Science (Fiction) in the Capital
Siena College
June 19, 2025
In an op ed from June 2025, titled “How History Will Remember Elon Musk,” Louise Perry wrote, “Elon Musk is a visionary. I have no doubt that he’s volatile and reckless, but those who dismiss him as a fraud or an idiot have not been paying close attention… Mr. Musk’s vision goes well beyond Washington. He has always been clear on this point and continues to tell anyone who will listen. ‘Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun…. The sun is gradually expanding, and we do at some point need to be a multiplanet civilization because Earth will be incinerated.’… His goal is to save humanity not only from the future loss of our planet but also from our own lethargy and cowardice.” So, I mean, if he says that’s his goal… that must be his goal.
There is a troubling tendency among media outlets and their professional opinion-havers to take what billionaires say at face value, without a grain of skepticism. It is bonkers that Musk’s various schemes receive such legitimation rather than being derided as the sci-fi pulp fantasies that they are. And one of the most frustrating things about this Overton window shift, in which sci-fi tropes become serious thought, is having to debate basic science and really just everything modern human civilization has established as scientific and social progress. Adam Becker, an astrophysicist, journalist, and author of the very recent book More Everything Forever explains the prospects for Musk’s plan to colonize Mars plan like this: “Mars colonization… is largely bullshit because Mars is terrible. Mars is just an awful place. The gravity is too low. The radiation levels are too high. There's no air and the dirt is made of poison.”[1]
Not to mention: Mars will also be consumed by the Sun!
Even if you still believe humans are going to colonize Mars, there is another problem that Perry’s op ed exemplifies: taking what the world’s richest person says at face value rather than considering his situatedness as the world’s richest person and concluding that that may influence his thought and ambitions. The problem, that is, is a complete lack of circumspection, contextualization, interpretation, and speculation, all things that science fiction and science are particularly good at, but that billionaires and their sycophants are not good at. What I want to say tonight is that science fictional thinking is in a weird place right now, where it abdicates its mission to speculate about the future. Instead—though not accidentally nor arbitrarily—it returns to tired old tropes from the 1920s and 30s like multiplanetary colonization. My starting point this evening is the presupposition that science fiction stories inflect how we are able to speak about the future. They provide a framework for how we look at the world, at the future, and in that sense they are a terrain of cultural contestation where alternate visions of futurity compete. For me those are visions of more just, equitable, and sustainable futures against the future that billionaires like Musk and other tech broligarchs want for us.
SCIENCE FICTION 1938/2025
But before I try to bring this point home, let’s first talk classic science fiction, or SF, for a minute. If I asked you when and where science fiction originated, what would you say? Among academics, common ur-texts are the “scientific romances” that came from the nineteenth century European imperial cores of France and Britain, the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells chief among them. For me, I’ve lately become interested is the origins of American SF, in particular. In that context, we might locate an origin with the so-called father of science fiction, Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback, a Luxembourgian immigrant to New York City, published the first issue of his magazine Amazing Stories in 1926. Gernsback was a radio parts importer, the founder of a radio station, a publisher, and just an all-around geek and tech enthusiast. In his magazine, he coined the term “scientifiction,” a clunky portmanteau that would eventually be replaced by science fiction. (He was also a businessman—kind of a sleazy one, who often neglected to pay his writers.) Reflecting on the field of SF forty years later, one of Gernsback’s contemporaries, the writer, literary agent, editor, and publisher Frederik Pohl described Amazing Stories as full of “the kind of stories Gernsback himself used to write: a sort of animated catalogue of gadgets. Granting that was what he did, he did it superbly, and as a matter of fact much of science fiction’s record of accurate predictions stems from those early Gernsback-type stories….”[2] In the first issue of Amazing, Gernsback himself—salesman that he was—promised a magazine unlike any other, devoted wholly to science fiction. In his introduction to the issue, he writes:
Science, through its various branches of mechanics, electricity, astronomy, etcetera, enters so intimately into all our lives today, and we are so much immersed in this science, that we have become rather prone to take new inventions and discoveries for granted. Our entire mode of living has changed with the present progress, and it is little wonder, therefore, that many fantastic situations—impossible 100 years ago—are brought about today. It is in these situations that the new romancers find their great inspiration.”[3]
Gernsback seemed to understand SF as a mode of prediction. Writers would extrapolate from extant scientific knowledge and map the future accordingly. Gernsback continues,
“[Edgar Allen] Poe, Verne, Wells, [Edward] Bellamy, and many others have proved themselves real prophets. Prophesies made in many of their most amazing stories are being realized—and have been realized. Take the fantastic submarine of Jules Verne's most famous story, ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ for instance. He predicted the present day submarine almost down to the last bolt! New inventions pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow.”[4]
Despite it being fiction, SF’s supposed predictive capacity has never really dissipated from popular understandings of the genre. In fact, today, it seems to be back with a vengeance. Often what drives readers’ interest in SF as a literary or aesthetic mode is what it more or less accurately portends—as though there is some technological teleology we are just hurtling toward. But I actually think SF’s predictions are among the least interesting things about it. What I do think is interesting, is instead a very basic question about how it urges readers to interrogate what kind of sociality we want for ourselves. And it turns out this question also shaped the readerly and professional activity of a generation of SF fans from Gernsback’s era, though sometimes in direct opposition to Gernsback’s—let’s call techno-utopian—brand of “scientifiction” (stf). While Gernsback’s magazines were popular, they were being read, it is important to remember, by a generation of young people who came of age and who came to political consciousness in the aftermath of World War I, in the midst of the Great Depression, and during rise of fascism and a disastrous deployment of technology for the purpose of systematized murder—a weird time, or perhaps the perfect time, for the emergence of science fiction. Imagine, in this calamitous context, what kind of future, if any, would be available to readers’ imaginations. What would be the nature of this “not at all impossible realization of tomorrow” that Gernsback promised was coming? How could the future be built in such a way to support human flourishing when, all around, there was only apparent apocalypse—the nullification of futurity?
