00:04:38.700So, I love this book, and as will become clear, I'm a bit of a science fiction nerd myself,
00:04:43.400and this is a book about science fiction nerds to some extent, and the very dark side that
00:04:47.720they can have. But I do want to start with the first question that might sound more skeptical
00:04:52.140than I mean it. Why is thinking about science fiction important for understanding certain
00:04:57.380strains of right-wing thought. Many listeners will have noticed that there's quite a bit of
00:05:01.580sci-fi thinking in the far right, especially when it comes to sort of the Silicon Valley
00:05:05.600far-right nexus, but they may not know how load-bearing it really is. So can we tease
00:05:12.060out what sci-fi does for or to the far right, to the alt-right, and so on?
00:05:17.240Sure. I mean, yeah, we normally think of science fiction as something that is inherently progressive.
00:05:23.540That's sort of the narrative that we tell ourselves often about science fiction, increasingly in the last couple of decades, the way science fiction is presented in the academy especially.
00:05:32.780But actually, science fiction and fascism have been connected for a long time.
00:05:38.040And I think that one of the reasons that's the case is that if you really think about the far right, it's an insurrectionary movement that believes that in order to maintain white supremacy and other kinds of hierarchies, they have to overthrow the state.
00:05:56.660And so they need to imagine a radically different future. And often they draw on science fiction tropes or science fiction imagery in order to envision their all-white utopias. We see this, for example, with James H. Madol, David Duke, William Luther Pierce, as well as Richard Spencer.
00:06:18.520But maybe even more fundamentally, the far-right, and in particular the alt-right, imagines whiteness as speculative. They believe that only white men are capable of imagining the future, and that includes science fiction speculation.
00:06:35.300And they also believe that whiteness has a kind of promissory dimension or speculative dimension. It's a potential that can only be realized, they think, in a fascist utopia. So often as they're describing whiteness, they're describing not what white people are doing now, but what white people could be doing, like, say, colonizing the stars or creating other kinds of technoscientific marvels.
00:07:02.980So science fiction is important in part to fascists because they imagine that tomorrow belongs to them.
00:07:10.600It's really interesting, right? So many of our fascists, as you point out, are science fiction fans. And what's the sort of role of fandom in this?
00:07:19.880This is a pretty common complaint, right? Gamergate has front-loaded gendered connections between fandom and reactionary politics. But the same is true, right? Like every time a beloved science fiction property is changed and people lose their goddamn minds over it, it does appear to be around these kind of like white supremacist eugenicist lines. So what's the nexus here?0.99
00:07:42.620I think there are a number of connections. I mean, one is historical. There have always been fascists among science fiction fandom or white supremacists among science fiction fandom. But more recently, this has been, I think, a crucial tool for far-right recruiting.
00:07:59.860They know that this is where the conversations are, whether that be Gamergate or the Rabid Puppies Affair with the Hugo Awards.
00:08:09.120Fascists know that they can pull people in by talking about science fiction and fandom in a way that if they're just talking about their politics, they might not reach broader audiences.
00:08:21.520And I think this is a calculated strategy beyond just getting clicks or getting linked online.
00:08:26.740I think that they believe that politics is downstream from culture, and they believe that they have to change the culture in order to enact a white supremacist politics.
00:08:39.340They think that the reason that white people, or at least some white people, don't love their politics is that they've been brainwashed with this cultural messaging.
00:08:50.600And so they see it as their goal to change the culture, to make fascism seem inevitable and appealing to larger audiences.
00:08:58.420In the past, that's often been looking for what they think of as subversive messages in popular culture, messages that are supposedly put there to demoralize white people.
00:09:09.720But in more recent years, fascists have been trying to find far-right meanings or subtexts in ostensibly liberal or leftist science fictional texts. And so they're trying to unearth these kinds of right-wing meanings that most of us don't see in order to appeal to this audience of fans.
00:09:31.000In some ways, a lot of the techniques that they use for analyzing these texts feel a lot like academic cultural studies, but run through a kind of funhouse mirror of looking for the hidden fascist meaning in text so that they can pull people in.
