In 2018, I was getting off BART in San Francisco, wearing a 3M Professional Multi-Purpose Respirator, waiting to be picked up in a semi-autonomous self-driving Tesla, about to participate in Autopiloto, a 24 hour, mobile radio project by Radioee, about critical responses to all things automated. I was invited to discuss my work researching crude oil and mysticism in the mid 1800s. Breathing heavily through my filtered mask, I stood at the Glen Park Bart stop waiting to be picked up by the self-driving vehicle transmitting moving electromagnetic radio waves, watching troves of passengers exit the station wearing respirators and dust masks to escape the toxic atmosphere created by the dense smoke of numerous California wildfires, it occurred to me we earth-dwellers must collectively update our post-apocalyptic narratives. They have arrived (again, for many). They are no longer fiction.
I tried to write this before. About 2 years ago, while I was in the throes of watching every episode of Star Trek, in order. Eventually I did it; more than 700 50 minute episodes. It took me about 1.5 years, which averages to more than an episode a day. I finished on a flight from Kampala, Uganda to San Diego, CA, after spending nearly a year living in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Uganda. On my way to Tamale, in northern Ghana—starting with the flight there—where I lived for some time, I read Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti novella series, Nigerian sci-fi, feminist sci-fi. It was by no means my first step into Afrofuturism or speculative feminism and the many strains of SF (string figures, speculative fabulations, scientific facts), as Donna Haraway calls them. Octavia Butler has transformed my sense of what literature, story-telling, and world-making can be. Similarly, I’ve been a fan of the mysterious Detroit techno group, Drexciya, for a long time. In the late 80s and early 90s, the cult producers began the mythology that Drexciya is a lost Atlantis civilization deep under the ocean consisting of pregnant slaves who were thrown overboard during the middle passage. All their music advanced this narrative. Before them, in the 1970s, Laaraji, who is a proponent of radical laughter, advanced an ambient, meditative cosmic philosophy. Of course, Sun Ra, too, and his Arkestra, were sent to earth to communicate the cosmic vibrations of sound.
It is through the Sun Ra compound that one of my favorite quotes comes into existence: “communities that have agency are capable of forming their own philosophical structures,” attributed to British saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. A wonderful notion indeed and, I think, the important launch pad for why speculative fiction is so important. Samuel “Chip” Delaney is an early progener of queer black science fiction, someone who certainly mobilized new philosophical concepts. I’m particularly fond of his work Nova because we all—earth beings—are sun worshipers after all. I feel this way in part because it links me to my bi-racial Mexican heritage and the ancestry of that lineage. The Aztec were very much children of the sun.
I’ve spent some time reading Latin American origin stories, the Mayan Popul Vuh, for instance. Specifically to see how it, in comparison to other origin texts like the Bible and the Koran, reference crude oil. In these early texts, different conceptualizations of the black corpse of the sun—as Reza Negarestani describes oil in his foundational speculative theory text, Cyclonopedia—provide different genealogies to the substance that the modern world is shaped with in nearly every aspect of life.
But, claiming origin stories as speculative fiction is not without stakes. On the one hand, I think it is a constructive move to bring these texts into literature and away from the risks of zealous creationism. On the other hand, to indoctrinate texts like the Popul Vuh into a western literary discourse is not an emancipatory practice of self-determination—communities with agency are capable of forming their own philosophical structures. Indeed, more and more western scholars are looking critically at the theology of enlightenment. In the Facing Gaia lectures, famed sociologist Bruno Latour asks, “What does it mean for people to measure, to represent, and compose the shape of the earth to which they are bound?” He continues in categorical terms:
Earth: understood as a historical conception or geohistorical adventure. Gaia: from James Lovelock, the most secular historical figure science has studied, not unified but composed—not nature… a political theology of nature. Nature-known, by the sciences… in epistemological mode nature defined by full attributes of exteriority, unity, inanimate agency, and undisputability…
Others too have begun to view the rationalist science of enlightenment as a theological output. In The Birth of Energy, Cara New Daggett looks at the history of the science of energy as naturecultural, the inseparable entanglement of nature and culture.