This question about what kinds of futures were available to the creators of science fiction at the time, is one I’m trying to answer, but I am really just starting out. This talk coincides with some new research I’ve just embarked on. I’ve been visiting some archives that collect the papers of fans, authors, editors, literary agents and publishers who played critical—if now largely forgotten—roles in the development of early American SF, people who, like Gernsback, would go on to shape this field of literature well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The cast of characters in this narrative include Gernsback, but really only insofar as he stands for a certain tendency in SF fandom, that of what I might call naïve techno-utopianism, not at all unlike the techno-utopianism (or dystopianism, depending on your point of view) we often see coming out of Silicon Valley—or, more recently, Washington. I’ve been less interested in Gernsback than I’ve been in the milieu of fandom that sprouted up around him.
One fan of particular note who came up in this time is Donald A. Wollheim. I don’t know if his name will be recognizable to anyone here? He was a long-time editor of Avon paperbacks—largely Westerns, which were popular at the time, but his real interest was always SF, fantasy, and weird fiction, all the stuff we today usually call speculative fiction. From 1952–71, he was the editor-in-chief of Ace Books, America’s first SF publishing house. Before that, he was an active fan, a member of Hugo Gernsback’s own club, the Science Fiction League (he and Gernsback fell out, and Wollheim even sued him for, I think, $10 in a theatrical attempt to expose Gernsback’s shady business dealings). Eventually, Wollheim founded DAW Books in 1971, which is still operating today under the leadership of Wollheim’s daughter, Betsy. The press has a small but not insignificant stable of SF and fantasy authors, including popular and critically acclaimed contemporary writers like Nnedi Okorafor and Patrick Rothfuss. Wollheim was also one of the founding members of a fan group called the Futurians, who established themselves in 1938 after the dissolution of Gernsback’s Science Fiction League and another fan group, the International Scientific Association. The Futurians included some now-forgotten fans and writers, but it also included notable people like the editor, agent, and writer Frederik Pohl; the writer Isaac Asimov, who probably needs no introduction; and Damon Knight, notable in my opinion for founding the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, perhaps the preeminent SF writing workshop, whose faculty and alumni include almost all the great SF authors of our time.
This is all to say, Wollheim and his milieu of fans and literary professionals were supremely important to the emergence of American SF; we can safely say that SF would not be what it is today without their influence. So, my research has this simple premise: this biographical backstory is important for understanding SF as a literary genre, as a form of fan activity, and as a strain of political literature, though Wollheim and the Futurians’ lives have received little attention, as far as I can tell, except in fan wikis and in the form of autoethnographies by other fans. This is an academic blindspot that I would like to correct.