00:09:45.520That kind of reading that has an almost inventive determination to it. Yeah. As you're talking, Jordan, it occurs to me that the science fiction fascist who you're articulating reminds me quite a bit of the incel in it. And this might bring us to our putative focus on gender, right?
00:10:03.580Like I'm thinking of, you know, the Ur-Incel Elliot Rodger, whose manifesto I had the misfortune of having to reread yesterday, as a incel who committed a mass shooting and ultimately a suicide in Isla Vista, California in 2014.
00:10:18.860And his writings and his presentation of himself was as a quasi-messianic figure out to correct a corrupted world that did not validate his masculinity, right?
00:10:30.600And that involves, I think in your terms, a kind of speculative gesture about the correct, righteous, sort of appropriately ordered world in which he would have been, to his mind, granted sexual access.
00:10:44.200It's easy for me to see how white supremacy and the promise of whiteness can have this speculative dimension.
00:10:49.620But what about sexual access and entitlement?
00:10:51.980This seems like also a very common theme.
00:10:55.420Yeah. I mean, gender and sexuality are constant anxieties for the alt-right. And we see this in a number of different places. One, I think, is the alt-right's discourse around risk. So they think of whiteness as speculative. It's looking towards the future.
00:11:14.060But they also think of whiteness as gambling on a better future, as risking everything in order to enact some other future. And they believe that only white men have the drive to risk their bodies, risk their lives, risk all of civilization in order to build a space empire or colonize the stars or whatever.
00:11:39.040And they frame this in very gendered terms. They think that white men are now too comfortable, they're too safe. They have this kind of dichotomy between Nietzsche's last man, who is this consumerist figure, but often described by people like Richard Spencer as emasculated or feminized.
00:11:58.760And then on the other hand, they imagine themselves as these kind of astronaut ubermenschen who are capable of dealing with great dangers, and that makes them manly and powerful.
00:12:11.740And they think that the incels would all be astronauts exploring the moons of Jupiter if only they lived in the fascist utopia.
00:12:20.220And obviously this is an old narrative. We can hear echoes of Nazi discourses on risk and insurance, a risk versus safety. But also it's a very American kind of narrative. We could look back to mythology of the frontier and Teddy Roosevelt, this idea that you prove your manhood or you prove your white masculinity in particular by confronting great dangers. And that's one of the things that the alt-right promises.0.64
00:12:47.080Yeah, and it's fascinating. You point out that this is kind of fannish elitism, which is all about the potential, right? Like, I have the potential to do this thing because I am unique. I am different from all those around me. I don't do any of it, but I have this amazing potential, right? Like, in the event currently, I am reading a science fiction novel and or contemplating jerking off into a tube sock, but possibly I could go out and conquer a moon of Jupiter, right?
00:13:13.660Like, the fact that it both has these kind of, I don't know, delusions of grandeur, I guess you would call them, and on the other hand, a sense of frustration, right? Like, if only, right? I would, if only. That strikes me as where the nerd figure as a sort of marginal figure in American masculinity discourses and the kind of, yeah, frustrated fascists meet, right?
00:13:34.600Yeah, it's easy to call them losers, but it's also true. Like it's a sociological fact that these are people who were, at least in their minds, set up to do something better. They're often downwardly mobile men who maybe have some college education. A lot of them are failed grad students or they have like a law degree that they're not doing anything with.
00:13:56.100They have this cultural training, and in some cases, credentials, and a narrative about promise of the gifted young men who were maybe in the gifted and talented program, and they didn't do anything with it either because a lot of these people are antisocial individuals with a number of personality flaws that probably got in their way.
00:14:17.460Or it's the larger decline of the U.S. and global economy and the financial crisis and the general downward mobility of an entire generation of people.
00:14:31.160Some people took that and broke for the left, and then others said, well, I was promised something greater. I had this potential, and they racialized that potential, and they imagined that what's missing is not a world where we are capable of using all of our talents, but they see their place as a hierarchy that they were promised and they didn't get to move to the top of, essentially.
00:14:53.520Yeah, kind of a birthright that is unrealized.
