In 2021 Alex Blechman famously tweeted:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus
The thing about dystopian visions is that they’re really only fun or useful when they engage with the present as critique or the future as warning. When they become actual templates for action (or are deliberately confused with actual current reality) two things happen. Firstly, unsurprisingly, they are rendered immensely scary. Secondly, by contrast, they become endlessly dull. Oh my god, shut up about the bloody red pill.
I suppose, actually, scary and dull is a pretty much a summation of our current geopolitical state at the moment but let’s not get diverted into the wider wasteland. This article is about the strange love the authoritarian right seem to have for speculative fiction.
At first blush, this is somewhat counter-intuitive. Almost by definition, sf is designed to provoke thought. It is by no means necessarily intrinsically progressive, but it is at least a literature of ideas. So what are are the authoritarian right doing with sf? Here is a not-entirely-serious and very much incomplete overview:
| Franchise/Premise | Musk flavoured accelerationism | MAGA | Neo-reactionary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iron man | Tech-enhanced ubermensch. Enough said. | AI pictures of Trump as Iron Man | King / CEO archetype |
| Red Mars | I will be a god and you will be my rock-breaking serfs. Oxygen is not free! | Colonisation! Like the old West! | Territory for the network state! Like Greenland on a grander scale. |
| Suck the juice out of Earth and then fly away, leaving the lumpen masses to perish. | |||
| AGI / Skynet | Replace all the sneering creatives with pliant machines. | New kinds of TV? Better Google? Trump as Terminator? | Will future god torture us? |
| I, Robot | Replace all the unionising warehouse workers with pliant machines. | Techno-butlers? Sexy robots? | |
| Robot dogs will eat the faces of rebellious NPCs as ordered | Robot dogs will eat the faces of other, lesser people. | Order must be. efficiently maintained. | |
| The Matrix | The universe is a simulation. I am the only real person and you are all NPCs. | All the bloody pills | |
| Cyborgs | Integration with machines / networks (but who controls those?) | Cyborg CEO fully embedded in network state. He sees everything! (See Middle Earth/Shire) | |
| Useful soldiers with built-in guns. | Cool! Built-in guns! | ||
| Mind upload | Already did it. I will live forever. My enemies and all NPCs will be defeated by time. I will programmatically retain my gender. | New kinds of TV? Jobs guarding data centres? | Beyond humanity |
| Middle Earth | Return of the king. You know who that is. | AI generated pictures of Trump cosplying a King. | The king and his dark elves in charge. |
| Make male elves brave, smart and nice again. | The Shire as very white utopia. | Elves are effete leftists. Something something dark elves. Something hobbits blah salt of the earth. It’s all very tiresome. | |
| Every little life is known thanks to the dark wizard and his palantir. | |||
| Foundation and Empire | Techno guru saves the universe from a dark age with his enormous brain and powers of foresight. | A plucky redoubt resisting space feds. | Civilisation rises anew from the ashes of necessary collapse |
| The Culture | What effective altruism gets you if you don’t waste wealth or compassion on living people. | What is The Culture? | The Cathedral in space |
| Cool spaceship names. | |||
| HHGTTG - Zaphod Beeblebrox | It me! | What is HHGTTG? | I am a dark elf. I am a CEO king. I have gravitas. |
| HHGTTG - Total Perspective Vortex | I am the only real person in the galaxy, baby! | ||
| Walking Dead | The left threaten a zombie apocalypse | Build the wall! |
A few of the items in the table above are really just a matter of record. Musk absolutely is obsessed with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as he says himself and as Jill Lepore’s excellent podcast series X Man: The Elon Musk Story attests. Others are projection on my part. I’m not entirely sure that MAGA commentators see immigrants as zomb… oh, come to think of it, by way of references to Hannibal Lecter (and I suppose cats and dogs), there is an entire MAGA mythos concerning hordes of flesh eating immigrants, so score me correct about The Walking Dead. But, yes, some the characterisations are more of a stretch than others.
There are a few aspects that these examples tend to have in common. To start with, they are broadly at odds with the original thrust of most of the sf stories that use the premises in question. This is the crux of the torment nexus point. sf is often a warning or an exploration of a technology and its implications, not a fanboyish endorsement of a shiny evil toy. This is complicated a little, of course, by the fact that no writer can control the meaning of their work once it’s loose in the universe. Even fascists, unfortunately, get to reformulate texts in the reading and the retelling.
