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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHOSE FUTURE IS IT ANYWAY?  
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Jess Maginity
November 12, 2024
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ This book discusses the effort by the alt-right and fascist
movements to claim the genres science fiction and speculative
literature as their own. _

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Speculative Whiteness
Science Fiction and the Alt-Right
Jordan S. Carroll
University of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781517917081

IN THE 1970s, a group of French right-wing intellectuals coalesced
around the idea that cultural influence, not direct political action,
determines the future. Led by Alain de Benoist, the Research and Study
Group for European Civilization (GRECE) borrowed heavily from
communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci to promote the ideas of what
would become the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right). At the time
Gramsci was writing, communist doctrine theorized culture as something
emergent from the economy, and not something with a distinct impact on
the organization of a given society. Gramsci disagreed. He argued that
ideas, politics, and economics are each active forces in society and
while they all impact each other, none of them simply emerges from
another. The New Left embraced this paradigm through countercultural
movements in the 1960s; what is often overlooked in history books is
how a New Right was not far behind. The use of culture as a vehicle
for politics (referred to as metapolitics) belongs to neither the
Right nor the Left; a culture war needs two adversaries.

In the world of science fiction, this culture war has been evident in
online forums, publications, and awards campaigning. The fight is for
ownership of the genre. In the mid-2010s, the Hugo awards served as
the primary battlefield for this front of the culture war. A group of
right-wing science fiction fans and creators calling themselves the
Sad Puppies formed a voting bloc to advocate the return to the
genre’s supposed roots: pulpy outer-space hero stories. The Sad
Puppies’ campaign was a populist one: they argued that elites,
disparagingly referred to as “literati,” were pushing a political
agenda and were silencing the true values of the people by presenting
awards to more underrepresented authors whose stake in the genre was
often, the Puppies insinuated, inauthentic. The Rabid Puppies emerged
a few years into the Sad Puppies’ efforts. As their name suggests,
the Rabid Puppies were unapologetic in their misogyny, homophobia, and
racism. Whereas the Sad Puppies wanted the Hugos to celebrate the
science fiction they were nostalgic for, the Rabid Puppies wanted to
burn the Hugos to the ground. Why did a genre built around speculation
and infinite possible futures spark such an impulse towards
exclusivity? In his new book, _Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction
and the Alt-Right_, Jordan S. Carroll argues that the stakes of this
cultural battlefield boil down to one question: who deserves to write
the future?

 
Science fiction has always been a genre with high political
affordances. It imagines future (and past and present) events,
technologies, and social and environmental developments, as well as
considering how these things change us, and how we react to them.
Science fiction is, in its most basic definition, political. The
project of imagining the world otherwise belongs to no one in
particular. Even so, throughout the genre’s history, both the Left
and the Right have attempted to claim it as an essentially left- or
right-wing venture. In the field of science fiction studies, the
overwhelming emphasis has been placed on science fiction as a
progressive force. There are some important accounts about how science
fiction has served reactionary purposes, such as John Rieder’s
_Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction _(2008) and David
Higgins’s _Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy,
and Alt-Victimhood _(2021). Overall, however, explorations of
presumed-progressive queer, BIPOC, environmentalist, and feminist
science fiction abound while criticism dealing explicitly with
right-wing engagement with science fiction is still rare. Carroll
suggests that this has something to do with the field’s need to
justify its existence; it is a comparatively new field of study that
has only earned mainstream scholarly credibility in the last few
decades, largely through its representation of science fiction as an
inherently critical genre.

