Surviving world machines: hopeful alterity in speculative fiction

Speculative fiction is often discussed by scholars in terms of their relationship to the zero world, i.e. the world of authors’ and readers’ lived experiences. While most scholars reject reductionist readings of the speculative genre as mere escapism, their analyses tend to focus on the political and/or sociological ramifications of imagining alternative systems of social order. Rather than engaging on the strictly socio-political level, Surviving World Machines explores speculative fiction’s capacity for engendering hope as a philosophical motivation of emancipatory action in the zero world. Hope is not treated as a wish or desire for other worlds but as a dynamic assemblage of one’s agency. This dissertation discusses speculative fiction from a variety of marginalized perspectives from New Wave speculation of the 60s and 70s to contemporary speculative work to establish hope as a core element of imagining alterities: each chapter deals with a speculative work that presents a protagonist who considers an alternative world as a possible solution for circumstances in the world they begin in. Each chapter focuses on the work of a specific author, including, James Tiptree, Ursula K Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Louise Erdrich, and Nnedi Okorafor. This dissertation also maintains that fascistic invocations of speculation are aimed at maintaining and supporting White hegemonic dominance which, while nefarious for a litany of reasons, inevitably leads to a bleakly deterministic perspective, entrenched in perpetuating present-day apparatuses of social control – world-machines. Ultimately, Surviving World-Machines argues that speculation is a hopeful act which emancipates and scaffolds readers’ imaginative capacities.