Search Results (17)

The Apple TV+ series Severance (2022–present) offers a dystopian portrayal of workplace life that intensifies real-world dynamics of control, boundary management, and identity regulation. This paper analyzes Severance as a speculative case study in organizational theory, treating the show’s fictional world as a site for conceptual reflection. Drawing on critical management studies and labor process theory, we examine how mechanisms of control, the regulation of work–life boundaries, and the fragmentation of autonomy and subjectivity are depicted in extreme form. We argue that fiction—particularly speculative satire—can serve as a tool of theoretical production, not merely illustration. Rather than restating familiar critiques, Severance allows us to see workplace norms with renewed clarity, surfacing the moral and psychological consequences of surveillance, coercion, and instrumentalized consent. A methodological note outlines our interpretive approach to narrative fiction, and a discussion of implications situates the analysis within broader debates about organizational ethics, resilience, and critique. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed individual and institutional anxieties about the apocalypse. Pastors and activists alike turned to the depiction of the apocalypse in popular media to describe the urgency of decisive action. Implicitly, these depictions offer a curious method for engaging and imagining children. Assata Shakur writes compelling poetry in her autobiography about her hopes for the world. In one poem, entitled For My Daughter Kakuya, I argue that Shakur engages in Afrofuturist speculative fiction as she envisions a future world for her daughter. This paper explores how writers living through these times themselves imagine Black children at the end of the world. What would happen if we took seriously the notion that the “end of the world” is always at hand for Black people? This article explores the stomach-turning warning that Jesus offers in Mark 13:14–19 regarding those who are “pregnant and nursing in those days”. Using a reproductive justice lens, this paper explores the eternal challenge of imagining and stewarding a future in which Black children are safe and thriving. It also explores the limits and possibilities of partnering with radical Black faith traditions to this end. Full article

In the last century, science fiction has become an incredibly powerful tool in depicting alternative social imaginaries, particularly those of the future. Extending beyond their fictious nature is a commentary on the stark realities of modern society. The ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre, for example, offers a dystopian critique on the dangers of technological dependence and hypercapitalism. In studying science fiction, future imaginaries can be developed as utopian goals for governance systems to strive for. In contrast to cyberpunk, the subgenre of ‘solarpunk’ depicts a utopian society where humanity lives locally, sustainably, and in harmony with nature. This paper deconstructs solarpunk media to describe three guiding principles of solarpunk: anarchism, ecology, and justice. As an anarchist community, solarpunk strives for a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society devoid of hierarchy and domination. As an ecological community, solarpunk strives for local, self-sufficient, and sustainable living where both the human and non-human flourish. Finally, as a just community, solarpunk strives to rid society of marginalization and celebrate authenticity. These three principles can be used to guide humanity towards a utopian, solarpunk future. Full article

Margaret Atwood’s science/speculative dystopian MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—opens up questions about how genre-mixing indexes and probes interrelated notions of authenticity. This focus is prompted by the simple question of why Atwood, having established worldwide renown for realist novels of socio-historical authenticity, switched to blending realism with science/speculative fiction. Through analyzing how the trilogy departs from realism, while never truly embracing SF, the paper argues that while the realist novel may offer the strongest representations of authentic psychological states, larger questions of epistemic authority and the state of our world demand a literature that authenticates knowledge. The MaddAddam trilogy challenges the notion that realism’s social, existential and moral concerns are more authentic when supported with a scientific explanatory logic. Authenticity is thus found in a negotiation between Truth and whether to trust in the locations (social and geographical, literary and literal) of knowledge. Full article

S. Shankar’s 2018 Tamil language science fiction film 2.0, the stand-alone sequel to his 2010 blockbuster Enthiran, presents a bleak vision of a near-present time when obsession with technology has led to deteriorating human relationships as well as destruction of the natural world. The film articulates a posthuman dharma founded on the understanding that humans have an ethical obligation towards all living things, not merely other humans. The film posits the individual as fractured and unstable but valorizes the interconnectivity of humans and non-humans, which is underscored by the film’s innovative evocation of the rasas of classical Indian aesthetics in the context of non-human agents. This essay argues that 2.0 presents a Hindu-inflected ecological posthumanism as the only viable alternative to a dystopian future. Full article

