John Rieder’s introduction to Speculative Epistemologies aims the book at the question of “truth effects in sf” and invokes the Harawayean expansion of those initials: the field of enquiry includes science fiction and speculative fiction, of course, but also “speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact” (1-2). The book’s heart is six close readings of stories from the genre’s subcultural margins, which Rieder hopes will “trace a history of sf that captures the increasingly feminist, racially and ethnically diverse, philosophically ambitious, and politically engaged character of [sf’s] subcultural centers of gravity from the 1960s to the present” (2). The speculative epistemologies of the title are “counter-hegemonic ways of knowing” (2), while the eccentricity of the subtitle refers not to the substitution of Hawaiian shirts and a fedora for a personality, but rather to an engagement with “multiple centers of gravity,” resulting in non-Copernican orbits such as those of comets and the like.
In other words, this is a tour of the Oort cloud of the generic solar system. Perhaps that’s not the ideal metaphor, however, given Rieder here extends the model of genre (re)formation set out in his Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017; SFMCGS hereafter): an Actor-Networkish approach which “resists any monolithic, centrally organised description” (3) in favour of exploring an ever-shifting assemblage of subnetworks through which the meaning of a term such as ‘science fiction’ is perpetually under (re)construction. Which is to say that ‘science fiction’ is not the simple category identifier that it’s sometimes taken to be, nor is it exactly like a solar system—unless, perhaps, we consider solar systems over a timescale for which our mayfly lifespans make us woefully unprepared.
Nonetheless, if that’s the map we’re taking for Rieder’s territory, then his navigational rubric is a popular aphorism pulled from Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), a landmark work in Science & Technology Studies (STS): “solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order” (3). To this claim Rieder adds a rider of his own: “the problem of knowledge/social order is therefore also, always, the problem of narrative or storytelling” (ibid).
The waystations on this journey are six sfnal texts that foreground the social struggles—and hence the alternative ways-of-knowing—of women, Indigenous communities, and queer communities: Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967); Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977); Samuel R. Delany’s “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” (1985); Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995); Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela (2009); and “The Camille Stories” (2016) by the aforementioned Donna Haraway. Rieder’s itinerary is not intended to be exhaustive, but illustrative, taking in some exemplary texts which subvert the hegemonic culture—but also the hegemonic sf culture—of their time, resulting in “an enormously more significant realisation of the genre’s literary and ideological potential” (4). I will not presume to judge the suitability of Rieder’s choices, here, nor critique his analyses. For one thing, I have read only two of the texts (the Zoline and the Haraway) and know one more by repute (the Delany). For another, Rieder’s reputation as a wide and generous reader precedes him, and the chapters devoted to each work in this book are testament to a body of knowledge and experience that puts my own to shame. What I can say with certainty is that he provides ample reason to seek out the stories I haven’t read, and to return to those I have.
Therefore—and given my own position within (or is it my trajectory across?) the assemblage-of-assemblages that we think of as the academic disciplinary (solar-)system—I will instead concentrate on Rieder’s framing argument and conclusion. Though a critic and author of sf, and a regular (ab)user of the scholarly toolkit surrounding the genre, I would not presume to define myself as an sf scholar first and foremost. If I am legible at all to the disciplinary system, it is as some vigorously mutant species in which the genes of futures studies and STS got mixed up, perhaps by way of a comic-book villain’s experiments with a particle accelerator. This may serve to explain why Rieder’s work usually speaks clearly to me: the theory of genre advanced in SFMCGS, for instance, makes a lot of sense to someone who, in the words of their long-suffering doctoral supervisor, “has read more Latour than is necessarily helpful”. Throw in some Haraway (as theorist as well as fabulist), the foundational work of Shapin and Schaffer, a pinch of Bakhtin and Barad, and I’m in fairly familiar territory; to then be slung outward on a trajectory that traces that territory’s potential intersection with a (small-c) catholic conception of sf as an assemblage is a mission that feels, at times, like it was written just for me.
