Fictional varieties of postcapitalism and imaginaries of systemic transformation: mapping alternatives in science fiction and making use of their heuristic potential

ABSTRACT

This contribution proposes to explore different forms of postcapitalist futures that have been imagined in science fiction and analyze their reflexive potential. The field of studies on diverse economies, those economies often made less visible by the preeminent economic system, should also be concerned with fictional representations oriented towards the future. The article first emphasizes how science fiction can participate in the political imagination, precisely because of its capacities for problematization and exploration. The next step is to exploit a corpus of mainly literary works to show how science fiction can be an original and heuristic vector for the exploration of transformative socioeconomic possibilities. The worlds created in these works allow us to show what a variety of alternative and postcapitalist socioeconomic systems might look like. A typological matrix of postcapitalist futures is then proposed to highlight the hypotheses on which these visions are based and the inspirations they provide.

KEYWORDS:

• Futures
• imagination
• postcapitalism
• science fiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the opening chapter written by Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Economics, Science Fiction, History and Comparative Studies’, in the collective work edited by William Davies (2018).

2 http://www.isfdb.org/

3 http://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/

4 https://www.imdb.com/

5 For an interpretation of the Culture through the lens of ‘fun’, see ‘A World of Fun’, in McKee (2016).