00:14:56.480You point out in the book that this is really quite old. This kind of nerd metaphysics, the stories of Claude Diggler or A.E. Van Vogt basically already have a lot of this. And the other thing I didn't realize, just for maybe more casual science fiction fans who are among our listeners, the fact that the figure of Khan Noonien Singh in the classic Star Trek episode Space Seed, who is this kind of like the Superman, this Ubermensch, is basically kind of a reply already to that.
00:15:26.480strain in science fiction fandom, what you call the mutationist romance, where basically you are
00:15:32.600different from others, meaning you are better, you're above, and the future really belongs to
00:15:39.240you and not to the weirdos or normies or, you know, I'm guessing also women around you, right?0.75
00:15:45.660That there's a kind of racial sort of promissory note. And that's exactly what's true of Khan.0.78
00:15:50.420And of course, anyone who's seen that show or who has seen Star Trek 2 and or that other Star
00:16:54.400But on the other hand, we see that science fiction fandom critiques that very early on and very forcefully. And yet, people like Spencer go back in and find the critique and flip it on its head.
00:17:08.540And that's the contradiction is in the act of trying to unearth fascism in fandom and critique that fascism, these science fiction texts often preserve it and allow people who have a fascist agenda to come back in and try to resurrect it.
00:17:30.020So yeah, the episode with Kahn is very clearly about condemning Kahn. And yet when Spencer looks at it, he loves this idea of the genetically superior ubermensch. And he hates Spock, who he sees as this kind of Jewish Marxist figure. In the show, it's precisely the opposite. Spock you're supposed to identify with and you're supposed to hate Kahn.
00:17:51.840But he clearly is able to wrest some right-wing meaning from this text because that history of struggle in science fiction is unavoidable. We see it so often where science fiction is trying to correct itself, but inadvertently, again, preserving this right-wing tendency within it.
00:18:10.540What about these seeming counter readings, right? Like you mentioned, some fans identifying with a figure that the science fiction project will very explicitly name as the antagonist. You see this happening sometimes in like video games as well. You know, there's a broad swath of genres. Like, what is the nature of that like reappropriation of the antagonistic role? Is it avowed? Is it a product of bad reading? How does that come about?
00:18:37.240I think it is often a product of bad reading. And in some cases, it's pretty obvious that they know it's a bad reading. But I don't think it comes from nowhere. I don't think that they're just looking at these texts and completely projecting their fantasies onto it.
00:18:55.000If we see, for example, the Paul Verhoeven version of Starship Troopers or Alan Moore's Watchmen, these are texts that are about looking at moments of fascist enjoyment that fans have had.
00:19:07.640There are moments where we are seduced as readers or viewers into investing in a fascist project, and then they turn around and say, look what you've done.
00:19:22.120But what the fascists often do is they leave that last part off. They'll look at Rorschach, or they'll look at the space marines and starship troopers and say, isn't this wonderful? Don't we enjoy this violence? Don't we enjoy this elitism? And they forget the final turn, which is the moment of critical self-reflection, and which seems to be in short supply on the far right.
00:19:44.000and that allows them, I think, to get past a lot of the kinds of messaging that we see in science
00:19:51.160fiction to the contrary. Yeah, it's so interesting. You say at some point that they basically strip
00:19:57.300science fiction of its speculative indeterminacy, right? Like the way a good sci-fi story can play
00:20:02.060with meanings and can reverse your view of what you're watching. We're going to talk about Dune
00:20:07.060later, but that's a classic case, right? Where like, you're with it, you're excited for it for
00:20:11.080a while and they're like, oh no, oh no, no, no, no, no. This is going very, very badly.
00:20:15.580And one of the things I feel like we keep echoing here, and I keep imagining someone
00:20:19.060like Elon Musk also, as well as someone like Richard Spencer. And of course, it's the same
00:20:24.240kind of dunderheaded sort of lack of indeterminacy that you get from Silicon Valley's readings of
00:20:30.320classic science fiction. I was thinking here of a tweet I really have loved by a guy named
00:20:33.920Alex Blackman, who I don't know anything about, about a tech company saying, at long last,
00:20:38.460We have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel,
00:20:42.200don't create the Torment Nexus, right?
00:20:44.020Like you can have a company calling itself Soylent.