However, that feeling dissipates somewhat when Rieder reaches his conclusions. To explain why, I must attempt to sum up the theoretical framework that takes us there, which Rieder erects around the central issue of “truth effects” (1). This argument begins with the relationship—often claimed but, as here shown, most often honoured in the breach—between the epistemic bases of science fiction and the sciences for which it was (unwisely, and regrettably) named long ago. This part of Rieder’s argument includes a quick foray through the emergence of ‘hard’ sf—here shown to be driven by a cherry-picked nostalgia for an earlier sf which had hardly existed, and resulting in a “highly targeted storytelling practice, one that caters to a well-defined, narrow audience” (11)—and the ‘soft’ New Wave counterpoint that emerged within the genre; it is also the part of the argument which I assume will be canonical to most readers here. What interests me more is Rieder’s delineation of an epistemological chasm between the reality- and truth-claims of sf-as-fiction on the one hand and science-as-non-fiction on the other. Here, the vastly different effects (and perhaps also affects) of authority and plausibility must be (re)examined within what Rieder calls regimes of publicity: “the material practices of the production, circulation and reception of discourses” (12) wherein the boundaries and protocols of ‘genre’ are built, maintained and reconfigured over time.
For Rieder, this process requires focussing on the label ‘science fiction’ as commonly used rather than as expertly defined, thus resisting pressures to purify sf of its entanglement with mass culture, and with the inextricably related techniques of advertising and market research. The latter are connected by Rieder (quite rightly) to the “fake news” phenomena of the moment, produced by the “outrage industry” as part of an assault on “the authority of evidence-based truth” (12). Meanwhile, “the real, true ‘cognitive’ power of sf” must be found “by tracing its proliferating networks of influence and association,” rather than by the aforementioned process of purification (12): the broad church that the term now represents, and its indirect and polymorphous relationship to the episteme of scientific enquiry, is precisely the result of sub-subcultural struggles within the subculture of SF itself. This dynamic is how the idea of ‘hard’ SF emerged, and—first as tragedy, then as farce?—how the more recent Puppies crusades emerged, but it is also what gave rise to the far more inclusive and radical countercurrents which Rieder is charting in this book.
So far, so good. But early in his conclusion, Rieder turns toward drawing a hard and exclusionary line between, on the one hand, both the vernacular (and liberal-hegemonic) notion of ‘science fiction’ (for which his figure is the bloated monolith of the Marvel movies franchise) and the more radical tradition that the book focusses on, and on the other hand, the post-truth narratives of the MAGA movement. He rightly notes that, while the radical tradition with which Speculative Epistemologies is concerned takes a critical and oppositional attitude to the more ‘same old capitalist technoscience, but with slightly better minority representation draped over it’ position of the liberal mainstream, the two blocs are united by a science-like commitment to evidence as the foundation of truth claims, albeit a very instrumentalised lip-service one in the latter case; the fables of the outrage industry, meanwhile, have given up any such pretence in favour of that infamous coining, ‘alternative facts.’
This argument is eminently tenable, to be clear. But I struggle with a corollary that seems to suggest that the fabulatory futures of the post-truth episteme are thereby beyond the pale in terms of the genre dynamics he has described in this and earlier works: disconnected from the somewhat-more-sciencey speculations of SF and, furthermore, undeserving of any attempt at critical engagement.
I can see where Rieder is coming from, here, not least because he sets it out clearly, referencing the circumstances of his writing the conclusion against the backdrop of the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol. Which is to say: I don’t blame him for getting on his soapbox. But I do feel that his argument is a poor fit with the book that precedes it. It’s not contradictory, exactly, but nonetheless: to go from detailed explorations of works which illustrate the long and close relation between radical sf and the academic regimes of publicity in particular, and then to hop-skip from there, over the mainstream movies of the commercial regime, and on to a regime that doesn’t even define itself as science fiction at all—even though I would argue its futurities are, contra Rieder, demonstrably no more ‘improbable’ than those of the Black Panther movie (2018), and to its fans distinctly less so—in order to dismiss the latter as illegible to analysis and undeserving of engagement… well, it feels like one hell of a leap.
