literature from the 1920s was so constitutive of the white supremacist male identity and alt-victimhood of today, but I guess it would be impossible to gather all reactionary strains feeding today's neoreactionary mind.

I am thankful to Jordan S. Carroll that he decided not to dedicate too much time to the usual suspects (NRx thinkers like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land) and more on the "Faustian rebels" sources (as well as the sort of gigantism and Prometheanism of this Luciferian/Faustian current) Spencer, Jorjani, etc. as well as the metapolitical French influences (Guillaume Faye) or local US fascists (Francis Parker Yockey and Willis Carto) or alt-victimhood (David M Higgins) novels or such as The Camp of the Saints by Raspail or race war narratives Kyle Bristow's White Apocalypse or Renaud Camus.
Finally, one of the most relevant threads of the book (for me) was where white masculinity meets financialization and forecasting. The political stakes of financial speculation, as well as the hubristic and narcissistic obsession over hazard, risk and uncertainity/forecasting appears as a common denominator (which let's be clear is never true contigency -or risk as Jordan Carroll emphasizes "Protected by cops, the facsists have little to fear: they are the ones putting everyone else at risk"). This is actually never risky and mostly a show-off and a type of scamming (not to mention insider trading), one that is particularly visible today with the advent of the barely regulated predictive markets where betting on catastrophes or the latest erratic measures by Trump is being monetized. Owning science fiction turns out to have something to do with fanciful economic theories as well. Radical anti-egalitarian austro- libertarian Hans-Hermann Hope used to rank civilizations (and by extension economies, societies and races) according to "time preference"(the preference for present goods over future goods), and this in practice, is conveniently used to condemn and to exclude entire populations and regions of the globe and even deny their economic capacities or ability to trade or actualize potentials basically a way to ensure that "white people maintain a monopoly over modal imagination".

[Charles Korb]

I found this book pretty annoying. For someone who wants to be so specific about the alt-right vs any of the other forms of right wing in his discussion he sometimes paints with a broad brush.

I didn't know that the alt right believed that the justification for their racism was that people of color had a steeper discount rate for future value than white people (ie they fail the marshmallow test). But the section that pushed me over the edge on this book was lumping together this together with the EA longtermism which in turn is lumped together with Elon Musk's pro-natalism; none of which I think go together very well. There are other examples of him doing this in the book as well but this was the simplest and most egregious.

It's an interesting history of the intersection of the two fields but there's only so many times you can read about some guy writing science fiction books where the future is dominated by white people and all the black people are savages

[David H.]

A short, fascinating book about the alt-right's effort to claim science fiction for themselves (white people). Instead of being outsiders trying to hijack a "progressive SF," Carroll shows they were there all along inside fandom (as much as the rest of us may dislike it). I was intrigued by their willful misreading of books with fascist/totalitarian elements and pretending they were positive portrayals, and I appreciated Carroll's angle of time preferences and their delusions, which I hadn't considered before (because I usually try not to pay attention to white-nationalist thoughts).

It's a short read, though written in a more academic style than casual readers will be expecting. I lucked out in that I had read or was familiar with many of the SF works mentioned within, and having read many of Camestros Felapton's Debarkle articles which touched on a few similar issues in SF history.

[Stoffia]

Petit essai des Presses Universitaires du Minnesota sur les liens entre la science fiction et les mouvements de suprématie blanche. L'essai s'oppose à cette vision de la SF comme un genre fondamentalement progressiste. Sans en faire un genre raciste par essence, il démontre comment les outils de la SF peuvent servir ses desseins plus sinistres.

L'essai explore plusieurs cas de figure : les supremacistes qui ont fait de la SF pour servir leur propos, et d'autres qui ont utilisé des "vrais" œuvres de SF pour en détourner le sens (ou parfois pour mettre de l'avant y sens qui y était réellement).

