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August 22 - August 28, 2025
We can therefore understand speculative whiteness as an ideological complex that promotes the following series of mutually reinforcing myths: (1) white people maintain a unique aptitude for innovative speculation, (2) speculative imagination is absent or deficient in nonwhite populations, (3) whiteness possesses a speculative value only realizable in a high-tech fascist future, (4) science fiction and other speculative genres are inherently white, and (5) white people become aware of their potential by seeing it manifested in speculative narratives.
white nationalists imagined space exploration as the next step in European settler-colonial Manifest Destiny,
the right turns on a politics of speculative futurity: neoliberals anticipate innovations made possible by speculative finance, neoconservatives forestall emergent threats through preemptive warfare, and evangelicals await the hope embodied in the fetal subject.
fascism portrays the white race as the unchanging protagonist of history even as it ushers in a radically renovated future.
In his “Dark Enlightenment” manifesto, Land argues that democracy makes politicians pander to the masses until there is nothing left of civilization except a “convulsive feeding frenzy.”
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.
early science fiction such as alien invasion and lost world narratives figured colonial relations as anachronistic encounters between societies or species inhabiting vastly different stages of technological development.
Mutant freedom proves incompatible with baseline democracy.
Khan is the only Star Trek character beloved by Richard Spencer. He glosses over the villain’s mixed racial heritage, presenting him as a Nietzschean superman whose Aryan spirit allows him to stand against the Jewish and Marxist egalitarianism embodied in Mr. Spock.
We can understand these stories as akin to what David M. Higgins calls “alt-victimhood,” political fantasies and science fiction plots wherein the dominant group of white men find themselves victimized by people who are oppressed in the real world.
staged alt-victimhood narratives in which future-oriented workers and entrepreneurs are threatened with bondage and cannibalism by a racialized class of present-oriented parasites.
“The Marching Morons”
Idiocracy film
Once more, futurity is equated with whiteness while Blackness is relegated to the savage state of the futureless present.
However, in the 2010s the Hugo Awards experienced a right-wing backlash that came to be known as science fiction’s GamerGate.
the Sad Puppies in 2015 turned out to be little more than a stalking horse for an extreme right-wing faction known as the Rabid Puppies, who were led by alt-right blogger, author, and publisher Theodore Beale (also known as “Vox Day”).
Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy can be read as the most eloquent response to Beale’s white supremacist stalling tactics. The novels’ vision of social change defies gradualism, choosing instead to end racialized slavery through an apocalyptic rupture that immediately abolishes the world’s predictable rhythms.
Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) argues that cold winters killed off Northern Europeans who did not have the “industry and foresight [to prepare] the year’s food, clothing, and shelter during the short summer,” leaving only the provident behind to become the white race.
The temporalities we have examined in this chapter are structured by whiteness. White time casts the present as a fleeting transition on the way to an anticipated goal.131 Whiteness therefore demands sacrifice: it denies the body and defers its demands in the service of a long-awaited transcendence that will never come.
A new generation of geeks has embraced longtermism, the belief that we should prioritize the well-being of the trillions unborn who may someday exist in the distant future. As
Technofascists
He likens Elysium to the traditional conservative vision of returning to the year 1955 by retreating into gated suburbs.
Johnson maintains that only an antiliberal and antidemocratic government can suppress the fickle demands of the masses—who cannot see past their immediate desires—and impose instead the rule of “people who think and plan over great, long spans of time.”
Our desire for science fiction saviors, Herbert suggests, leads straight to totalitarianism.
the servant transcends his circumstances through labor, thereby ushering in the future, while the master remains trapped in the transitory pleasures of luxury consumption.
the alt-right insists that white masculine self-expression is the source of all unforeseeable historical change.
Goethe’s Faust wagered his own soul by making a dangerous deal with the devil to acquire knowledge and power before reshaping the world according to his visionary plans.
Only one who displays a disregard for the present has access to the future.
Racist ideology presents the white man as a disembodied mind or spirit whose ability to rise above the demands of the flesh makes him fundamentally distinct from Black people, who always represent excessive embodiment.
Whatever accidents may befall the insured, racial capitalism guarantees that white supremacy will persist in every possible future.
White nationalism’s glorification of risk must therefore be understood not as a genuine openness to radical uncertainty but instead as a predictable example of fascism’s aestheticized politics.
Manosphere misogynist Lyndon McLeod wrote his victims’ deaths into his science fiction novels before he murdered them.
the alt-right’s future visions “terrorize us into accepting that this world is inevitable.”
Archeofuturism holds that each culture’s technoscientific development is rooted in its people’s arché or origin: “The future is not the negation of the tradition and historical memory of a folk, but rather their metamorphosis, by which they are ultimately reinforced and regenerated.”
Working in a more metaphorical register, Great Replacement theorist Renaud Camus worries that multiculturalism is stripping Europeans of their distinct identities and boiling them down into interchangeable units he likens to the robot from Metropolis
Moreover it shows there is no contradiction between radical genetic manipulation and racial purity in the minds of racists: some seem to think that racial differences will persist no matter how drastically genetic engineering changes humankind.
Faustian culture is therefore violent and alienated, approaching the world as a foe to be subdued and transformed.
According to Yockey, Jews are representatives of the past, remnants of a fossilized civilization that spent its potential over a thousand years ago.124 This supposedly renders them insensible to anything beyond the dead and calcified reality of actualized forms.
Yockey claims, Jews embrace materialistic philosophies that deny the inner necessity of the Faustian spirit to expand and conquer.
Yockey’s race war is a time war between the Jewish past and the white future.
midcentury science fiction and popular science also borrowed images of the U.S. western frontier from pulp fiction to depict humankind’s exploits in space.
many authors suggested that shared conflicts with space aliens and other interstellar obstacles would heal earthly racial divisions.
The solar system becomes an unsettled place that allows for the free and creative exercise of white sovereignty—made possible by genocide.
The Turner Diaries inspired more than two hundred murders and forty terrorist attacks, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Racial egalitarian society will inevitably collapse due to unstoppable biological tendencies, The Turner Diaries suggest, but action can accelerate the process so that it falls before extinguishing the white race.
Whiteness is therefore a speculative fiction: it relies on an anticipatory fantasy that white men have the power to someday achieve the impossible goal of perfect mastery over themselves and others.
The alt-right proclaims the negation of the here-and-now, but then it betrays itself by committing to a future whose sole purpose is to monumentalize their present identities as glorious, necessary, and eternal.
Faustian science fiction consoles its fascist fans by positing the essential continuity of blood and time.