I can see the logic in holding up MAGA futurism’s refusal to debate in good faith as a reason to “acknowledge, with regret, outrage’s own practice of putting itself outside of any meaningful dialogue” (157), both academically and politically. But politics and logic are not blood relatives… and my (admittedly limited) training in pedagogy leaves me wondering whether we are (to borrow a metaphor from William G. Perry) simply stonewalling the disruptive students who’ve finally cottoned on to the first solipsistic stages of epistemic multiplicity and leaving them to be swept up by demagogues.
And if we concede that debate is impossible, engagement pointless—what then? Because regretfully allowing these epistemes the exit from metaphysics (and hence analysis) whose impossibility forms the basis of our critique of them, and hoping it will just die out if we stop looking at it, doesn’t seem like a strategy that’s going to win over the long haul. Worse, our condemnation and dismissal of these alternative futurities is exactly the effect that their authors—because outrage futures definitely have authors, or at least curators, with political positions and agendas as well-defined as any author Rieder explores in this book—would most like them to achieve. The trap has long been built in: our dismissal of these speculative epistemes—justified by reference to names that post-truth fandoms will identify as ‘postmodern neoMarxists,’ and using five-dollar words aplenty—enacts the elite disdain that those narratives already claim to be all that can be expected of us, tweeting our wokenesses in the sacred groves of radical-leftist academe. Our rejection is prophesied; as a consequence, it will be celebrated, and the division deepened. For all our faith in our own epistemological foundations, we seem unable to escape the characterisation ascribed to us by theirs.
So surely seeking to understand these epistemes with the tools we have developed to that end is better than to shrug and retreat? Certainly, they differ hugely in their truth effects from the ones with which Rieder is here concerned, but—as he observes earlier in the book—they are shaped by the same media-systemic dynamics of niche and mainstream, of marketing and seriality. Indeed, the passing mention of the Puppies crusades could even form the basis for making the case that the sf subculture was a Ground Zero for the ‘culture wars’—and it would be of a piece with the book’s stated project of studying the effect of speculative epistemologies “on the formation of identities and communities” (back cover).
Other scholars seem to be pushing in this direction, too. David Higgins’s Reverse Colonisation (2021; reviewed elsewhere in this issue), for example, shows that sf media which, at the time, were artefacts of a radical leftist (or leftish?) subcultural scene, have gone on to provide rhetorical strategies of resentment to the post-truth meta-episteme. More recently still, Sherryl Vint has described a project in which she intends to treat the adherents of post-truth futurities exactly as fandoms—a move which gestures back to the deep history of sf fandom, prior even to the ’hard’ sf controversy, as a harbor for some irrational, deeply weird, and disturbingly reactionary narratives of futurity.
None of this political meta-talk should be seen as casting any aspersions on the deep readings that Rieder has collected in this book, nor the theoretical framework within which he arranges and executes them: these, as always from this author, are exemplary, and will doubtless join my core collection of references in the field. See my quibbles instead as an intervention in a debate still ongoing, concerning how a once-marginal field of scholarship, having become much more relevant, influential, and mainstream in recent years, should best go about extrapolating its analyses and conclusions into the context beyond the texts which are its core concern. I am in no doubt that such extrapolations are worth making; indeed, I make them in my own (much less notable or exemplary) work.
But we too are in the business of truth effects as are, perhaps, all authors, knowingly or not. Rieder notes that Derrida—a ‘postmodern neo-Marxist’ par excellence!—observed that there can be no exit from metaphysics, and this lack of exit informs, for instance, the feminist critical engagement with a male-hegemonic science whose episteme put women under erasure. MAGA futurism may have put truth under erasure, but that’s all the more reason for us to insist on seeking it there: the very commitment to truth that supposedly defines our opposition to it surely behooves us to seek it in our opposers. The alternative can only serve to sustain the destructive division which their imaginary dreams of making canon.