Instead, I will satisfy myself with sharing some realizations I had while working to understand Wollheim’s life and contributions to the field of SF. Earlier this summer, I was in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas, where, among the Library’s rather vast science fiction collections, are most of Wollheim’s papers. Closer to home, I’ve also been spending time at the Bird Library at Syracuse, where the papers of several prominent figures—like Gernsback, Pohl, and Knight—are archived. While in those archives, I discovered several documents in which Wollheim and his colleagues argue passionately for something they called “Michelism,” named after John B. Michel, a fan and Futurian they credit with the idea. Michelism, as I understand it from the primary materials, was a kind of political ethos for fandom—by no means dominant, but rather a politically aspirational and even utopian leftist project espoused by a small cohort. “Here in New York,” Wollheim wrote to the publisher of Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell, in November 1937, “those of us who feel this sociological angle of stf most deeply have found a term [Michelism] for the advocating of stf as a force for actively encouraging idealist progress. It is defined formally as follows: — Michelism is the belief that scientifiction followers should actively work for the realization of the scientific socialist world state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence.”[5] Damon Knight, another fan who lived in the Futurians’ communal house for a time, describes Michelism as “the effort to encourage progressive thinking among science fiction fans.”[6] For those of us whose closest referent for radical SF fans is more likely to be the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies—alt-right factions that tried to hijack the Hugo awards a few years ago with a white supremacist voting bloc—I think it is worth simply lingering on the existence of an openly leftist agenda in SF fandom.
In this correspondence between Wollheim and Campbell, Wollheim requests that Campbell publish more stories that capture one of Michelism’s core interests: “Speaking for those whose abilities and talents are not technical but sociological and literary, we would ask that you give us just a little more sociology in your stories as well as more science.”[7] In response to this letter, Campbell wrote, “Sociological stories are hard to write… There are therefore few authors who can honestly and competently treat that type of material. Further, I don’t want to confuse sociology with political prejudices—which is, unfortunately, a rather natural human failing of authors. Sociology may be treated either from purely philosophical grounds, or on purely human grounds—but not—definitely not—political grounds.”[8] Campbell treats sociology in a vacuum, as though human relations and the structures of societies exist as abstractions outside of human activity and influence.
What I’m getting at with these letters is that SF fans, in fandom’s earliest days, believed, to channel Breitbart News for a minute, that politics is downstream of culture. And so, regardless of anyone’s specific politics for a second, fandom as a whole seemed to clearly understand that the genre of SF and its fandom was a terrain of political struggle. My general sense is that the right and center of fandom saw themselves as apolitical. But, at the same time, they did acknowledge that the Futurians posed some kind of danger to their nascent and still-evolving fandom.
That danger, though I doubt many fans of the time would put it this way, was that Wollheim and the Futurians saw themselves not as dispassionate cataloguers of scientific facts, nor just as imaginers of cool gadgets, nor as mere storytellers of escapist fantasy. Instead, they very literally saw science fiction as a critical part of the war of ideas against both capitalism and the emergence of fascism in their time. Several Futurians, such as Michel and Pohl, were themselves card-carrying members of the Communist Party and, as I read a moment ago, others like Wollheim believed in the necessity of a socialist world state.
For these beliefs, and their advocacy, Wollheim and his colleagues faced ideological and political opposition from within the SF community. Another of my discoveries in the archives was a fascinating pamphlet published by Wollheim and Michel under the banner of another fan group, the Committee for the Political Advancement of Science Fiction. In 1938, there was a SF convention in Newark, organized by two fans, William Sykora and Sam Moskowitz, whom the Futurians considered conservative reactionaries. On behalf of the CPASF, Wollheim and Michel were meant to present speeches to the roughly 100 fans in attendance at the convention. But the Convention Committee declared that all speeches must be submitted for approval in advance of the convention. “The reason for this fascistic act of censorship,” Wollheim and Michel write in their later CPASF pamphlet, “was to prevent any new or interesting ideas being presented.”[9]
Left to right: Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, and John B. Michel, circa 1938. Wollheim family photo of Donald Allen Wollheim, Frederik Pohl and John Michel. Donated by Elizabeth Wollheim. Creative Commons license CC0 1.0
Similar to how Campbell imagined sociology could—indeed, should—be separated from politics, there was an attitude among some fans that science existed independently of human sociality, that writers and readers should concern themselves primarily with the scientific plausibility and possibility of scientific invention. (This was a sincere belief. One of the things I learned about doing archival research is that you might laugh out loud in a reading room full of old tomes because of something silly you stumble across. So, one letter I found, from Campbell to the fantasy writer, Anne McCaffrey, rejecting her first novel in the Dragonriders of Pern series, demonstrates this scientific stance beautifully and comically: Campbell actually elaborated to her physics of flight and how dragons would be more believable if she were to change their bone composition.)
This scientific fixation, or fetish even, is something that Wollheim indicates in his suppressed speech of 1938. “In the past,” he writes, “it was always taken for granted that science-fiction could have only the one objective---to rouse interest in science and awaken a desire among readers to study science and embark upon a scientific career.”[10] One of Wollheim’s chief complaints about fandom was that it concerned itself with debating scientific facts and theories in a very facile way. By contrast, the Wollheimists, as they were sometimes called, or Michelists, had a very different idea of what SF fandom should be. I’m going to quote Wollheim’s speech at length:
The stf fan reads his science-fantasies because he wants to escape the grim monotony of the present for the glamour and glitter of a non-existent future. He pins his hope in science as the maker of that future but he himself by the very nature of his mind cannot partake of the work of present-day science. His mind is not the trained patient mind of the scientists, his is the wild flaming mind of the utopian, of the champion of science, not the worker in science.
