A review of Jordan S. Carroll, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).
Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right is a short, accessible, and impressive book. It possesses a critical appreciation of science fiction and a wide-ranging knowledge of the far-right, from James H. Madole (a science fiction fan who led the first major neo-nazi party in the US) to Peter Thiel. Carroll’s central focus is the alt-right’s interest in science fiction. Since the alt-right collapsed under the pressures of antifascist organizing, he characterizes Speculative Whiteness as a “historical study” (105). While antifascists regularly criticize the far right’s fixation on an imagined past, in the era of the second Trump administration, this study of the ways in which the alt right draws on science fiction to consider the future takes on renewed relevance.
The alt-right is well-known for applying the metapolitical strategies developed by the French far right to the American context. That is, the alt-right aimed to normalize far-right ideology within various cultural milieux in order to gradually shift political discourse toward the far right; in other words, once a culture normalized far-right positions, they would become more likely to be normalized in political discourse. Carroll notes that a number of prominent alt-right figures are science fiction fans. Richard Spencer, for example, “brags about owning a light saber, obsesses over Christopher Nolan, and discusses every development in the Dune franchise with avid interest” (3). However, it is not a matter of mere fandom. During the 2010s, the Hugo Awards, one of the major events in science fiction fandom, faced a right-wing backlash—known as “science fiction’s GamerGate”—against the growing critical consciousness toward speculative whiteness within the genre (47–54).
Carroll argues that the alt-right is drawn to science fiction as a metapolitical form of “speculative worldmaking that allows them [the alt-right] to decide not only which worlds are conceivable but also who has the power to imagine other worlds in the first place” (9). “Speculative whiteness,” he contends, is present in science fiction where “whiteness appears as an inborn tendency to transcend the indexical present” (12). There are two intertwined motifs—already present in the genre—that the alt-right attempts to shape into speculative whiteness. First, alt-right readers see in science fiction the confirmation that the future is exclusively a “white” preoccupation. Second, they draw from science fiction a mythos that equates risk-taking with white masculinity.
“Each genre is a terrain of struggle, shaped and reshaped through political intervention.”
Carroll aptly notes that “each genre is a terrain of struggle, shaped and reshaped through political intervention”—something with which antifascists involved in punk or other politically-contested music genres are more than familiar (19). His analysis also shows affinities with the three way fight. There are numerous points where he engages with the work of authors associated with this project, but, more importantly, he shows how far-right aficionados of science fiction attempt to reconfigure themes already present within the genre “to position the genre’s reactionary impulse as the motive force driving its progressive elements forward” (20). Just as the three way fight develops a critique of the far-right through reckoning with oppressive structures already present in ostensibly liberal-democratic societies, Carroll’s critique of the alt-right also reckons with the elements of speculative whiteness within science fiction.
The first chapter of Speculative Whiteness, “Invaders from the Future,” focuses on a motif that frequently appears in science fiction: the motif of a small elect of gifted and/or future-oriented individuals—embodying, for instance, the figure of the mutant—who struggle against a society that prevents them from realizing their true potential. This motif can take on a leftist hue, focusing on a minority that struggles against an oppressive majority, or it can be configured as a dystopian cautionary tale, whereby the elect’s attempt to realize its potential brings about the destruction of others and their own downfall. When the alt-right appropriates such narratives, it does so by ignoring the irony, parody, or immanent critique contained therein. However, Carroll also shows how science fiction—with authors including C.M. Kornbluth, Ayn Rand, and Robert A. Heinlein, to name a few—is already replete with variations on this motif that explicitly racialize the division between a white, future-oriented elect who are oppressed and the racialized or inferior masses who live in the present tense of instant gratification and reckless consumption, and who oppress the former. This version of this motif presents a narrative of what David M. Higgins calls “alt-victimhood,” a reversal that produces a fiction “wherein the dominant group of white men find themselves victimized by people who are oppressed in the real world” (38).
As Carroll notes, similar themes can be found in longtermism—which claims to prioritize the well-being of the unborn geniuses of the future who, in an unsurprising narcissistic twist, will supposedly be the descendants of these present-day longtermists—in Silicon Valley. He also connects them to an emerging type of producerism which I think is quite evident with far-right tech bros such as Elon Musk or Peter Thiel: while the traditional, populist version of producerism champions so-called producers (typically, in reality in North America, white settler workers) against supposedly parasitic elites and non-productive minority groups, “the narratives examined here argue that the real producers aren’t manual workers but instead the gifted minds who originate new products and methods of production” (39). Also evident is the shift from the traditional form of producerism articulated during the first Trump administration to the elitist producerism of the second. But we should make the point clearer: this elitist producerism is a far-right, racist, masculinist discourse that positions a select tech elite against workers, minorities, women, and other parts of the capitalist class that it views as parasitic; the internecine rivalry on the latter point positions these tech elitists to embrace antisemitism and/or conspiricism when their own theory requires a deus ex machina to shore up its explanatory power.
The alt-right sees space travel as the reinvigoration of colonial conquest and the risk-taking Faustian adventurism they associate with white masculinity.
The second chapter, “Whitey on the Moon” (so named to parody a right-wing author’s contempt for Gil Scott-Heron’s poem), explores the alt-right’s interest in space travel. Carroll observes that “reclaiming American supremacy in space has long been a project of the right,” from science fiction authors Larry Niven and Jeffrey Pournelle and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to Willis Carto, Richard Spencer, and Peter Thiel. Certainly, for the right, one motivation for space travel and technology is military dominance. The alt-right, however, sees space travel as the reinvigoration of colonial conquest and the risk-taking “Faustian” adventurism they associate with white masculinity, which they view as stifled by contemporary society. Carroll cites Richard Spencer declaring that “we need identarianism in space….Our identity is to die exploring the moons of Jupiter” (quoted on 70).
The alt-right would have rather died exploring space than exploring the contradictions of imperialism that continue to shape the contemporary world. While alt-right figures characterize themselves as embracing risk and being oriented to futurity, they ultimately return to an “aestheticized politics” (in Walter Benjamin’s terms): they see themselves as tragic rebels who risk their own destruction when “in some sense white people have always been indemnified” (79). Carroll argues that, contrary to their assertions, the alt-right is actually averse to radical uncertainty. The alt-right—and far-right ideologues in general—may see themselves as trailblazers toward the future, but what they actually desire is the prolongation of the present, the prolongation of current oppressive systems that supply the privileged social positions that they occupy and misrecognize. Carroll concludes that not only are white supremacists antihistorical and committed to a “future whose sole purpose is to monumentalize their present identities as glorious, necessary, and eternal,” but that they are also impoverished readers of science fiction: “science fiction at its best is a radically historicizing genre that reveals the present as contingent while allowing us to imagine how things might be otherwise” (101). Carroll’s synopsis here of science fiction is just as applicable to his own critical reflections in Speculative Whiteness.