Contemporary Crises and Contemporary Speculative Fiction: Social Change Through Affect

Speculative fiction has the potential to function as sociopolitical critique through a process of cognitive estrangement. This project uses contemporary speculative fiction from around the world to demonstrate that this sociopolitical critique can take place via modeling social relations. In chapters on capitalism, climate change, and forced migration, speculative fiction is shown to use “affective communities,” or small groups of people experiencing shared affective atmospheres, to not only critique crisis situations, but to suggest potential avenues out of them. This project departs from other speculative fiction critique in focusing not on the novum but on the characters’ interactions with and attitudes toward the novum and larger fictional world, and especially on how the characters’ treatment of one another comprises the majority of the effective intervention in fictional crisis. This approach is analyzed as a potential strategy for encouraging real-world change and political solidarity.