If we believe in science, if we believe that science can give mankind a future more to our liking, if we want to see or help bring about that future then we must awaken to our position as defenders of science….We believe in science and it holds for us the future of the world. Today it is menaced on all sides by the onrush of a new barbarism—by the insanity and incompetence of the morons now wielding power over a large part of this globe.
Science-fiction should present an unyielding front to the enemies of science, we should oppose the war makers, the new barbarians who call themselves fascists and destroy science in those unhappy regions in which they gain their hold. We who believe in science, who express our belief by our enjoyment of STF, must realize that today science is menaced by reaction. Must realize that today science, and with it all humanity, is fighting for its very life. And that we as champions of science, can only redeem our beliefs by fighting shoulder to shoulder with science and with those millions and millions of humans who champion progress.
… We are not scientists, we are its defenders. It is the duty of science-fiction to point out continually that science must win, that progress must go on, that reaction and fascism must be defeated.[11]
I wanted to present these discoveries to you because in Wollheim’s conflict with fans like Gernsback, Moskowitz, and Campbell, we see a dynamic in science fiction that has never gone away. Today, still, we confront a left/right split in fandom and in the politics of SF. The narrative I see unfolding in this still very exploratory research is that the history of American SF contains within it the origins of a contemporary dilemma we confront right now, namely, the alignment of science, SF, and fascism and the latter’s bid to control our collective future.
Now, when I make this argument, it is not to say that SF fandom is cleanly split between leftists and avowed fascists. Fandom contains multitudes. But what I feel confident saying is that SF history seems to vacillate between relatively left-leaning fiction (as in the New Wave of the 60s and 70s, which proliferated feminist, queer, and Black utopian SF, for instance) and far right-leaning positions (as in the alt-right drive to reclaim SF for the white supremacists, race scientists, and neo-Nazis). That vacillation matters, because SF is not just a genre. It is a form of cultural activity where people develop dispositions toward the future—and not just hardcore fans, but also casual consumers of what is one of the most pervasive mass cultural genres we have. Not only do readers and consumers absorb ideas of the future; additionally, like Wollheim suggests in his speech, it is possible for cultural practice—such as SF fandom—to play an active role in the creation and promotion of a vision for the future. This is something that fascists and other far-right fans understand very well; they care deeply about culture because they know it is a way of generating common values, goals, and narratives to explain their aspirations for the future.
Gerns-We Are So-Back
But what kinds of futures are up for debate, and the implications for the people who live in them, have to matter. What are we building toward? To raise this question with my students, I often like to teach a short story called “The Gernsback Continuum” by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. Written and set in 1981, the story is narrated by a photographer who has been commissioned to take pictures of 1930s architecture for a book called The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was, “an illustrated history of… ‘American Streamlined Moderne’… or ‘raygun Gothic.’” Now, you are probably already envisioning what an airstream futurpolis looks like. What do you see? And that’s part of the point here. SF culture is mainstream American culture; it’s everywhere, fully integrated into the fabric of our society, forming something like an unconscious substrate to how we think a city or nation should look or for what it should or aspire to. In the story, Streamline Moderne includes things like “the winged statues that guard the Hoover Dam… Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson's Wax Building… the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps.” One of things we often focus on in my classes is Gibson’s mastery as a prose stylist, especially when he’s writing about the present, as he does in “The Gernsback Continuum.” He has a way of making the ordinary seem alien, and often insidious. The photographer, our narrator, remarks on
Coca-Cola plants like beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like the temples of some lost sect that had worshiped blue mirrors and geometry… The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car, no wings for it, and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal....[12]
Pretty much every student who reads this story is familiar with the pulpy sci-fi aesthetics of chrome and marble, flying cars, and crystal skyscrapers. What requires more unpacking for them are the rockets falling “on London in the dead of night, screaming.” Gibson is referring, of course, to the V2 missiles that were used by Nazi Germany to bomb London (and other targets) during World War II, which gives this pulpy SF Americana a very different valence.
Things in the story continue to take a dark turn. Our narrator begins to see “semiotic ghosts,” signs of a failed utopia cropping up all around him. Driving now through Arizona, he sees a new architecture, a whole city in fact, with its own inhabitants, emerge before his eyes:
Then I looked behind me and saw the city […].
