Whose Future Is It Anyway?

IN THE 1970s, a group of French right-wing intellectuals coalesced around the idea that cultural influence, not direct political action, determines the future. Led by Alain de Benoist, the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) borrowed heavily from communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci to promote the ideas of what would become the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right). At the time Gramsci was writing, communist doctrine theorized culture as something emergent from the economy, and not something with a distinct impact on the organization of a given society. Gramsci disagreed. He argued that ideas, politics, and economics are each active forces in society and while they all impact each other, none of them simply emerges from another. The New Left embraced this paradigm through countercultural movements in the 1960s; what is often overlooked in history books is how a New Right was not far behind. The use of culture as a vehicle for politics (referred to as metapolitics) belongs to neither the Right nor the Left; a culture war needs two adversaries.

In the world of science fiction, this culture war has been evident in online forums, publications, and awards campaigning. The fight is for ownership of the genre. In the mid-2010s, the Hugo awards served as the primary battlefield for this front of the culture war. A group of right-wing science fiction fans and creators calling themselves the Sad Puppies formed a voting bloc to advocate the return to the genre’s supposed roots: pulpy outer-space hero stories. The Sad Puppies’ campaign was a populist one: they argued that elites, disparagingly referred to as “literati,” were pushing a political agenda and were silencing the true values of the people by presenting awards to more underrepresented authors whose stake in the genre was often, the Puppies insinuated, inauthentic. The Rabid Puppies emerged a few years into the Sad Puppies’ efforts. As their name suggests, the Rabid Puppies were unapologetic in their misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Whereas the Sad Puppies wanted the Hugos to celebrate the science fiction they were nostalgic for, the Rabid Puppies wanted to burn the Hugos to the ground. Why did a genre built around speculation and infinite possible futures spark such an impulse towards exclusivity? In his new book, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, Jordan S. Carroll argues that the stakes of this cultural battlefield boil down to one question: who deserves to write the future?

Science fiction has always been a genre with high political affordances. It imagines future (and past and present) events, technologies, and social and environmental developments, as well as considering how these things change us, and how we react to them. Science fiction is, in its most basic definition, political. The project of imagining the world otherwise belongs to no one in particular. Even so, throughout the genre’s history, both the Left and the Right have attempted to claim it as an essentially left- or right-wing venture. In the field of science fiction studies, the overwhelming emphasis has been placed on science fiction as a progressive force. There are some important accounts about how science fiction has served reactionary purposes, such as John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) and David Higgins’s Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood (2021). Overall, however, explorations of presumed-progressive queer, BIPOC, environmentalist, and feminist science fiction abound while criticism dealing explicitly with right-wing engagement with science fiction is still rare. Carroll suggests that this has something to do with the field’s need to justify its existence; it is a comparatively new field of study that has only earned mainstream scholarly credibility in the last few decades, largely through its representation of science fiction as an inherently critical genre.

Speculative Whiteness addresses this underexplored subject in science fiction studies’s dialogue about the genre, its cultural history, and its political implications. Carroll overviews important radical right figures, including Richard B. Spencer in particular, to point out shared aesthetic and political ideas about science fiction that have had material effects on their politics. Carroll identifies the hollow core of their claims: while these radical right figures claim that science fiction allows white men to reclaim their racial identity as intrepid innovators and explorers solely responsible for shaping the future, these right-wing thinkers are in fact incapable of imagining a future meaningfully distinct from the self-aggrandizement of their present identity. He identifies three main trends in right-wing science fiction and criticism: the tendency to strip science fiction of uncertainty and present the author’s future as a foregone conclusion, the emphasis on a racialized understanding of time as a qualification for full humanity, and the role of a Faustian hero who shapes the future for the white race.

In his introduction, Carroll discusses the close proximity of science fiction to radical right-wing politics since the early 20th century. To some extent, popular culture was always a tool used by the Far Right. Theorists of the French New Right described intentional ideological influence on popular culture aimed at a distant political victory as “metapolitics.” As Andrew Breitbart summarizes, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Carroll describes this tactic, alluding to his focus on speculative genres, as “fascist worldmaking.” The ideology that structures fascist worldmaking is speculative whiteness: “For the alt-right,” Carroll says, “whiteness represents a matrix of possibilities more important than any actual accomplishments the white race may have already achieved.” There are five “myths” that constitute speculative whiteness: first, white people are uniquely good at speculating about the future and innovating in the present; second, nonwhite people are incapable of imagining the future and making long-term plans for the future; third, the true grandeur of whiteness will only be apparent in a high-tech fascist utopia; fourth, science fiction is a genre only white authors are truly able to produce; and fifth, speculative genres have the metapolitical potential of allowing a brainwashed white population to see their racial potential.

