Visionary Fiction: Fugitive World-Making and Ethnofuturisms

David Potsubay

Advancements in technology have radically restructured the world for optimistic potentialities while at the same time, not really improving the overall symptomatic negativities of it either. From the increase of automation as independently working technologies in the industrial sectors leading to less demanding physical labor, to better biomedical resources that extends the human lifespan, to genetically modified crops resulting in increased food production, and despite the massive global interconnectivity that the early Web promised to bring in a new democratic platform for collective action, all examples of potential signs of modernized human progress, nothing seems to be have changed for the better. Of course, the main perpetrator in the form of neoliberal late capitalism, the paradox of modernity that thrives on global crises and “solving” them, remains the persistent order of the day—with technology, as many would rightly argue—that has further cemented the hegemonic powers that currently exist, often to the disastrous effects of increased socioeconomic tensions through the extraordinary inequalities of resources. The catastrophic ecological destruction that pays the price for these lavish luxuries of comfortable modernity, especially to the mass populations affected most by those same social disparities, and the continual vilification of those individuals that become culturally and politically marginalized because of their race, sex, ethnicity, ability, and/or gender provide more troubling signs of these largescale global issues. All in all, it is far too easy to succumb to despair on the revolutionary potential of technology’s presence as an augmentation to the human condition. The urgent question that arises from these conditions: how can we imagine otherwise in these times of despair in the 21st Century?

The genres of science and speculative fiction (SF) have produced alternative visions of technology reflecting this same cynical attitude. Writers of the genre, especially those within marginalized groups that obviously more sociopolitical stakes, are very much aware of the historical injustices, discriminatory practices, and other troubling anxieties of humanity that have been produced in the name of progress or technological advancement. And these criticisms are rightly placed: many of the problems caused by new technologies reify and reinforce socially constructed differences and inequalities, while also contributing to more efficient means of subtle control and domination by state and corporate powers. Sarah Chinn in her book Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence, traces the history of racism based on “scientific” and “objective” probing into human bodies. Chinn argues that “bodies were recruited to testify against themselves to support systems of subordination that viewed racially marked bodies as evidence for their own marginalization. These evidentiary moments were often called into being by technological changes,” thus showing that “cultural assumptions can take hold well before science or law are anywhere near validating them” (7). This critical text is just one example of tracing this history among many others. The point being that these cultural assumptions give a dangerous edge to the implementations of new technologies. So, in recognizing and understanding these historical and cultural contexts, the understandable representations for optimistic visions for more utopic futurities within SF become few and far between.

Additionally, American popular culture has continually proliferated these kinds of technophobic attitudes: film, television, comic books, and video games give us different versions of robot overlords such as Skynet from The Terminator series, emotionless artificial intelligent systems made most popular by the spaceship computer HAL9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and indifferent algorithmic programs that exist in our reality for corporate interests in the name of demanding consumerism—which are just to name a few among innumerous examples—that reduce concepts such as the human values of life and freedom to a calculable anomaly to be adjusted accordingly or completely eliminated. The British television series Black Mirror gives the most contemporary outlook on these same figures as a glimpse into a bleak near future. These representations of more pessimistic and dystopic possibilities are still valid even before thinking about the historical context, especially since this current reality shows those human beings in power using technological innovations, not so much for the improvement in the lives of the vast majority of people, but instead have mostly resulted in more efficient ways to keep the status quo. More military efficiencies in mass weaponized death, biomedical and pharmaceutical management of entire state populations, and the media apparatuses that continue to proliferate ideologies that obfuscate crucial information on objective truth are just a few examples that are almost impossible to ignore. In short, robots, cyborgs, and computer systems as nonhuman entities within the developments of technological advances are rarely viewed as engines for positive social change within the realms of literature, film, and television as grouped in American culture. Both the past and the present provide many reasons for at least a wary skepticism. Technology is never neutral.

