Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

by Jordan S. Carroll

Through metapolitics, they hope to undermine liberal hegemony by using cultural countermessaging to promote white identitarianism’s pre-political assumptions. Policy changes will follow, they claim, once they have cultivated fascist attitudes in white people through right-wing media manipulation.

Bowden argues that the protagonist in popular narratives is often a Schmittian sovereign who uses his exceptional power to smash his subhuman foes.26

Not lately

Fascists thereby strip science fiction of its speculative indeterminacy.

Alt-right reading protocols foreshorten this critique, highlighting the text’s invocation of fascist enjoyment while omitting the moment of critical estrangement that would banish those authoritarian possibilities. They see the dystopia as a political program.

My argument is that the alt-right seizes upon speculative genres to dictate who has the right to speculate in the first place.

The alt-right asserts ownership over science fiction because they think white people maintain a monopoly on modal imagination. Nonwhite people, they suggest, dwell in a state of modal impoverishment, cut off from possibility.

According to the fascists, only white people may change, evolve, or open onto new possibilities. The

The fact that a renaissance of Afrofuturist and otherwise antiracist science fiction has disproven the alt-right’s exclusive claim to the future only makes them more eager to colonize the genre for themselves.

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.

Over the course of this study, I shall show the stories told in the name of speculative whiteness are fundamentally incoherent.

Some critics who follow Darko Suvin in defining science fiction as progressive treat the genre’s reactionary elements as inessential holdovers from the pulp tradition.

science fiction’s ideological “diversity.”78 Its history contains both Madole and the fans who met his Animist Party proposal with skepticism. Science fiction fandom has always been fractious.

Each genre is a terrain of struggle, shaped and reshaped through political interventions, but not all battlefields offer every side the same strategic advantages.

Raymond speculates that beings from another planet, habituated to traveling between parallel worlds, passed this yearning to transcend reality down to white humans after mixing with select hominids.

The alt-right came to see the world as if governed by a media franchise’s canon, possessing a fundamental ethnoracial continuity running underneath every historical difference.

The alt-right therefore has no desire to see a fundamental rupture with present-day identities or hierarchies.

Heinlein argued that “science fiction fans differ from most of the rest of the race by thinking in terms of racial magnitudes—not even centuries, but thousands of years.”

Beale often uses r/K selection as a metaphor rather than a literal scientific concept—he expresses skepticism about evolution—Beale

To reverse this trend, some longtermists hope to emulate Genghis Khan by producing enough offspring that they’ll eventually constitute a major planetary population.141 These plans are no longer purely speculative: tech entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel are investing in reproductive technologies to make this happen.

Because they see technoscientific exploration as an expression of white Faustian identity, white nationalists incorrectly attribute deindustrialization and the concomitant technological slowdown to gender and racial chaos.

Because the far right posits white demographic decline as the underlying cause of capitalism’s long downturn, they maintain that ethnic cleansing is the only way to bring back the boom times.32

But capitalism’s inner contradictions are the real cause of the current stagnation. As the rate of profit declines, private firms no longer invest at high levels in technologies that might dramatically increase productivity growth and improve everyday life.33 Research and development spending falls while capital, technical personnel, and other resources are diverted into socially negligible pursuits governed by short-term financial interests such as stock buybacks or targeted advertising.

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.”

None of these fascists seems to have read far enough in Hegel or Kojève to see that the servant transcends his circumstances through labor, thereby ushering in the future, while the master remains trapped in the transitory pleasures of luxury consumption.46 Johnson and Spencer suggest that Paul’s refusal to play the game, his unwillingness to compete for spice, makes his ascent to power a genuine rupture with the existing order.

Alt-right partisans are not the shell-shocked victims of trench warfare. They have led lives of pampered safety made possible by stolen wealth and brutal violence.

The Turner Diaries inspired more than two hundred murders and forty terrorist attacks, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.151 Pierce frames the novel as a found document, the diaries from 1991 to 1993 of a white nationalist terrorist named Earl Turner, published more than a century in the future in commemoration of a global fascist revolution that ended in the genocide of all nonwhite people.

But perhaps the most formally sophisticated rebuttal to fascists comes in the unlikely form of Chuck Tingle’s queer absurdist science fiction erotica.

Tingle represents the most uncompromising antidote to the fixed identitarian future, but all antifascist science fiction presents history as what we make of it. Tomorrow belongs to everyone.