The Harvard Water Program is more than sixty years old. It was directed by an academic Steering Committee consisting of the professors of Government and Political Science, Planning, Economics, and Water Engineering. In 2022 we would add to the notional Steering Committee the professors of Ecology, Sociology and Water Law, calling it the augmented Harvard eutopian approach to the design and operation of Water Resource Systems. We use the Greek word ‘eu-topos’ to mean ‘a good place’, figuratively speaking, and ‘dys-topos’ its antonym, ‘not a good place’. By opposing eutopia and dystopia (latin forms) (Utopian literature begins with Thomas More’s (1478–1535) fictional socio-political satire “Utopia”, written in Latin and published in 1516: “Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia”. “A little, true book, not less beneficial than enjoyable, about how things should be in a state and about the new island Utopia” [Wikipedia translation]. He coined the word ‘utopia’ from the Greek ou-topos meaning ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’. It was a pun-the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means ‘a good place’), we pass judgement on three Irish case studies, in whole and in part. The first case study deals with the dystopian measurement of the land phase of the hydrological cycle. The system components are distributed among many government departments that see little need to cooperate, leading to proposition 1: A call for a new Water Law. The second case study deals with a project to restore a 200 km² polder landscape to its condition in 1957. The project came to the University with an hypothetical cause of the increased flooding and a tentative solution: dredge the Cashen estuary of its sand, speeding the flow of sluiced water to the sea, and the status quo ante would be restored. The first scientific innovation was the proof that restoration by dredging is impossible. Pumping is the only solution, but it raises disruptive questions that are not covered by Statute. The second important innovation was the discovery in the dynamic water balance, of large leakage into the polders, either around or between sluiced culverts, when the flap valves are nominally closed, impacting both their maintenance and minimization of pumping. Discussions on our findings ended in dystopian silence. Hence proposition 2: Moving towards eutopia may only be possible with a change in the Law. The third case study concerns the protection of Cork City from flooding: riverine, tidal and groundwater. The government’s “emerging solution” consists of major physical intervention in the city centre, driven hard against local opposition, as the only possible solution. Two hydro-electric reservoirs upstream were largely ignored as part of a solution because the relevant Statute did not mandate their use for flood control. The Supreme Court has recently overturned this interpretation of the governing Statute. A new theory of flood control with a cascade of reservoirs, dams and weirs is the scientific innovation here. Once more these findings have been greeted by government with dystopian silence. Hence proposition 3: Re-open the design process to find several much better solutions, approximating a eutopian water world. Full article

Science and technology transform the frontiers of knowledge and have deep and powerful impacts on society, demonstrating how social reality varies with each era of the world. As a set of fictional representations of technologically driven future worlds, the Metaverse is increasingly shaping the socio-technical imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, i.e., the outcome of radical transformations of dominant structures, processes, practices, and cultures. At the core of the systematic exploration of science and technology is the relationships between scientific knowledge, technological systems, and values and ethics from a wide range of perspectives. Positioned within science of science, this study investigates the complex interplay between the Metaverse as a form of science and technology and the wider social context in which it is embedded. Therefore, it adopts an analytical and philosophical framework of STS, and in doing so, it employs an integrated approach to discourse analysis, supported by a comparative analysis of the Metaverse and Ambient Intelligence. This study shows that the Metaverse as a scientific and technological activity is socially constructed, politically driven, economically conditioned, and historically situated. That is, it is inherently human and hence value-laden, as well as can only be understood as contextualized within the socio-political-economic-historical framework that gives rise to it, sustains it, and makes it durable by material effects and networks. This view in turn corroborates that the Metaverse raises serious concerns as to determinism, social exclusion, marginalization, privacy erosion, surveillance, control, democratic backsliding, hive mentality, cyber-utopianism, and dystopianism. This study argues that, due to the problematic nature of the Metaverse in terms of its inherent ethical and social implications, there need to be more explicit processes and practices for enhancing public participation and allowing a more democratic public role in its shaping and control, especially early in the decision-making process of its development—when the opportunity for effective inputs and informed choices is greatest. The novelty of this study lies in that it is the first of its kind with respect to probing the link between the Metaverse and data-driven smart cities from an STS perspective. The main contribution of this study lies in deepening and extending social scientific critiques and understandings of the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities based on the analysis and evaluation of the Metaverse and the warning signals and troubling visions it conveys and animates in order to help construct desirable alternative futures for the greater good of all citizens. The ultimate goal is to structure the Metaverse in ways that are morally acceptable and collectively the most democratically beneficial for society. Full article