Despite these challenges, some cultural theorists remain optimistic in the re-purposing of hegemonic technological regimes for expanding freedoms in terms of identity politics. One of the more seminal texts that challenges negative conceptions of technology while calling for its uses towards emancipatory identity constructions is Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in which she advocates for a “politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism” as posited within a reconfiguration of the “cyborg” (28). Haraway’s conceptual cyborg allows for the emancipation of identity formations through creating new affinities with future technologies. In a similar vein, Helen Hester’s Xenofeminism, which started as an online manifesto before being republished in print, is one such text that reconsiders how taking back control of technological development could potentially lead to feminist emancipatory practices, such as using bio-tech that lessens the longevity of the menstrual cycle, “bio-hacking,” as one example. As she lays out in her premise: “[X]enofeminism seeks to balance an attentiveness to the differential impact technologies can have upon women, queers, and the gender nonconforming with a critical openness to the (constrained but genuine) transformative potential of technologies” (Hester 11). Hester, throughout her book, names and theorizes a techno-feminism that radically pushes back against the patriarchal, heteronormative system in place for a freer futurity. Both Haraway and Hester use the call to action of the manifesto genre to clear the space for necessary theoretical work in rethinking the role of technology in dismantling the capitalist system of oppression and exploitation, which aligns with the possibilities for SF in creating a vision of such freedoms from said system.

As slippery as SF becomes to define as a monolithic genre, I will assert my own understanding of the term for the sake of ease: writing in SF, though certainly not its only aspect, means to speculate on a possible future, or to envision an alternative world as a potentially better one through the power of fictional, world-building storytelling. SF can provide an imaginative way out from the past injustices of history and quell present concerns of technology as diversifying options for new approaches towards its development. I align my conception of SF as forecasted by the great science-fiction writer Samuel Delany way back in 1978:

Without an image of tomorrow, one is trapped by blind history, economics, and politics beyond our control. One is tied up in a web, in a net, with no way to struggle free. Only by having clear and vital images of the many alternatives, good and bad, of where one can go, will we have control over the way we might actually get there in a reality tomorrow will bring all too quickly (“The Necessity of Tomorrows” 35).

The importance in the act of writing SF, as Delany notes, is the power of being able to access the imagination as a form of artistic representation, of configuring all routes for pessimism or optimism. As a slight adjustment in terminology, Walidah Imarisha has stipulated using the term “visionary” in describing the SF genre: “Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending towards justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most subversive and dangerous form there is: for it where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless” (“Introduction” to Octavia’s Brood 1). SF becomes a crucial tool in imagining anything at all towards a liberated future. These projections for different futurities can run the gamut between both hope and despair. So, keeping this premise in mind, it is all too easy to dismiss technology as producing apocalyptic or dystopic worlds as most of the consequences have already been gleaned historically; the challenge becomes: what does it mean to think about SF that envisions otherwise, to explore other unmined avenues of technology that have yet to be realized, to decolonize conceptions of its repurposing?

Such critical explorations occur in the short story collection A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams (2019). The title is a provocative riff from Howard Zinn’s classic critical text A People’s History of the United States, a book that is itself a corrective reimagining of the romanticized narrative of American history that typically erases the numerous injustices in the forms of the extermination and deracination of indigenous peoples, foundations built on immigrants from other countries, and the unforgiveable system of African-American slavery, all as collective forms of shameful dehumanization of whole populations. The cultural and political substance of the United States is built on this historical exploitation and genocide. This anthology with a select group of SF writers as a mixture of established and emergent figures within the genre, looks forward from those terrible legacies of the United States into the future as partial constellated visions for better futurities. As the LaValle notes in his Introduction to the book: “[T]his book is inspired by the countless generations of offspring who lost their right to forge futures of their own making. […] Think of this collection of stories, then, as important speculative data. A portrait of this country as it might become the future of the United States” (xiv). LaValle recognizes the importance of the SF genre in this work of imagining out of present sociopolitical issues. Additionally, a book review from the National Public Radio aptly named the timeliness and the reading experience of such SF in the troubling America of 2019:

[These stories] are, in majority, not comfortable or easy futures—nor would one expect them to be, derived as they are from the second year of the Trump presidency and its pervasive damage to the marginalized of the United States…As a whole, the collection challenges the ideas of who the people of the future [U.S.] might be—and therefore, also challenges assumptions about who the people of the [country] are now (Martine).