This is not particularly new. Many artists, writers, and critical theorists have challenged the anthropocentrism of Western conceptualizations of the cosmos. I am particularly interested in Karen Barad’s critique of what they call the metaphysics of individualism which challenges the conception of representationalism, in favor of practices, doings, becomings, and performativity. In this view, there are no essential characteristics of any “thing”, but rather things become with/through matter’s ongoing differentiation of the world, where matter is always already intra-actively co-constituted by material-discursive conditions. Barad calls this agential realism. There is density to this idea, that I will willfully sidestep for the purposes of this writing, but it is a start, I think, to allow for the proposal of many worlds, which numerous anthropologists (Marisol de La Cedena, Mario Blser, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, etc.) have argued for, to coexist simultaneously. These are worlds in which Isabel Stengers’ conception of cosmopolitics as a matter of concern can prosper: “gathering together for interests in common which are not the same interests.”
Really, though, I want to focus not on the theorists making these arguments, but the work that new speculative storytelling can do. Metaphors do not rule our world per se, but many people, from Friedrich Nietzsche to George Lakoff have warned against the risk of relying on language too much to shape worlds. Before I get away from theorists though, I’ll let Haraway’s thoughts overemphasize the point, because she does it so damn well:
Even rendered in an American English-language text like this one, Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa, Medusa, Spider Woman, and all their kin are some of the many thousand names proper to a vein of SF that Lovecraft could not have imagined or embraced—namely, the webs of speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, and scientific fact. It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems (Haraway, 2016, 101).
So, how is contemporary science fiction doing? What figures is it figuring? Visually, in the current so-called golden age of television, there ought to be a surplus of conceptually rich sci-fi, magical realism, indigenous futurism, and other worlding narratives. There are some, see Skawennati and the aforementioned Okorafur. But far more frequent are the utterly banal (at best) and downright problematic (at worst) rehashing of the current techno-capitalist values. Most current sci-fi does not even represent the best version of the nonetheless still ossified faith that technology alone will “save” humanity: left accelerationism. Instead, series after series reproduces the most boring tropes of a new technological arms race, surveillance capitalism, and what Jenny Odell calls the attention economy. Robot camera choreography does not matter if it is not contributing to the conceptual realization of the work. Technological improvements in CGI, camera speed, rigs, etc. can be noteworthy accomplishments, but they do not, on their own, constitute meaningful developments of anything specifically, or help mobilize new conditions for thinking.
Good sci-fi, which I think is more often found in speculative fiction, creates alternative worlds in which new concepts or relations can be explored seriously. It does not graft the benign values of the present into future conditions. Good SF reminds us that communities that have agency are capable of forming their own philosophical structures and provides frameworks for conceptualizing those concepts. The worlds we live with/in now, in the present, are also conditions of standardization, governed by the philosophical concepts of the enlightenment: individualism, anthropocentrism, extractive capitalism. The list is not finite. Nor is the potential otherwise, precisely the reward of SF.
Amidst the contemporary moment, which, dare I say, was prophesized by Octavia Butler in her Parable Series to a frightening degree of accuracy, in which fragmentation, alienation, ignorance, extremism, and environmental catastrophe are enveloping all that there is, we earth beings need better storytellers. Not the Cli-Fi genre, which commodifies disaster capitalism. We don’t need stories for the future, we need stories for the present. Stories that provide new frameworks for how to create new concepts. Stories that update the idea of apocalypse to the slow death of ecosystems, identities, and the ongoing destruction of many different worlds: island dwellers, indigenous populations, species-beings, glacial ice, salmon, and more. These worlds already experience the apocalypse that we moderns—as Latour would say—are just catching up to. We need stories that challenge concepts of “we” and “us” and “I” in meaningful ways and practical responses to the spacetime disciplining that has colonized life.