Carroll’s first chapter, “Invaders from the Future,” focuses on time preference. Time preference refers to the preference for good things to happen now rather than for better things to happen in the future; this chapter discusses how both committed scientific racists and less systematic science fiction fans claim that having a lower time preference is the key evolutionary trait that has led (for the scientific racists) or will lead (for the science fiction fans) to a superior breed of human beings. In Speculative Whiteness, the most comprehensive representatives of this viewpoint are Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (a Southern Poverty Law Center–certified white nationalist) in their 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Cochran and Harpending argue that the cold winters of Northern Europe drove these populations to develop agriculture and the lower time preferences that came with it; conversely, they claim, people from foraging societies “immediately share or consume everything they produce.” Because of this, populations characterized by a “‘lazy’ egalitarianism” are incapable of civilization or technological progress. They are living vestiges of the past who at best are unable to step into the future and at worst are dead set on dragging the gifted arbiters of the future into the past with them.

While out-and-out white nationalists frame this idea unambiguously in racial terms, mainstream science fiction approaches race more indirectly. Carroll reminds us that “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.” Often, these gifted few are unrecognized and even oppressed by the inferior masses, as in A. E. van Vogt’s Slan (1946) or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957). Novels whose futuristic elite class “no longer shares a common history with the living fossils that make up the popular majority” are called mutational romances. The mutational romance is structured by profoundly antidemocratic logic; if the masses are far enough below you as to constitute a different species, there is no point in dialogue or “a shared political project.” Ironically, living in the present disqualifies the normie from participating in civic life—this politics of time, which Carroll characterizes as “white time”—requires its adherents to sacrifice in the present for a supposedly certain future.

Carroll’s second chapter addresses space exploration. A preoccupation with colonizing the galaxies pervades science fiction generally—in some cases, even a conviction that the only way to survive as a species (or as a race) is to spread into the stars. While investment in the space program is not an exclusively reactionary project, as Carroll articulates, “reclaiming American supremacy in space has long been a project of the right.” Space exploration makes up a key feature of what Richard Spencer describes as “Faustian science fiction,” science fiction that “is bound up in an urge to expand outward past all frontiers even if that means dying tragically while doing so.” Spencer claims that the white race is characterized by a Faustian spirit, a dauntless restlessness that pushes the boundaries of what is possible. Right-wing thinkers have warned against the “feminization” of a society with guardrails, warning that accommodating the weaker elements of society (i.e., nonwhite people, queers, women) means sacrificing the vitality of Western civilization. They extol the ruthless expansionism of settler colonialism not only as a virtue but also as an immutable racial (and masculine) characteristic. Contra the self-representation of right-wing politics as “offering stability and permanence in an increasingly chaotic world,” Spencer and other alt-right intellectuals argue that Western civilization should return to an ethos of living life dangerously. The Faustian hero must deny the present and its comforts in order to control the direction of the future.

Carroll argues that the realization of these political theories is based in a fundamentally flawed science-fictional logic. It all comes back to a political concept of time, identity, and historical development. There is strong critical consensus that, as Carroll describes, good science fiction “asks us to confront the possibility of a fundamental break with the existent.” The original Star Trek (1966–69) presented audiences with a future where humanity travels to other worlds, but more importantly, it straightforwardly presented a racially integrated ship where women could be officers. We can talk about the ways that the execution was flawed, but it was still so impactful that Martin Luther King Jr. famously asked Nichelle Nicholls to remain in her role as Lieutenant Uhura when she considered leaving the show. King, ever the savvy rhetorician, understood the significance of giving people the tools to imagine a future different from the past.

“Science fiction at its best,” Carroll tells us, “is a radically historicizing genre that reveals the present as contingent while allowing us to imagine how things might be otherwise.” Science fiction teaches us that nothing is inevitable. Power structures, economic systems, identities—these all came of choices and circumstances and random chance. They are not immutable facts of existence. Faustian science fiction denies all of this by “committing to a future whose sole purpose is to monumentalize their present identities as glorious, necessary, and eternal.” The plot is always predetermined—the heroic white man had it under control all along and things went exactly to plan. There is no room for surprises or complications; that means no room for story. Often, this is even encoded in the form of the novel: William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978) is written as a future history, and Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948) is presented as an account of events that will happen. This writing is formulaic not only by default but also by design.

Genres have no essential existence; people decide what they are. A categorical definition only makes sense when enough people agree with it. The science fiction community rejected the alt-right’s definition of speculative fiction. N. K. Jemisin, a primary target of reactionary fan hatred, won three consecutive Hugos for Best Novel with her Broken Earth trilogy. Chuck Tingle, who writes absurdist queer erotica, was mockingly nominated by the Rabid Puppies for several awards; he disavowed the nomination, tirelessly satirized the Puppies, and wrote Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination (2016) in response. He has since written two very successful queer horror novels, Camp Damascus (2023) and Bury Your Gays (2024). The Sad and Rabid Puppies dissolved after a few years of campaigning; they were primarily active from 2014 through 2016. The alt-right has also collapsed. After the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, the alt-right as a movement effectively ceased to exist. That doesn’t mean that they just disappeared—some were absorbed by older radical right movements, others were absorbed into the mainstream, and a few became mass murderers in the name of a white future.

Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can be defeated. The future is for everyone—if we make it that way.