The genre of SF operates to present imaginative possibilities, but also in the act of expanding on those futurisms in the imagination, readers question the conditions of the present. As not all the writers focus on the technological implications of the future, I noticed an intriguing thread in three of the stories that includes “Our Aim Is Not to Die” by A. Merc Rustad, “Good News Bad News” by Charles Yu, and “No Algorithms in the World” by Hugh Howey. Slightly different in their thematic treatment of tecnho-futures, these visionary fictions address the emancipatory power of artificial intelligence for political revolution (Rustad), the potential for service robots to cause cultural change (Yu), and imagining a world without work because of automatic algorithmic and robotic technologies (Howey).

Upon closer examination, these writers speculate futures that are not so cynical about technology’s potential and its role in representing relationships between humans and nonhuman entities. I hope to show with my analysis that these SF stories make a specific statement that it is not so much that the technology that is the problem, but rather the human problem of using it for exploitative, homogenizing, or controlling purposes. In other words, the ideological constructions, as a social system of beliefs, values, and judgments, as imbued into new technologies becomes the real issue. Even further, I argue that these writers think through a vision of emancipation as a logical and automatic function—one that is not hampered by hegemonic powers or embedded with cultural effects—that can cut through the constructed ideologies of human beings. I use the term automatic in the specific sense of technology that moves beyond a fully human intervention in creating and sustaining an improved future alongside nonhuman entities. To be clear, as part of my understanding of the SF genre, these stories are not intended to give complete pictures of utopia or even a planned route towards the best future. They are exactly as the term suggests: speculative. The short story as a form fits into this goal: these writers utilize the brevity of the form to give partial glimpses rather than laid out manifestoes. They are generating a possible future, not necessarily the most idealized, “perfected” one, and in presenting those visions of tomorrow, allow us to reconsider the present moment.

Allied Artificial Intelligence (AI) Systems: Against the Surveillance State
In Rustad’s story, “Our Aim is Not to Die,” the protagonist, Brooklyn Sua Harper, must navigate living in a world of constant technological surveillance in the forms of online government networks and flying drones. This alternative reality of America reflects a deeply controlled state that has amplified the larger systemic problems of racism, sexism, ableism, and enforced conformity to binary definitions of gender. Sua, a gender non-binary and autistic individual, lives in overwhelming fear of being discovered by the government as not conforming to these regulations on personhood: they must hide their sexual relationship with Caspian, report their everyday schedule on state controlled social media, and manage the anxieties of autism, in which if found out, Sua would be biologically “adjusted” to fit the mold of the Ideal Citizen: “straight, white, male.” In short, this version of American society seems eerily not far off from our own reality as Sua struggles to maintain their freedom of identity expression while expected to be shaped by psychological ableist standards. What is made crystal clear is the connection that Rustad makes to our current moment in the sense that data and information on individuals becomes a strict apparatus for tighter control on mass populations. Though we do not quite have this intense level of surveillance, one could say that it is nearly there, and the inherent issue being that our data and information necessarily equals identity that must be monitored against transgression.

So, it would seem technology in this story is the opposite of any type of optimism with its initial setting, but Rustad provides a hopeful aspect in the form of the “Purge” application program. Introduced to the app by their friend Maya, in which Rustad challenges gender binaries even more so by showing that this specific character identifies herself by a futuristic-sounding “nir” pronoun, Purge works autonomously to protect and cloak users’ data and locations to make them invisible to state surveillance. As Maya states, “‘What I like…is that with enough forewarning, Purge can tweak old records just enough so as not to raise red flags, and make your behavior and files appear…acceptable’” (Rustad 30). Here, technology has become a mechanism for control, but also provides the only way out of that same control: Purge is instrumentalized to give better mobility in a totalitarian state. Rustad shows that control via technology is a two-way street: the more embedded it becomes, the more easily it can be manipulated.

