Narratives and futures control real world action, their biopolitical discourse on intellectual property seeps into the very world they create, only the alt can create new futures. (Mainly in relation to Speculative Fiction, but applicable to alt’s that imagine new world or just as a reason why their fiat is bad)

This interplay among material innovations, fictional projections, and popular anticipations and anxieties is a crucial object of study in the twenty-first century. In his introduction to Lively Capital, Kaushik Sunder Rajan suggests that the “theoretical problem of this volume is not to come up with the ‘theory of’ life or capital or governance or globalization or markets or neoliberalism but is rather to come up with forms of inquiry that are adequate to studying a contemporary conjunction of the life sciences and capital.”29 Speculative fiction is precisely such a form of inquiry. To be clear, I am not arguing for technological determinism, and indeed, precisely the point of fusing sociotechnical practice with speculative fiction is that technologies will influence social life based on the political and social structures and values attendant on their emergence. Narratives foreground such cultural forces and often enable us to see how otherwise neutral or even beneficial technologies may have undesirable consequences if issues of equity are not addressed in how they are implemented.30 At its best, speculative fiction can help us envision and materialize alternative futures that seek to transform rather than intensify contemporary injustices. At the very least, such alterative futures are a sign of capacities for speculative dreaming and anticipation of the future that exceed and escape what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” and defines as the erosion of our capacity to imagine the future as anything other than a continuation of current hegemonies.

Fisher similarly sees speculative fiction as a way to shape our affective investments in the new, to orient how we think about technologies and the new social arrangements they entail toward greater social justice rather than greater capitalist accumulation. He argues that capitalist realism is our dominant ethos, prompting us to accept the world-as-seen-by-capital as given, rather than one alternative among many. Trapped in these logics, we seek to survive, to endure, and are no longer capable of imagining that there is an alternative. Fisher points to speculative images of the future produced by corporations as the chief mechanism by which we are encouraged affectively to invest in the future of capital, images he calls “sf [science fiction] capital.”31 He contends that our emotional investment in such sf capital encourages our material investment in a narrow range of futures. He calls on us to invest our sf capital in estranged new worlds rather than the continuation of this one, to cultivate a different sociotechnical – and political – imaginary.

Sunder Rajan theorizes the distinct role such “science fiction capital” images play in contexts of biotechnological start-ups, situations in which access to resources necessary to research an innovation or discovery is contingent upon first articulating compelling visions of their possible futures. In documents seeking venture capital, corporations rely on what Sunder Rajan describes as “promissory futuristic discourse”; that is, they must imagine and inspire belief in the world-transforming value of the intellectual property upon which they intend to develop products in order to secure the funding to do the research that might transform these visions into material commodities.32 This discourse, then, cannot be evaluated as either true or false in its relationship to reality. Rather, “hype is reality, or at least constitutes the discursive grounds on which reality unfolds.”33 In a context in which biotechnology itself relies on speculative discourses, and in which the economy is largely propelled by such fantasies, discourses of speculative fiction have a crucial role to play in the struggles over how to imagine the future. This book demonstrates how speculative fiction elucidates the ways the regime of epivitality enables the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital. At the same time, however, the fictions I analyze also provide imaginative resources to counteract this regime’s biopolitical sorting of life into valued and disposable configurations. The importance of articulating a livable life outside of this logic is why this book is also a project of posthuman ethics.