_Speculative Whiteness_ addresses this underexplored subject in
science fiction studies’s dialogue about the genre, its cultural
history, and its political implications. Carroll overviews important
radical right figures, including Richard B. Spencer in particular, to
point out shared aesthetic and political ideas about science fiction
that have had material effects on their politics. Carroll identifies
the hollow core of their claims: while these radical right figures
claim that science fiction allows white men to reclaim their racial
identity as intrepid innovators and explorers solely responsible for
shaping the future, these right-wing thinkers are in fact incapable of
imagining a future meaningfully distinct from the self-aggrandizement
of their present identity. He identifies three main trends in
right-wing science fiction and criticism: the tendency to strip
science fiction of uncertainty and present the author’s future as a
foregone conclusion, the emphasis on a racialized understanding of
time as a qualification for full humanity, and the role of a Faustian
hero who shapes the future for the white race.

In his introduction, Carroll discusses the close proximity of science
fiction to radical right-wing politics since the early 20th century.
To some extent, popular culture was always a tool used by the Far
Right. Theorists of the French New Right described intentional
ideological influence on popular culture aimed at a distant political
victory as “metapolitics.” As Andrew Breitbart summarizes,
“Politics is downstream from culture.” Carroll describes this
tactic, alluding to his focus on speculative genres, as “fascist
worldmaking.” The ideology that structures fascist worldmaking is
speculative whiteness: “For the alt-right,” Carroll says,
“whiteness represents a matrix of possibilities more important than
any actual accomplishments the white race may have already
achieved.” There are five “myths” that constitute speculative
whiteness: first, white people are uniquely good at speculating about
the future and innovating in the present; second, nonwhite people are
incapable of imagining the future and making long-term plans for the
future; third, the true grandeur of whiteness will only be apparent in
a high-tech fascist utopia; fourth, science fiction is a genre only
white authors are truly able to produce; and fifth, speculative genres
have the metapolitical potential of allowing a brainwashed white
population to see their racial potential.

 
Carroll’s first chapter, “Invaders from the Future,” focuses on
time preference. Time preference refers to the preference for good
things to happen now rather than for better things to happen in the
future; this chapter discusses how both committed scientific racists
and less systematic science fiction fans claim that having a lower
time preference is the key evolutionary trait that has led (for the
scientific racists) or will lead (for the science fiction fans) to a
superior breed of human beings. In _Speculative Whiteness_, the most
comprehensive representatives of this viewpoint are Gregory Cochran
and Henry Harpending (a Southern Poverty Law Center–certified white
nationalist) in their 2009 book _The 10,000 Year Explosion: How
Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution_. Cochran and Harpending
argue that the cold winters of Northern Europe drove these populations
to develop agriculture and the lower time preferences that came with
it; conversely, they claim, people from foraging societies
“immediately share or consume everything they produce.” Because of
this, populations characterized by a “‘lazy’ egalitarianism”
are incapable of civilization or technological progress. They are
living vestiges of the past who at best are unable to step into the
future and at worst are dead set on dragging the gifted arbiters of
the future into the past with them.

While out-and-out white nationalists frame this idea unambiguously in
racial terms, mainstream science fiction approaches race more
indirectly. Carroll reminds us that “disaffected science fiction
fans have long claimed membership in an advanced race of
future-oriented mutants, posthumans, and mad geniuses responsible for
the greatest inventions.” Often, these gifted few are unrecognized
and even oppressed by the inferior masses, as in A. E. van Vogt’s
_Slan_ (1946) or Ayn Rand’s _Atlas Shrugged _(1957)._ _Novels whose
futuristic elite class “no longer shares a common history with the
living fossils that make up the popular majority” are called
mutational romances. The mutational romance is structured by
profoundly antidemocratic logic; if the masses are far enough below
you as to constitute a different species, there is no point in
dialogue or “a shared political project.” Ironically, living in
the present disqualifies the normie from participating in civic
life—this politics of time, which Carroll characterizes as “white
time”—requires its adherents to sacrifice in the present for a
supposedly certain future.