The future is not what it used to be. A new strain of futurism has taken over the stage of global science-fiction: one whose understanding of the future cannot be distinguished from its understanding of the present. Gone are the days when extraterrestrials in shiny, extravagant outfits mastered fascinating technologies that flirted with magic. Characters in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2015–2020) dress like us, and the dystopian technology they put up with is, for the most part, a technology that has existed for years. Armando Iannucci’s imagining of a space cruise for rich people in Avenue 5 (2020) overlaps with Elon Musk’s actual plans of sending wealthy tourists to the moon, while Albert Robida’s visionary téléphonoscope (1879) amounts to a sad reminder of our everyday Zoom call. Is not the current COVID-19 crisis the blueprint to the ultimate post-apocalyptic script? Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona noted in a recent interview that Steve Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), originally labeled as a sci-fi movie by IMDB, is now a drama according to the same internet portal. Science is not fiction anymore, which means at least two different things: that science has lost the power to convey the kind of awe that may be later turned into fiction, and that fiction seems to be unable to inspire a narrative of scientific or—broadly speaking—human progress. How can we retrieve the emancipatory value of progress in good old futuristic sci-fi when the future coincides with the present? What should cultural production look like to help us imagine an alternative to financial capitalism in the face of the impossibility of utopia? The answer, I will claim, resides in Franco Berardi’s concept of “futurability”. This paper explores the limits of this concept by reading side by side Javier Olivares’ and Pablo Olivares’ The Ministry of Time (2015) and Oriol Paulo’s Mirage (2018). Full article

In this article, I investigate the literary representation of the religious convictions and political strategy of neo-Nazi ideologues who are influential in rightwing authoritarian movements in the USA today. The reason that I do this is because in contemporary fascism, the novel has replaced the political manifesto, the military manual and proselytizing testimony, since fiction can evade censorship and avoid prosecution. I read William Luther Pierce’s Turner Diaries and Hunter together with his text on speculative metaphysics and religious belief, Cosmotheism. Then, I turn to Harold Covington’s Northwestern Quintet with The Brigade, reading this with Christian Identity and his own conception of Nazi religious tolerance. Finally, I look at OT Gunnarsson’s Hear the Cradle Song, reading this together with discussions of racism in Californian Odinism. I propose that what this literature shows is that the doctrinal differences between the three main strands of neo-Nazi religion—Cosmotheism, Christian Identity and Odinism—are less significant than their common ideological functions. These are twofold: (1) the sacralization of violence and (2) the sanctification of elites. The dystopian fictions of fascist literature present civil war scenarios whose white nationalist and genocidal outcome is the result of what are, strictly speaking, supremacist death cults. Full article

In response to this special issue’s question of whether mainstream science fiction has become stuck in presentism and apocalypticism, this article examines how utopia is expressed and salvaged in the work of Rivers Solomon. Using three of Solomon’s novels and the theoretical lenses of black utopia studies and salvage-Marxism, I suggest that scholars and activists should approach this question from a different perspective. While Solomon’s novels may seem dystopian from the perspective of liberalism or whiteness, they can also clearly be placed within the long, if marginalized, history of leftist and black utopian thought. Likewise, where the ‘traditional’ utopia (a concept I interrogate) is often imagined as grounded in hope and futurity, black utopia and salvage-Marxism reject these concepts as counterproductive to the actual work of social justice and utopia-building. Despite their presentism and apocalypticism, then, I argue Solomon’s novels are very much utopian: they simply locate their utopian desire in radical kinship and salvage, rather than universalism or futurity. Full article