[…] soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires… Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the [Planet] Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things… mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters...
[…] Very carefully, without moving my head, I turned the headlights on.
And saw them. They were blond. They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing toward the city. They were both in white: loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes… He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened, frightened in an entirely different way… I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson, a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me. They were the children of [the] 1980s-that-wasn’t; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American… They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world.[13]
The future imagined by the science fiction writers, by designers, architects, by artists of the pulp era, which gave us glimpses of something to look forward to, did come to America first—at least as a rendering or preparatory sketch—but materialized fully in Nazi Germany where the rockets made the leap from fiction to reality—just not the reality we wanted. The problem, Gibson’s story suggests, is that this dream world persists in the American mass consciousness, waiting for its revitalization. And as Gibson says in a 2011 interview about the inspirations behind cyberpunk, “I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above.”[14]
So, if Gernsback’s magazines promoted a brand of science fiction preoccupied with a techno-utopia to come, what becomes of that future—explicitly invoked by Gibson’s story—after history catches up to it? When the dominant vision of futurity is tainted, perhaps irredeemably, by its actualization not in some utopia but with the rise of fascism, Gibson’s story suggests that it is possible for the progression of history to nullify certain futures—and that’s not always a bad thing! As when fascism is defeated, at least for a time. But the problem Gibson’s story points to is that there have been no satisfactory alternate futures to take the place of the failed Gernsbackian future. Whether Gibson’s cyberpunk aesthetic that he became known for after he wrote most of his short stories was an adequate replacement for the Gernsback pulps and the mainstream SF he mentions is debatable. But I take away two key ideas from Gibson’s story, one hopeful and one not so hopeful.
I’ll begin with the not so hopeful. In the logic of “The Gernsback Continuum,” fascism lives on after WWII as a latent tendency within American culture and politics—or not so latent, as we have seen in many ways since 2016. I think it’s an uncontroversial claim that the far-right (however you want to brand them) is obsessed with the past, even as it seeks to project an anti-democratic vision of a white ethno-state far into the future.
And so everything old is new again. Is it any wonder that all the goofy gadgets of pulp SF are now taken seriously as though they were imminent developments rather than huckster bullshit? AGI, coming soon to a future near you!
This infatuation with the SF tropes of the past takes many forms from the technological (say, The Jetsons-like “Internet of Things”) to the political, like fantasies of renewed colonial expansion and imperial conquest on the unexplored frontiers of spaces like Mars or Canada. But let’s take an emblematic example, perhaps the most sci-fi of all sci-fi tropes, the flying car. A quote that techno-utopians like to trot out, attributed to the Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, goes: “We wanted flying cars. What we got was 140 characters.” The point of this quip is that science has stagnated and we aren’t getting the kinds of technological breakthroughs we are entitled to. He says in interviews that apart from the development of the Internet, there haven’t been any truly great scientific advances in recent memory.
Despite tech moguls’ belief that the future has stalled, they also tell us incessantly that the future is coming, all gas no brakes. So, which is it? Are we in decline, a failed state that couldn’t keep up our glorious innovation? Or, as Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, writes in a 2021 techno-utopian manifesto, is the “technological revolution… unstoppable[?]” For Altman, anyway, we are heading toward a “recursive loop of innovation, [because] smart machines themselves help us make smarter machines, [which] will accelerate the revolution’s pace.”[15] There’s nothing we (meaning you or me, not Altman) can do to stop it; we need to embrace it or be branded as luddites. And the only way to embrace this future—or so goes the narrative from tech corporations and billionaires—is to deregulate everything and let them cook. Only then can they make the technology that will make the future.
In Altman’s manifesto, he says, “‘Moore’s Law for everything’ should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can’t afford what they want. It sounds utopian, but it’s something technology can deliver (and in some cases already has). Imagine a world where, for decades, everything—housing, education, food, clothing, etc.—became half as expensive every two years.”[16] Altman is referring to the idea that the number of transistors in a chip will double roughly every two years with a negligible increase in cost. But, I dunno, maybe we shouldn’t think of everything as though it were qualitatively interchangeable with microchips? Consider some of the other things Altman treats as commodities—which are commodities in our current mode of production, capitalism—but would likely be better thought of as rights or entitlements: “housing, education, food, clothing, etc.” In his manifesto, Altman gives the game away when he notes that “AI will lower the cost of goods and services, because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain.”[17] So, in pretty plain terms, the goal of AI here is to control labor and laborers.