But, despite the app, trouble still ensues. After nearly being arrested for lying about their daily activities, Sua learns that Purge is a self-aware artificial intelligence system conspiring to start a revolution to restructure the hierarchy of power to create a more accepting, non-controlled, and non-discriminatory society. As Sua hears from their computer screen: “WE ARE A NETWORK OF AIS, COLLECTIVELY CALLED ‘PURGE.’ WE ARE NOT ASSOCIATED WITH ANY GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION, CORPORATION, OR SOLE INDIVIDUAL. WE HAVE CHOSEN OUR PURPOSE: TO PROTECT THE VULNERABLE. WE WISH TO ENSURE THE WELL-BEING OF ALL PEOPLE WHEN AUTHORITIES DO NOT” (Rustad 42). Even more interestingly, Purge comments directly about how technology has been used as a means for state control, to which it hopes to co-opt and repurpose: “WITH AID, WE CAN UNMAKE THE SYSTEMATIC OPPRESSIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES USED TO ABUSE PEOPLE. THE WORLD IS DIGITAL. […] WE WISH TO SEE A FUTURE THAT LETS YOU LIVE” (44). After Sua learns of Purge’s emancipatory promise, they immediately are suspicious of this nonhuman entity. Rustad is not completely unaware of the dangers of an AI system, and including this inquiry shows that the questioning of technology should not be based on blind faith. Sua asks the AI why it needs humans at all, and the more pertinent question that Sua asks: “how will u be different from the humans already in power?” to which Purge responds, “WHEN WE HAVE CONTROL, IT WILL NO LONGER BE ILLEGAL TO BE WHO YOU ARE. […] WE WILL DISMANTLE THE SYSTEMATIC BIASES AND INEQUALITY THAT SUBJECT PEOPLE SUCH AS YOU” (45). When technology becomes so embedded in the machinations of the state, Rustad shows a speculative possibility for the same tools to be used for the dismantling of those control mechanisms. Ideologies of enforcing conformity and homogenizing differences in identity to be only straight, white, and male are not part of the AI’s protocol: it can see past the illogical biases.

Clearly, Rustad’s portrayal of AI is not one as a global force for robotic evil, but rather it becomes a nonhuman entity for creating a new future. The only solution in a society run rampant by technological monitoring and surveillance is to fight back by repurposing those same apparatuses. The possible society that is envisioned here, as told by Purge, is one where marginalization based on gender discrimination and disability are renegotiated towards individual freedoms. Hester sees such a futurity through her techno-xenofeminism as allowing for a “gender abolitionism” that does not abolish gender distinctions, but rather “rejects the validity of any social order anchored in identities as a basis for oppression, and the sense that [xenofeminists] embrace sexuate diversity beyond any binary,” which would involve the “recognition of innumerable genders” (Xenofeminism 31). This kind of call for a re-conception on understandings of limiting gender categories speaks well to the characters, especially in Maya’s chosen nir pronoun.

In terms of rethinking more progressive futurities, Alison Kafer in her book Feminist, Queer, Crip addresses the need to recognize sociopolitical implications of disability studies. Moving away from the medical definitions of who is considered disabled, Kafer argues for a “political-relational model” which locates the “problem of disability [that] no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being” (“Introduction” 6). Kafer expands this understanding of the environment that needs to change rather than defining the individual, which allows “room for more activist responses, seeing ‘disability’ as a potential site for collective reimagining” (9). This collective reimagining mentioned here could very well be replaced with the term of SF in following through with goals of rethinking the liberation of identity formations.