J'y ai découvert qu'il existait, par exemple, un sous-genre complet de la SF maintenant oublié d'histoires ou "les Blancs sont oppressés par des Noirs, ou des aliens à la peau foncée dont la société tombe en ruine parce que seul le génie des Blancs peut construire et maintenir une civilisation". Et quand je dis un sous genre complet, c'est une cinquantaine de nouvelles, romans, certains ayant gagnés des prix, et certains par des noms connus. Heinlein ou Niven, par exemple.

(Pour Heinlein, ça ne me surprend pas, je connais déjà ses histoires basés sur le "Péril Jaune". J'ignorais tout des politiques de Niven par contre et en fouillant... Ouf, ça ne s'est pas amélioré avec le temps. Il a travaillé au gouvernement américain sous Bush où il a proposé un projet pour réduire les coûts des soins de santé en faisant croire aux latinos qu'on leur prélèverait secrètement des organes s'ils se rendaient à l'hôpital. En 2007.)

J'ai appris que, si Le Monde des Non-A est le livre le plus connu de Van Vogt en français, en anglais c'est plutôt À La Poursuite des Slans. Et qu'une raison de ce succès vient d'une interprétation du livre qui a subi la réappropriation des supremacistes Blancs, avec tout plein d'organisations eugénistes où près du Klan se réclamant de Van Vogt. (Avec même un plan pour construire une ville eugéniste basée sur le livre, mais qui a dû se rendre à l'évidence qu'une bande d'hommes Blancs célibataires ça ne pouvait pas vraiment passer beaucoup de gènes.)

Je donne ici les exemples les plus marquants mais le livre en déborde. On y revient sur la polémique des Hugo entourant les Sad Puppies, on y parle de superhéros et tout ça. Le dernier long chapitre analyse plus en profondeur la "philosophie" supremaciste blanche, ses fondements et ses errements. Son "archéofutur Faustien". Cette section, bien qu'intéressante, s'éloigne un peu trop (à mon goût) du sujet d'origine du livre, qui reste très bon et fouillé malgré tout.

[Nils]

Although only two years old (published in 2024), Jordan Carroll’s book is already somewhat dated because it reflects on a tradition on the American right — oriented toward a futurity of white supremacy — that was at that time still a somewhat fringe faction but which now (with Stephen Miller’s Goebbels-like ascendancy) has become absolutely dominant. The result is a writing tone that treats the people Carroll is talking about as gnarly freakazoids more than as the dominant political force on the American right — the reason why the term “Alt-Right” (which is in the subtitle) has disappeared is that it’s no long “alt” — it IS the right.

With that said one of the great strengths of this book is that it has a quite nuanced take on the figures of the far right, regularly noting divergences between them. For example, he notes that Richard Spencer‘s vision of white supremacy is not of a retreat to whites, only enclaves, but rather white domination of the entire planet. Or as another example, he notes the French far right figure Guillaume Faye’s transhumanist science fiction vision is at odds with many other on the right who see this as a plot to dissolve the identity categories they hold dear.

With these subtle points aside, what Carroll is really doing here is unpacking the intellectual genealogy of this set of ideas with the world of science fiction writing. It does this well, though there is one curious lacuna: how can one write a book on this topic and not place HP Lovecraft at the center of the story? (I don’t think Lovecraft gets so much as a mention.) I’m also not fully convinced by Carroll’s suggestion that this rightwing lineage within SF serves as a lind of gateway drug for young men into white supremacy.

Particularly interesting is his discussion of the role of “the Faustian“ in alt-right mythology, as represented by “a white man whose constitution enjoins him to speculate on the future…. The Faustian proves his aptitude for future greatness by pledging entire populations and planets as collateral. Only one who displays a disregard for the present has access to the future. That is the story they tell themselves at least.” (76-77)

[Amanda books_ergo_sum]

Fighting fascism with alien peen. Any book that concludes that “the most formally sophisticated rebuttal to fascists comes in the unlikely form of Chuck Tingle’s queer absurdist science fiction erotica.”

Is my kind of book 😂

Now when someone side-eyes my queer sci-fi erotica, I can confidently say that I’m defeating fascism. One weird alien peen at a time.