The idea that AI can replace teachers strikes a particular nerve for me, as an educator. In the techno-utopian vision of the future, “AI teachers… can diagnose and explain exactly what a student doesn’t understand.”[18] Is the purpose of education to have something explained to you in unambiguous terms? Absolutely not. I believe education is a fundamentally social process of constructing meaning in concert with others—not just because it is good to learn that way but because it is good in itself. But in the techno-utopian imaginary there is no act of act of human thought or creativity that is worth pursuing (unless it is them doing it, anyway): not learning, not problem solving, not making art. If a computer program can approximate it, then it should.
This hostility to creation and to human endeavors that cannot be readily commoditized—and that’s the key thing, the way they resist commoditization—this, I think, is why nowhere in the techno-utopian imaginary do you see something resembling collective human agency. In this vision of the future not all humans are humans—but computer programs are. Even at a grammatical level, people are not subjects in this future. Rather, technology will create wealth, technology will reduce costs, technology can deliver the goods. But this vision is just an entirely impoverished and miserable view of futurity, where people do not build the conditions of their own existence but where the wealthy own those conditions of existence. So, I think we should amend Thiel’s witticism to something like: “We wanted healthcare, education, and public transportation. Instead we got billionaires.”
In the techno-utopian Dream World, everything will be owned by corporations and run like corporations. Again, in Altman’s manifesto, this plan is in plain sight. “All citizens over 18 would get an annual distribution, in dollars and company shares, into their accounts. People would be entrusted to use the money however they needed or wanted—for better education, healthcare, housing, starting a company, whatever.” There is always some convoluted plan to enable people to spend ‘correctly.’ In such a corporation-as-state or “freedom city,” spending correctly—since the AI companies will apparently make everything—sounds a lot like paying scrip back to a company town.
The idea just barely concealed beneath all the techno-utopian speculation is that a handful of powerful corporations will own everything and become big enough to replace government. It is a thoroughly anti-democratic plan to not only capture all society’s wealth but to lay claim to the future itself, to continue the inequity of our current capitalist status quo into the future and to suppress the means we, as a society, have to promote and enact different futures. This is what the techno-utopian vision of the future boils down to: everything will be revolutionized, they like to say. Everything will be radically different, but somehow—still—it will all be exactly the same as it always was. Wealth and power will be hyper-concentrated in the hands of the few, while the many are exploited. If the tech-bros are telling a science fiction story, then it’s not a very good one. Or, to give them some credit, it may in fact be a very good work of dystopian fiction—not unlike Ray Nayler’s most recent novel, Where in the Axe is Buried, in which technocrats sell most countries on something called “rationalization.” The scheme is to replace government with AI “prime ministers.” In the face of “Protests, labor shortages, supply chain breakdowns, strikes, wars, the climate catastrophe…—a constant cycle of disasters,”[19] rationalization offers an alternative, whereby humans outsource their work to artificial intelligence, which controls the economy and institutes laws to execute its inscrutable vision. It’s not dissimilar from the state-corporation amalgam that Altman envisions.
I said there was a more hopeful conclusion to be drawn from Gibson’s story. Let me finally get to that: When we see the aesthetics of futurity co-opted and applied toward fascist or anti-democratic aims, that tells us something important, namely that stories we tell about the future can help people form common cause around a shared vision of the world they want to build and live in—fascist or otherwise. This tells us that science fiction is a form of cultural, intellectual, and political activity. In that sense, stories about the future play a role—not the only role, and probably not the most vital one—but still an important role in influencing our activity. This means there are no foregone conclusions. ‘Progress,’ a term I’m placing in heavy scare quotes, is not unstoppable.
Is Marxism the “Science” in “Science Fiction”?
The billionaire techno-utopians, in their bid to own the future, touch on something essential to the study of science fiction and to the science of capitalism, or Marxism. What they identify in their vision of the future is one of the central contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, that history changes only to remain the same.. In this sense, they identify something quite like what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did in the famous opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”[20] Except they have no desire to resolve this contradiction between social classes.
I want to put forward the argument that Marxism—a recognition of the built-ness and mutability of all collective human sociality—remains salient to our economic situation of hyper-inequality and to science fiction, as the genre that can aid in the cultural activity of imagining and building a more just and equitable future.
For Marx, of course, the struggle between classes arises from his observation that the working class produces surplus value (or profit) for capitalists, who themselves own the means of production (whether that be machinery to make a commodity, the land to build a factory, or the capital to expend on labor). Crucially, when Marx says production, he does not just mean the production of things or commodities. He also means the production of human society itself, all the ways that we humans reproduce ourselves and order ourselves into various forms of sociality. In his writing, Marx usually uses the phrase “capitalist mode of production” rather than “capitalism.” This is because he recognizes that there have been past modes, that capitalism is not the first nor last mode, and that humans are innately creative beings capable of producing themselves in any number of social arrangements. Production also includes activity we pursue in excess of our bare survival; like create new meanings, ideas, and art. And in exceeding what is, we create the possibility for what could be. So this is what, for Marx, makes humans human: we speculate, and in this sense are constantly writing a work of science fiction, in both thought and action.
