Overview
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Tomás Vergara
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Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile
Explores the political potential shared by all speculative fiction
Draws on an alternative genealogy of Marxist criticism
Posits that speculative fiction performs an estrangement effect on historical reality
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Back Matter
Pages 203-206
About this book
Speculative fiction has been traditionally studied in Marxist literary criticism, following Darko Suvin’s paradigmatic model of science fiction, according to a hierarchical division of its multiple subgenres in terms of their assumed inherent political value. By drawing on an alternative genealogy of Marxist criticism, this book presents a non-hierarchical understanding of the estrangement connecting all varieties of speculative fiction, outlining the political potential shared across the spectrum of speculative fiction, along with the specific narrative strategies by which it critically engages with its historical context of production. This study’s main point of contention is that speculative fiction performs an estrangement effect on historical reality that can potentially render visible the role of fantasies in the organisation of capitalist social practice. This narrative effect enables an estranged perspective by which the novel interprets and conceptualises historical reality in a totalising manner.
Reviews
"As the storm called progress piles wreckage at our feet, speculative fiction is now key to articulating catastrophe. Through paranoid ontologies, anamorphic estrangements, counterfactual energies, crisis historicity, forestalled extrapolations and catatonic thrum, writers like China Miéville and Rivers Solomon, Bina Shah and Colson Whitehead estrange the death throes of a terminal capitalism that refuses to die until it has asset-stripped the world of all possibilities. This is heady stuff and Vergara a critic to be heeded".
—Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature, UWE Bristol
Authors and Affiliations
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Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile
Tomás Vergara
About the author
Tomás Vergara completed his Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is a lecturer in English at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. His research interests are focused on speculative fiction, Marxist literary criticism and the environmental humanities. This interest ranges from early forms of science fiction and the Gothic in Victorian literature to the dystopian imaginaries of cyberpunk in Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, and the radical alterity of China Miéville’s New Weird fiction attempting to weaponize the fantastic to revitalise the imaginary of revolution. The particular focus on speculative fiction is a consequence of this broader interest in the fantastic. Tomás has published an article on Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars in the
C21 Literature journal.