Many of the sf premises that the right embrace bring with them a superficial cool. Sleek spaceships, gleaming robots, advanced kit. Is it an accident that over-militarised police and militias bear more than a passing resemblance to imperial stormtroopers as they strut around in their masks and goggles? There’s often an air of designer violence to the imagery, a promised third act reimposition of order through force or surveillance.
Another theme that recurs is a sense of specialness. The neo-reactionaries and tech bros have their CEO kings, the MAGAs have their own particular overlord. All of them are more or less certain that they belong to an elevated race, class or nation. Of course core science fiction narratives, too, often play into this. Kings are a thing in Tolkien and, in other genres, humble farm boys turn out to have all sorts of magical powers and galactic destinies.
If the specialness of the hero is a thread (I’m Zaphod Beeblebrox baybee!), then its much more disturbing corollary is the insignificance of the other. These are the orcs, the zombies, the masses, the sheeple. In the case of the simulation hypothesis (the idea that we are mathematically more likely to be living in a simulation than a base reality), a solipsistic variation posits that at least some of us may be non-player characters in contrast to the truly sentient Musk contingent who are plainly the protagonists of whatever game or experiment we happen to be trapped in.
Ultimately, these threads can be woven into a set of stories that provide emotional, if not intellectual, coherence for dark and distinctive world views.
There is a tendency on the left to take a look at this tapestry and conclude that there’s something intrinsically reactionary about sf itself. This is less a misreading than a failure to read. At the other extreme is the famous argument by Darko Suvin that sf is a literature of cognitive estrangement. This recalls both the Russian Formalists and the alienation effect of Brecht and Benjamin. The idea is that a skewed fictional vision of the world is characterised by the presence of a science fictional conceit – a ‘new thing’ or novum. This vision makes the world we know strange, engendering analytical clarity in the reader or viewer. By rendering the familiar weird, sf exposes the web of assumptions that underlies our understanding of normality.
This is a compelling argument, but it may be more true at the level of mission than of universal effect. It’s belied to a real extent by the right’s version of sf (which reinforces – revels in – many assumptions that sf might be expected to challenge), to say nothing of the many Twitter trolls who scream woke whenever women and people of colour are represented in sf narratives.
Sure, by presenting alternative realities sf is more likely to challenge normative expectations than foster a passive acceptance of the status quo – and this without breaking a sweat. Just look at Anne Leckie on gender, or Martha Wells on neurodivergence. Or Marge Piercy, or N.K Jemisin, or Octavia Butler, or Kim Stanley Robinson, or Margaret Atwood, or Jeff VanderMeer, or Ursula K. Le Guin…
sf is also friendly to formal experiment – less frighteningly than modernism and postmodernism, thanks to the comforting alibi of a premise (there is a usually reason for dizzying time shifts, or that a cucumber is thinking, that a character wakes up as a cockroach, or that five versions of the same life play out simultaneously – a reason that sugars the experimental pill).
None of that is enough, though, to keep a radical project radical. Iain M Banks was a confirmed socialist who imagined capitalism defeated. Douglas Adams wrote his satirical, broadly anti-capitalist comedy on a typewriter decorated with an anti-apartheid sticker. That doesn’t stop Musk from naming his vehicles after Culture ships and (mis)referencing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy every chance he gets.
Also, it is worth admitting that looking at the world in a skewed way is precisely what conspiracy theorists do. It’s the game that various Matrix-inspired rightist subcultures play. Sometimes a skewed perspective fosters a critical perspective. Sometimes you’re just trapped in a hall of mirrors.
Co-opting words and concepts has always been a particularly successful right wing trick. Critical Race Theory, DEI, pro-Palestinian activism, even the word woke, have been turned into crude and menacing caricatures far removed from nuanced and useful origins. Phrases are emptied of meaning, freighted with nonsense, and then pointed back at their originators. Fake news now means anything that the president does not like. Insurrectionist may soon describe an anti-Ice protestor. Language is hollowed until all that’s left is a mood and a surface.
Which brings us back to the science fiction project. There is no satire in the husk of the Hitchhiker’s Guide that Musk loves, just the gleam of the Heart of Gold and the idiotic glitz of the galactic president. Sometimes it seems that the torment nexus is real and we are living in it. But the co-option project is reductive by nature and design. Empty-eyed AI art is always dead on arrival, a copy of a copy of a copy with nothing new to offer. Real sf, on the other hand, remains endlessly inventive and creative, both as it’s written and reimagined in rereading. No-one can pin Douglas Adams down, or reduce Iain M. Banks to a set of Ship names. Writers and creators will always run rings round the meme-lords.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
