Better Tomorrows

Abstract

183 BOOKS IN REVIEW sources, reveals a real ideological myopia. No listing for John Rieder’s Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017)? SFRA award winners Sherryl Vint or Steven Shaviro? Not even something as “canonical” as Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future? Such blinkered perspective limits the usefulness of the Bibliography for serious scholars. To conclude, while there are many excellent pieces in Science Fiction and the Dismal Science, on the titular subject of economics in sf this volume represents, at best, a conversation at the periphery of the field. To claim that economic issues are underrepresented and undertheorized in science fiction scholarship, one must ignore the last ten years of conferences of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and of the Science Fiction Research Association, dismiss many fine articles published in SFS and elsewhere, and pretend that scholars like Rieder, Vint, Shaviro, Gerry Canavan, Rebekah Sheldon, David Higgins, etc., are not leaders in the field today, both theoretically and organizationally. Those interested in moving scholarship on economics in sf forward should look elsewhere.—Joshua Pearson, California State University, LA Better Tomorrows. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer. Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology. U of Minnesota P, 2019. 106 pages. $7.95 pbk. $4.95 ebk. Matthew Wolf-Meyer is a cultural anthropologist who also reads a lot of science fiction. This short book (published in Minnesota’s FORERUNNERS series, which endeavors to present scholarship in more compact forms and for an extra-academic audience) is devoted to the parallels between anthropology and science fiction: “social theory and speculative fiction are two sides of the same coin” (5). Wolf-Meyer’s starting point is the awareness that most white middle-class educated professionals (including himself, together with a large percentage of his readers) tend to be stuck in “suburban provincialisms” (17) beyond which they (or we) find it difficult to think. Anthropology and science fiction are both products of white, Western, middle-class “complacency” (a word that appears a number of times in the text); but they both, at their best, represent efforts to overcome these constraints and to help to move us to “choose a different future” (12). We desperately need to “try to find something that disrupts the futures we have been given” (15). Beyond this general need to imagine a more “sustainable, equitable world” (18) than the one to which our current social arrangements seem to be leading us, both social theory and science fiction can work as forms of modelbuilding . They both endeavor to “imagine the rules that undergird a society and its human and more-than-human relationships” (5). This effort is sometimes problematic; whenever we encounter something genuinely new, the danger is that “its alienness, its unexpected potentials and actions will be translated into models, theories, and language that adhere in disciplines as they already exist” (11). But at their best, social theory and science fiction can model novel possibilities in ways that do not just reproduce and extend the present. It is hard to imagine the end of the world, for “the apocalypse is 184 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) never singular; it is always multiple. In its multiplicity, the apocalypse is unimaginable” (4). But we can approach disaster by breaking it down into its components: “to imagine the apocalypse in its singular forms,” one at a time, might still help to “make plain possible ways forward—and how they build upon the past” (5). Theory for the World to Come exhorts its readers to “choose your future: throw in with what has been or try to find something that disrupts the futures we have been given” (15). Wolf-Meyer also reminds us that “history lingers” (90); we cannot simply negate the influence of what has already happened. The United States today still bears the scars of slavery, upon which it was built. But the other side of this inheritance is our awareness that “history is suffused with contingency” (90). Nothing had to happen the way it actually did and the future is still open. We do not have to perpetuate the bad old ways that we have inherited, even if...