But under capitalism, that creativity required to build with intention is contorted by a society based on the production of commodities. Part of the problem, moreover, is that capitalism produces a very special kind of commodity: the worker themself. In Capital, Marx explains how workers, owning nothing themselves, must exchange the only commodity they have, namely, their capacity to perform labor, or what Marx calls labor-power. The sale of labor-power estranges, or alienates, us from our creative capacity. What separates us from other animals is that we take the raw materials provided by nature and bend them toward some end. In a well-known passage of Capital, Marx writes:
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.[21]
Such a state in which workers’ will is consonant with their purpose may seem fanciful to us, whose work is so often not purposeful, except insofar as it secures for us a wage on which we can subsist. This is because, under capitalist social relations, workers work toward an external purpose, the enrichment of capitalists. Rather than the object of labor being made in service of the worker’s own purpose and vision, that object is made to sustain the worker as a worker. It’s similar to the quip, working to live is better than living to work. But the problem, for Marx, is that it’s both: we work to live and live to work. And in selling our labor-power, we become servants to the objects we produce, rather than the other way around. In this state of affairs, human production is separated from our purposeful direction of our own sociality.
To me, the AI goldrush reads as a renewed attempt at alienation, an attempt in which the technology of the day—combined with the failure of past science fictions to offer us compelling visions of a just and equitable future—adapts to new material conditions to continue degrade and dehumanize workers. Everything changes to remain the same. This is why techno-utopian thinking bums me out. Underneath all the rhetoric, there is nothing we haven’t heard of before. It may as well be 1926 again—or 1867.
Science vs. Capitalism
I think the most interesting science fiction is less futurological than, as the Futurians might say, sociological. It is often set in the present, or near present, and it approaches science in the way Marx had in mind, as a way of accounting for contradictions in human societies and from there generating critiques of those societies with the aim of changing them. This is science is the sense of Wissenschaft, a German word often translated as “science” but which has a more capacious meaning like learning or knowledgeship. It includes “‘not only natural but… all the cultural or historical sciences and… scholarship.’” As Gerry Canavan, another professor of science fiction at Marquette University, argues, it is “not simply mastery of the “cold equations” of physics, chemistry, and biology”—something I sometimes fear my students at RPI may think—“but a full accounting of capital-H History as such, how the world got this way and how it might yet become different.”[22]
It is precisely this accounting of history that we find in one of the great SF writers of our time, Kim Stanley Robinson, from whose work I take the title of my talk. Between 2004–07, Robinson wrote three novels set in the present: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting, comprising the Science in the Capital trilogy. These novels were then turned into an omnibus edition titled Green Earth in 2015. The premise of this novel is this: climate change causes catastrophic weather events to erupt all over the world, including a devastating flood in Washington, D.C. It’s a bit apocalyptic, but not so unbelievable. So, what’s the truly science fictional part of this novel? Climate change propels a progressive senator to the presidency. Acting under the advisement of scientists at the National Science Foundation, an armada of climate legislation is enacted to fund and empower the NSF to do basically whatever is needed to mitigate climate change, whatever the cost. “The National Science Foundation had jumped into politics and the culture wars.”[23]
This sounds dramatic, and parts of the novel are, but most of its roughly 1,000 pages is quite mundane. I’m not doing a very good job here of pitching the novel to new readers, but the parts that get me excited about Robinson’s work are boring. While all this climate catastrophe is going on, for the wide array of characters—most of whom are bureaucrats— life kind of just goes on: people parent and drop their kids off at Gymboree; they have dinner parties; they play frisbee golf and hang out in parks; they go to work at the NSF, at tech startups, and universities. Even the disasters lead to new normals: one character, Frank, helps to locate and tag animals that escaped from the National Zoo during the flood. In one subplot, Buddhist monks from the island nation Khembalung, which is sunk by rising sea level, rent space in the NSF building.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-07).
Perhaps midcentury science fiction was, as Gibson remarked, propaganda for American exceptionalism. But I don’t think we should throw away the baby with the bathwater. That period was also a good time for science. The NSF was founded in 1950 to promote foundational science, basic research that would promote prosperity, health, welfare, and national defense. And even if that project was intertwined with American imperialism and its postwar global hegemony, that scientific spirit might again be channeled toward some massive public works. That vocation for science, and that spirit of having a future to look forward to, is at least what Robinson’s work is trying to channel, a spirit of consistent progress and a vision of long-term prosperity for all.