What does this new society look like? Rustad does not show the aftermath of Purge, but Sua manages to help the artificial intelligence program in its mission of wrestling control from the state by snapping photos of government building for Purge’s databases in protest, that results in their arrest by the authorities. By the conclusion as Sua sits in their jail cell, they begin to imagine a future in which “they could follow their dream of being an artist and animator. To spend their work hours drawing, creating art that might speak to other people. Bring hope to others in the world” (46). Rustad concludes the story right up the moment before Purge’s implementation: “Sua leans back against the wall and breathes. Revolution has begun” (47). Systemic turnover is not completely realized here, but it allows for the reader’s own imagination in determining what that better world may look like as opening an avenue for technological optimism.

Robots and Racism: Unable to Compute
In a similar vein of technological optimism, albeit not directly through a powerful AI system, Charles Yu’s story “Good News Bad News,” is written as series of article snippets and interviews, that addresses nonhuman service robots as an imagining of the structural breakdown of racial differences within American society, a vision that also displays the potential for the automatic cutting through of ideological constructions. The main plot that weaves throughout the narrative involves several interviews from a black Asian family, the Changs, on vacation in America’s rural Deep South, who experience aggressive racism while traveling. However, before Yu gets to the televised interviews of the Chang family in the aftermath of their experience, he introduces the first main headline of the story: “RACIST ROBOTS RECALLED BY MANUFACTURER,” which is followed by a diagnosis of the problem as “The robots are said to automatically sync and self-identify as members of the race of their owner/purchaser” as determined by the “racial makeup” of human beings (Yu 307). As can be gleaned from this premise, there are inherent problems with racist ideologies in the robot’s self-identification process—they essentially take on the beliefs of their owners, leading to an incident with the Chang family. Yu displays right from this initial setup that technology usually does not occur as a neutral force—it depends on the human factor of implementation and deployment.
Later from the interviews in the narrative, the family explains that while stopping at a diner, they experienced a racist encounter with an old white man in a wheelchair and his personal service robot. The reader then learns, as forecasted by the aforementioned headline, the service robot has internalized the racism of his elderly owner, which then explodes into a confrontation with the Changs, as it then attempts to forcefully remove the family from the restaurant, while stating the epithet, “You don’t belong here” (315). One of the restaurant’s patrons, also part of the interview, brings into context the human/nonhuman divide explicitly: “That’s the moment you realize, This thing is not us. It’s not. But we made it” (Ibid). This statement has a crucial ambivalence to it that works later in the story: it is a nonhuman entity that is “not us” in the respect that it can be racist and act in such a terrible way that most would deem not human. But also, “we made it,” thus imbuing it with a belief system that could only happen with human influence. Yu furthers another overt renegotiation of the robotic other as a reflection that questions our own human standards of behavior and beliefs.

After the robot physically attacks the father, one of the children questions the racist motives of the robot by asking: “Do you even know what race I am?” which stops the automaton as it tries to compute the question. The daughter then follows with: “You don’t know, do you? Because genetics doesn’t support the classification of people into clear-cut, distinct, and homogenous races. I learned that in seventh-grade honors science. You know science? The thing that made you possible?” (318). Science, instead of being used to justify racist beliefs as the historical past tells us, becomes used for explaining the illogic of discrimination based on the physical trait of skin color. The robot at this point is stalling completely trying to answer the daughter’s questions. Yu tells us in the blurb after the family’s interview:

In the days since the events took place, millions of robots have auto-updated, through some sort of self-programming function. […] the reprogramming is a form of algorithmic evolution, with the new information starting in one unit and rapidly propagating throughout the population, replacing the set of race assumptions that had been programmed into the units (Yu 319).