The argument in this book was fascinating—you know the joy we feel when we read a queer normative sci-fi, with a critique of late stage capitalism plus a climate change allegory or two?

Welllll… turns out alt-right white supremacists have been experiencing the same joy about seemingly normal sci-fi books—except for fascist reasons 😳

This is the perfect ‘know thy enemy’ anti-fascism book for Bookstagrammers. It’s bookish, well-cited, rigorous enough for me (as an academic with a background in the philosophers covered), yet super introductory-friendly too! It:
▪️ explains what the alt-right white supremacist dog whistles in fascist sci-fi books are
▪️ introduces the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ political philosophies of people like Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and Richard Spencer—the theoretical mentors of your least favourite evil-doers (like JD Vance and Peter Thiel)
▪️ gives you even more reasons to love your favourite progressive sci-fi authors (NK Jemisin has been ✨in the trenches✨ battling these douche bags)

And, maybe most importantly, this book perfectly explains why sci-fi with queer, POC, and disabled characters isn’t just about representation—it’s a political statement about how, when we dream about the future, contrary to what the alt-right wants, that future is full of queer, POC, and disabled people.

… who may or may not be getting banged by hot aliens aka, thriving 😉

[Sophie]

Overall, the framing through the lens of scifi literary theory limits its scope and ability to discuss the more tangible impacts of fascism as it applies to technology, politics and science. The latter half of the second part seemed unfocused. However, it was very informative and a must-read for scifi fans.

The ideas presented are not surprising, but intriguing in a "finally, someone has connected the dots, this makes sense" way. The core of fascism is an appeal to authority and a racist belief that white people are the intellectually and culturally superior race. Carroll argues that fascist attraction to scifi is an extension of this - that white people are the only ones capable of technological advancement to the stars, while BIPOC are stagnant. Not only are white people the only ones who have the intellectual capability and desire to imagine a speculative future, but fascists actively seek to determine who is allowed to engage in speculation on our future.

Ultimately, I feel as if the framing puts this book into a box. Carroll mentions some of the real-world consequences of this connection - the fascism of Silicon Valley tech bros like Peter Thiel - but doesn't elaborate on this. Maybe it's an unfair thing to critique (at 120 pages, it's essentially a very long essay) but I think this would've served better as a long chapter or section in a larger work about fascism, technology and science. This is mostly a reflection of an issue I have with a lot of sociological criticism which is that it is more focused on theory and ideas rather than practical consequences.

[Mitchell Friedman]

Fascinating. Intriguing. Thought-Provoking. Exhausting.

This short book, basically a long essay in multiple chapters, won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2025.

It shows the connections between Science Fiction and Science Fiction Fandom with the Alt-Right and White Supremacy. There was a lot to take in and much that I had not heard of. But I could have used an intro to the subject. And really it was more than one subject.

It also covered a related subject which one might describe as Science Fiction Works with the trappings of white supremacy. In this aspect various books were taken up and described in terms that white supremacists have used to make use of these books including especially Dune.

Other books covered include Farnham's Freehold and Lucifer's Hammer - but there were many more.

Any book discussing science fiction books, I'm going to find some merit.

And when a white straight cis-male writes about white straight cis-males, he's clearly leaving people out. But when he writes of other things he risks being accused of writing outside his line, of doing it wrong. And really the same is true of everyone else. But that doesn't change the fact that the world is a rich one and risking getting it wrong is worthwhile.

Often the quotes in this book seemed ironic in the context of the impact of LLM AI's on geek jobs such as software creation.

This was a hard book and worth reading - but really I'd get more value out of easier versions of the same.

[Tim Ubels]

Chuck Tingle gang rise up!

A little dense reading, but an interesting dive into the alt-right’s obsession with misinterpreting speculative science fiction and spinning into Aryan propaganda slop 100% of the time.

[Anne]

The only reason I didn't give this 5 stars is I need it to be longer!

[Gregory Amato]

Insightful enough that the white supremacist Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale) tried to tear this book down, and inadvertently confirmed Carroll's central thesis in the process.