How do you define science fiction? That is the question that has occupied Steven Shaviro for decades. Now that he is approaching sixty, he still has no answer.
That is precisely as it should be, writes Shaviro: science fiction has no clear boundaries, which is good. Science fiction is an important genre, he emphasizes. For more than a century, it has been one of the most powerful ways to explore the effects of technology in an imaginative way and to propose alternatives.
Shaviro’s belief in the independence of science fiction as a literary genre is thought-provoking. He argues that science fiction stories while following the rules of literature, are conservative in form and radical in content. This is a stark contrast to his previous research on music videos, where the form was radical and the content conservative.
This year, Shaviro retired as a professor at Wayne University in Detroit. He wrote thirteen books on postmodernity, literary theory, film theory, accelerationism, speculative realism, music videos, and science fiction. Shaviro has merged all these subjects in ‘Fluid Futures’. The texts in this book are a rollercoaster ride through theories, thinkers, anecdotes, books, films, and music. Sometimes, Shaviro threatens to derail, but in the end, he manages to bring everything back to the essence of this book: we can learn a lot from how science fiction represents the future.
That future is problematic, Shaviro emphasizes more than once. In the Western linear image of time, the future is yet to come and can be extrapolated from the present. Science fiction counters this with other ways of looking at the future. Afrofuturism responds to the destructive nature of linear time in the African diaspora and brings together past, present, and future to enforce radical changes. Shaviro distinguishes three ways of dealing with the concept of the future in science fiction: extrapolation, speculative fiction, and fabulation. The first stays close to the present and translates existing developments into the future. Speculative fiction makes the impossible possible and thus shows us alternative worlds. Fabulation designs completely new social systems on which alternative worlds are based. Shaviro loosely draws connections with postmodernity, assembly theory, and speculative realism and uses ideas from Kant, Deleuze, Spinoza, and Whitehead to indicate the importance of science fiction: its radicality invites us to question the here and now.
Shaviro uses ‘Model Minority’ by Cory Doctorow as an example. In the story, American Eagle, a character based on Captain America, is determined to stop police violence against black Americans. However, his allegiance to the police force and the state creates a painful conflict: he can only be a superhero for a particular population group.
‘Fluid Futures’ is heavy, but anyone following the theoretical reflections will have a beautiful and exciting book. Also, Shaviro’s dissecting of Fredric Jameson’s description of the gap between science and science fiction is gold.
Fluid Futures: Science Fiction And Potentiality by Steven Shaviro is published by Repeater Books.
This review is originally published in Dutch in the print edition of Gonzo (circus) magazine #183.