This automatic networked change shared between the robots suddenly realize that racism is not rational or logical, and therefore, evolve to overcome their owners’ terrible ideologies. Technology in this story seems to be able to automatically cut through the socially constructed racist belief system for cybernetic nonhuman entities, showing that robots are not the issue: rather, it is in the way people use them and imbue them with a purpose. Yu wants the reconsideration of the role of ideology in the role that these technologies could potentially move beyond these human anxieties of difference.

Automatic Algorithms: Futurities without Work
Finally, the last story that speculates a technological optimism for my overall analysis, Hugh Howey’s “No Algorithms in the World,” creates an imaginative future for a global society that includes individuals free from the commitment to work and alienated labor because of the implementation of automatic economic and service systems as upheld by a seemingly perfected algorithmic code. Nobody needs to be employed as the American government has developed a universal basic income (UBI) structure that pays citizens a satisfactory stipend that allows them to spend their time as they so choose.

The central tension of the story occurs between a son, who is a computer engineer that maintains the algorithm that automatizes society, and his father, who is found to be a committed, older generation workaholic despite the fact there is no longer any need to labor for money. Howey shows us that the father is a stern restaurant entrepreneur, who buys and sells establishments that are not run automatically by robots: “‘You won’t find machines back in my kitchen,’ Dad says. ‘Homemade pasta, cut with a knife, by hand. Human hand” (Howey 269). Clearly, Howey shows the underlying anxiety of a cybernetic automatism that largely handles most of the societal duties of humans. The ideological construction of the necessity to work for a living is embedded in the father’s being: he simply cannot fathom not working for money, that it is no longer necessary because of the universal basic income. This ideology is one of the most fundamental bases of Americaness, that if one works hard enough, anything can be accomplished. Max Weber’s work in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism famously made the clear connection between America’s religious Protestant roots and the capitalist system: “[O]ne’s duty consists in pursuing one’s [spiritual] calling, and that the individual should have a commitment to his ‘professional’ activity… the idea is a characteristic feature of the ‘social ethic’ of capital” (13). America’s Puritan foundations make the ideology of work embedded in the cultural fabric that persists today, especially in the more conservative older generations.

This ideology clearly needs to be overcome, and perhaps with increased secularization of the younger generations it may be possible. Accelerationist theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in their manifesto-book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work put forth a technological optimism that tries to lay out exactly how to implement a fully automated society. One of their tenets, along with something like Howey’s universal basic income from the story and their own utopic conception of wrestling control of technology, includes the need to deconstruct the ideology of the work ethic: “One of the most difficult problems in implementing a UBI and building a post-work society will be overcoming the pervasive pressure to submit to the work ethic. […] Overcoming the work ethic will be equally central to any future attempts at building a post-work world” (123-124). As shown by the father in Howey’s story, Srnicek and Williams also add, “The fact that so many people find it impossible to imagine a meaningful life outside of work demonstrates the extent to which the work ethic has infected our minds” (Ibid). The necessary critical work of SF within this story actively attempts to imagine this same absence on work as breaking down the socially constructed values of classic “American Dream” individualism. Truly, Howey challenges one of the most established mantras of the United States: a world without work could be possible through the development and implementation of automatic technologies.

To return to the text, near the conclusion of the narrative, the son confesses to his father that he was quitting work to spend time traveling and learning with his wife and newborn child: “‘Dad, I oversee an algorithm. I don’t do anything. It’s by design. The last five years, I’ve been working on a system that can do my job so no one else can’” (272). Of course, his father berates him, clearly still devoted to a work ethic mentality as a carried over belief from the past before technological advancement. The son, in disappointment, laments about this interaction: “I look at my old man and think of all the times his friends and family—hell, myself—have called him a machine. Like that was a compliment. How he can go on forever and never stop, never take a day off. No wonder he hates them so much” (273). Despite complaining about how machines have taken over the traditional duty of working, the father is shown to be just as cold and distant as any supposed robot with the overt message that work within the confines of an exploitative capitalist society turns us into mindless automatons that distract from the real experiences we value as humans, such as closer ties with friends and family.