The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (pub. 1997) and Carpentaria (pub. 2006) to imagine what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. The occupation of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory since 2007 has allowed the federal government to intervene dramatically in what they term the dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities; these are afflicted by transgenerational trauma, endemic domestic violence, alcoholism, and child sexual and substance abuse—in themselves the results of the marginal status of Indigeneity in Australian society—and continued control over valuable resources. This essay will discuss how Wright’s dystopian novel exemplifies an Indigenous turn to speculative fiction as a more successful way to address the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia and project a better future—an enabling songline rather than a disabling swansong. Full article

Futurity denotes the quality or state of being in the future. This article explores futurity as an effect of response, as an aesthetic experience of playing a narrative video game. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ways in which video games are engaged in ecocriticism as an aspect of cultural work invested in the future. In the presented reading of the 2017 video game Horizon: Zero Dawn, it is argued that the combination of the affect creating process of play, in combination with a posthumanist and postnatural plot, creates an experience of futurity, which challenges generic notions of linear temporal progress and of the conventional telos of dystopian fiction in a digital medium. The experience of the narrative video game Horizon Zero Dawn is presented as an example of an aesthetic experience that affords futurity as an effect of playing, interlinked with a reflection on the shape of the future in a posthumanist narrative. Full article

Claire G. Coleman’s science fiction novel The Old Lie (2019) evokes the blemished chapters of Australia’s history as the basis of a dystopian futuristic Earth. By using the metaphor of a secular apocalypse (Weaver) wrapped in the form of a space opera, she interrogates historical colonialism on a much larger scale to bring to the fore the distinctive Indigenous experience of Australia’s terra nullius and its horrific offshoots: the Stolen Generations, nuclear tests on Aboriginal land and the treatment of Indigenous war veteran, but this time experienced by the people of the futuristic Earth. Following a brief introduction of the concept of the “Native Apocalypse” (Dillon) in the framework of Indigenous futurism, the paper discusses Coleman’s innovative use of space opera embedded in Wilfred Owen’s famous WWI poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The analysis focuses on four allegedly separate stories in the novel which eventually interweave into a single narrative about “the old lie”. In keeping with the twenty-first-century Indigenous futurism, Coleman’s novel does not provide easy answers. Instead, the end brings the reader to the beginning of the novel in the same state of disillusionment as Owen’s lyrical subject. Full article

This paper examines the theme of relational theology in the Blade Runner science fiction franchise by exploring the symbolism of eyes and sight in the films. Using the work of ecofeminist theologian Sallie McFague, we explore the contrast between the arrogant, detached eye of surveillance (what we call the “gods’ eye view”) which interprets the other-than-human world as instrumental object, and the possibility of the loving eye of awareness and attention (the “God’s eye view”) which views the other-than-human world as an equal subject with intrinsic value. How the films wrestle with what is “real” and how the other-than-human is regarded has implications for our present time as we face enormous upheavals due to climate disruption and migration and the accompanying justice issues therein. We make the case that the films are extended metaphors that provide a window on our own dystopian present which present us with choices as to how we will see the world and respond to the ecological and humanitarian crises already upon us. Full article

The present paper discusses Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969), which parodies both “post-apocalyptic” novels in the Cold War era and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory on civilisation. By analysing this novel in comparison, not only to Rousseau’s On the Origin of Inequality (1755), but also to the works of various science fiction writers in the 1950s and 1960s, the paper aims to examine Carter’s reinterpretation of Rousseau in a post-apocalyptic context. As I will argue, Heroes and Villains criticises Rousseau from a feminist point of view to not only represent the dystopian society as full of inequality and violence, but also to show that human beings, having forgotten the nuclear war as their great “sin” in the past, can no longer create a bright future. Observing the underlying motifs in the novel, the paper will reveal how Carter attempts to portray a world where human history has totally ended, or where people cannot make “history” in spite of the fact that they biologically survived the holocaust. From this perspective, I will clarify the way in which Carter reinterprets Rousseau’s notion of “fallen” civilisation in the new context as a critique of the nuclear issues in the late twentieth century. Full article