 
Carroll’s second chapter addresses space exploration. A
preoccupation with colonizing the galaxies pervades science fiction
generally—in some cases, even a conviction that the only way to
survive as a species (or as a race) is to spread into the stars. While
investment in the space program is not an exclusively reactionary
project, as Carroll articulates, “reclaiming American supremacy in
space has long been a project of the right.” Space exploration makes
up a key feature of what Richard Spencer describes as “Faustian
science fiction,” science fiction that “is bound up in an urge to
expand outward past all frontiers even if that means dying tragically
while doing so.” Spencer claims that the white race is characterized
by a Faustian spirit, a dauntless restlessness that pushes the
boundaries of what is possible. Right-wing thinkers have warned
against the “feminization” of a society with guardrails, warning
that accommodating the weaker elements of society (i.e., nonwhite
people, queers, women) means sacrificing the vitality of Western
civilization. They extol the ruthless expansionism of settler
colonialism not only as a virtue but also as an immutable racial (and
masculine) characteristic. Contra the self-representation of
right-wing politics as “offering stability and permanence in an
increasingly chaotic world,” Spencer and other alt-right
intellectuals argue that Western civilization should return to an
ethos of living life dangerously. The Faustian hero must deny the
present and its comforts in order to control the direction of the
future.

Carroll argues that the realization of these political theories is
based in a fundamentally flawed science-fictional logic. It all comes
back to a political concept of time, identity, and historical
development. There is strong critical consensus that, as Carroll
describes, good science fiction “asks us to confront the possibility
of a fundamental break with the existent.” The original _Star Trek_
(1966–69) presented audiences with a future where humanity travels
to other worlds, but more importantly, it straightforwardly presented
a racially integrated ship where women could be officers. We can talk
about the ways that the execution was flawed, but it was still so
impactful that Martin Luther King Jr. famously asked Nichelle Nicholls
to remain in her role as Lieutenant Uhura when she considered leaving
the show. King, ever the savvy rhetorician, understood the
significance of giving people the tools to imagine a future different
from the past.

“Science fiction at its best,” Carroll tells us, “is a radically
historicizing genre that reveals the present as contingent while
allowing us to imagine how things might be otherwise.” Science
fiction teaches us that nothing is inevitable. Power structures,
economic systems, identities—these all came of choices and
circumstances and random chance. They are not immutable facts of
existence. Faustian science fiction denies all of this by
“committing to a future whose sole purpose is to monumentalize their
present identities as glorious, necessary, and eternal.” The plot is
always predetermined—the heroic white man had it under control all
along and things went exactly to plan. There is no room for surprises
or complications; that means no room for story. Often, this is even
encoded in the form of the novel: William Pierce’s _The Turner
Diaries _(1978) is written as a future history, and Francis Parker
Yockey’s _Imperium:_ _The Philosophy of History and Politics _(1948)
is presented as an account of events that _will _happen. This writing
is formulaic not only by default but also by design.

Genres have no essential existence; people decide what they are. A
categorical definition only makes sense when enough people agree with
it. The science fiction community rejected the alt-right’s
definition of speculative fiction. N. K. Jemisin, a primary target of
reactionary fan hatred, won three consecutive Hugos for Best Novel
with her _Broken Earth _trilogy. Chuck Tingle, who writes absurdist
queer erotica, was mockingly nominated by the Rabid Puppies for
several awards; he disavowed the nomination, tirelessly satirized the
Puppies, and wrote _Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination
_(2016) in response. He has since written two very successful queer
horror novels, _Camp Damascus_ (2023) and _Bury Your Gays _(2024). The
Sad and Rabid Puppies dissolved after a few years of campaigning; they
were primarily active from 2014 through 2016. The alt-right has also
collapsed. After the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, the
alt-right as a movement effectively ceased to exist. That doesn’t
mean that they just disappeared—some were absorbed by older radical
right movements, others were absorbed into the mainstream, and a few
became mass murderers in the name of a white future.

Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a
vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can
be defeated. The future is for everyone—if we make it that way.

 

Jess Maginity is a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware. Their
research focuses on the political uses of narrative art in general and
science fiction in particular.

* Fantasy-Science Fiction
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* Alt-Right
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* literature
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* Politics
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