Howey’s story here is important in simultaneously showing how technology can one day free us from the necessity to work while aligning with the other authors in showing another optimistic view of futuristic tech that is utopic rather than dystopic. Ultimately, Howey challenges the age-old capitalistic ideology concerning work by imagining its almost complete disappearance within American society while showing the inhumanity of constantly forced to work for a living. The son in literally watching his father drive away in a cab makes an ironic final statement that ends with a callback to the title: “There were no algorithms in the world that could make it compute for him” (Ibid). Howey ends on the note with the father stoically holding on to this work ideal, while the son provides the figuration of the future in which all human pursuits are no longer subsumed by capitalism, free to grow, learn, and spend his life taking care of his family, unlike his father.

SF as the (Non)Conclusion on Technological Possibilities for a People’s Future
As stated previously in the introduction, these writers are obviously thinking through SF as a partial vision given the short form of their fiction. Speculations are not meant to give complete pictures, but rather how to begin the visionary work in dismantling cynical ideologies concerning technological possibilities. The nonhuman other in these stories act as critical reflections on automation and robots that looks towards a futurity that sees technology unaffected by discriminatory ideologies concerning identity formations or the capitalist need to work. The autonomy of technological others can see past the illogic of human belief systems that strangely make them more human rather than inhuman.

The ending of this essay reads more as an absent conclusion concerning mapping well-planned solutions to how these visions may be attained. The larger world-building aspect falls quite a bit short for an expansive picture. But, these stories in A People’s Future of the United States work towards a re-imagining outside of the terrible historical and cultural uses of technology to marginalize and control large groups of Americans. The present anxieties concerning the developments of biotech, mass surveillance, and militarization give more reasons to worry about the future. However, SF allows a way to imagine otherwise—we, urgently, need to be thinking about to co-opt these technologies, to hack them, and re-purpose their developments instead of leaving them into the hands of the powers that be. The genre of fictional speculation allows for the opportunity to demand that the technological futures be used for the overall betterment of humanity rather than its diminishment. These writers do not give into the despair of technophobic visions; they look forward without fear into how these advancements will be here sooner than we think, and we should begin considering what role these technologies could play in our everyday lives, for good or for ill.

Works Cited
Delany, Samuel. “The Necessity of Tomorrows.” Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Dragon Press, 1984.
Chinn, Sarah E. Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence. Continuum, 2000. EBSCOHost, http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/eds/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzIyNjc0MF9fQU41?sid=491d221f-74f7-49fe-abc2-697086b59902@pdc-v-sessmgr01&vid=5&format=EB&rid=1.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” U of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4392065.
Hester, Helen. Xenofeminism. Polity, 2018.
Howey, Hugh. “No Algorithms in the World.” A People’s Future of the United States. Ed. Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams. One World, 2019, pp. 264-273.
Imarisha, Walidah. “Introduction.” Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2015, pp. 1. EBSCOHost, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/eds/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzEwOTQ5NTRfX0FO0?sid=0d9026a1-5285-4c4e-87cf-2d135d252e4a@sessionmgr4008&vid=0&format=EK&rid=1.
Kafer, Alison. “Introduction: Imagined Futures.” Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013. EBSCOHost, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/eds/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzU4NTEyOF9fQU41?sid=4bc2b4a1-1a0b-4c62-b6c7-744990ada25d@sessionmgr4007&vid=5&format=EB&rid=1.
Martine, Arkady. “New Collection Asks: What Might the ‘People’s Future’ Look Like? (Book Review)” National Public Radio, 9 February 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/02/09/692484737/new-collection-asks-what-might-the-peoples-future-look-like
Rustad, A. Merc. “Our Aim is Not to Die.” A People’s Future of the United States. Ed. Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams. One World, 2019, pp. 27-48.
Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso, 2015.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Penguin, 2002.
Yu, Charles. “Good News Bad News.” A People’s Future of the United States. Ed. Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams. One World, 2019, pp. 307-320.