Crucially, though, this understanding of science is incompatible with capitalism. There is no real profit in slow research that requires time and funding and that cannot be commoditized efficiently. This is also what the Futurian John B. Michel realizes in one of the 1938 texts I uncovered. He writes:
Science has accomplished wonders, precisely up to the point where the economic conditions shaping its forms were progressive. We do know more than we did fifty years ago. But the application of the full fruits of this knowledge ceases as soon as the contradictions of the economic system deprived it of the sustenance necessary to continue.[24]
For Michel, science had been captured by “the cause of greed[,] war[,] and the Almighty Profit.” This, further, spells the end of science fiction itself, Michel argues, “the obliteration of the true idealism. It is in the best interests, therefore, of the science fictionist to work for the breaking of the chains that hold science helpless, for the release of its mighty energies from economic bondage.”[25]
How we work toward that release is the big problem, though. It’s not one that’s easily solvable, especially not when we have an administration that is hostile to the mission of science and the goals outlined by the NSF at its founding. Having better science fiction is at least a minor part of such a struggle. I think it is an unambiguously good thing to have cultural works that promote a more utopian understanding of science as a collective good. But to bolster such a view, I think we also need to push back against the idea that science means getting a new iPhone, legs in the Metaverse, or a water-guzzling plagiarism machine. So, let me leave you with one of my favorite science fictional images from Green Earth:
Anna liked the NSF building’s interior. The structure was hollow, featuring a gigantic central atrium, an octagonal space that extended from floor to skylight, twelve stories above. This empty space, as big as some buildings, was walled by the interior windows of all the NSF offices. Its upper part was occupied by a large hanging mobile, made of curved metal bars painted in primary colors. The ground floor was occupied by various small businesses facing the atrium—pizza place, hairstylist, travel agency, bank outlet.[26]
There is no gadgetry here, just a place “adequate for human beings,” as the German philosopher Ernst Bloch once described utopia. It’s not so much the architecture Robinson is describing, nor the artwork, but for me the description of a place where people gather for a united purpose—to do good work in the public interest with the support of their government (yet another expression, in theory anyway, of collective will). I think it is these tremendously mundane visions of human sociality that will—in fact must—define our most radical science fiction and future-oriented thinking in the years to come.
Notes
[1] Adam Becker, “Scientist Destroys Elon Musk's Mars Fantasy: ‘BS’,” interview by Gil Duran, The Nerd Reich, May 30, 2025. https://www.thenerdreich.com/scientist-destroys-elon-musks-mars-fantasy-bs/.
[2] Frederick Pohl, “The Day after Tomorrow,” Galaxy 24, no. 1 (1964).
[3] Hugo Gernsback, “A New Kind of Magazine,” Amazing Stories 1, no. 1, April 1926.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Donald A. Wollheim to John W. Campbell, November 17, 1937. Donald A. Wollheim papers, Department of Special Collections, MS 250, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. Emphasis added.
[6] Damon Knight, The Futurians [1977] (Golden, CO: ReAnimus, 2025), 20.
[7] Wollheim, November 17, 1937.
[8] Campbell, November 18, 1937.
[9] Wollheim and John B. Michel, Foreword, “Rejected”—Convention Committee: The Speeches by Donald A. Wollheim and John B. Michel Suppressed by the Committee of the Newark Convention. Pamphlet No. 2 of the Committee for the Advancement of Science Fiction (New York, 1938). Forrest J Ackerman Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.
[10] Wollheim, “Science and Science Fiction,” “Rejected”—Convention Committee: The Speeches by Donald A. Wollheim and John B. Michel Suppressed by the Committee of the Newark Convention.” Pamphlet No. 2 of the Committee for the Advancement of Science Fiction (New York, 1938). Forrest J Ackerman Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.
[11] Ibid.
[12] William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” Burning Chrome [1986] (New York: Eos, 2003), 28.
[13] Ibid., 33.
[14] William Gibson, “William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211,” interview by David Wallace-Wells, Paris Review 197 (2011). https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson.
[15] Sam Altman, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” https://moores.samaltman.com/.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid. Emphasis added.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ray Nayler, Where the Axe is Buried (New York: FSG, 2025), 67.
[20] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007.
[21] Marx, Capital Vol. 1, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm.
[22] Gerry Canavan, “The Suvin Event,” Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), xviii–xix.
[23] Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth (New York: Del Rey, 2015), 649.
[24] John B. Michel, “The Position of Science, Corelative to Science Fiction and the Present and Developing International Economic, Political, Social, and Cultural Crisis,” 7.
[25] Ibid., 9.
[26] Green Earth, 6.