00:20:46.820You're like, are you, do you layer irony upon irony
00:20:50.500or do you just don't know what irony is, right?
00:20:52.440Like, and in some way there is something really interesting
00:20:54.380that's happening here that like our technology seems to be losing
00:26:15.500In the narrative, though, we see the protagonist propose essentially a genocidal plan to get0.89
00:26:24.460rid of all of the short-sighted people who can't plan for the future by shooting them
00:26:31.140off into space in these spaceships that aren't designed to allow them to survive, essentially.
00:26:38.260This plan takes place, and then the small, gifted few who can see forward into the future realize how horrific this is and condemn him, and he's sent off to his own doom.
00:26:54.760The narrative is loaded towards a eugenicist narrative.
00:26:57.340It's just a narrative fact that being short-sighted or foresighted is genetic in this story, unless we're really reading it against the grain.
00:27:05.720But nevertheless, it's intended to kind of condemn this idea of looking forward, looking ahead, giving you more rights than other people, and this fanish elitism where fans say, oh, yeah, we are capable of looking into the distant future, and that makes us better than everybody else.
00:27:22.220But when it's taken up by the far right, they don't see that kind of satire. They just see it as here's how things are. And several alt-right intellectuals or far-right intellectuals have kind of pointed to this story, and especially to the similar narrative, Idiocracy, as an example of where the world is actually going.
00:27:42.960But all this points to, I think, an ongoing narrative about who's capable of imagining a future, but also who has the discipline to actually bring that future into being.
00:27:56.140And it's clear that at least one interpretation of this suggests that that's a genetic potential, that not everybody can do that. And only this small group of hyper-intelligent individuals are capable of seeing past the present, essentially.
00:28:12.960So I want to drill down on that last thing you said. Where did they get this idea? I mean, like, sure, the science fiction fan thinks about the future more, right? The same way some people apparently think about the Roman Empire more than other people, as we found out last year through everyone's shock.
00:28:28.280But on the other hand, right, like forethought
00:28:53.820well, it's written at the very end of World War I,
00:28:56.020but becomes a phenomenon really between World War I and II in Germany and beyond, one should say.
00:29:01.980And it's this story about the difficulties of what he calls the Faustian element,
00:29:06.820which is this kind of striving, you know, blowing through any limits,
00:29:10.900even if it ends up killing you kind of ethos.
00:29:13.720I mean, those listeners of ours who've been listening to the Nietzsche episodes
00:29:16.600will recognize that this is basically just a collectivized version of what Nietzsche was talking about.
00:29:22.600And at the same time, it is for him characteristic of the European. He makes a claim that the West has its essence in the Faustian and that basically that is what's now being lost in a sea of collectivism, et cetera, et cetera. Is that where this is from or did this predate kind of Spengler?
00:29:40.640I think that's definitely one element. For people like Richard Spencer, they're explicitly citing Spengler and they're citing other authors who are talking about the Faustian spirit.
00:29:53.440And they definitely do believe that Europeans or white Europeans, I should say, and white European men are uniquely suited towards transcending the here and now and are constantly looking forward to the future, looking forward into the beyond, and as a result are exploring the world and building technology and ultimately are destined to go to the stars.
00:30:21.360And so, yeah, I think it's definitely coming from that as well. Although in Spengler, there is a kind of melancholy note to that or a cautionary note, a sense that there's something almost horrible about this civilization of technology, of these massive projects.0.58
00:30:40.840I mean, if we go back to the original Faust narrative that inspired this in Goethe, ultimately at the end, he moves beyond his satanic drivenness to change the world and find something like peace.
00:30:54.340We see some of that ambivalence in some fascists, like a feeling that white people are restless and driven, but I don't think that they really grapple with that sense that this is, even in Spengler, not only the source of grand projects like cathedrals, but also the source of modern misery.
00:31:18.680Yeah, it strikes me that there is this kind of simplistic cheerleading in the speculative impulse. I'm thinking of things like effective altruism, which so quickly evolved from a speculative command over supposed knowledge of the future that commanded you to, say, give up your kidney, and then very quickly became, no, in fact, what you really need to do, brave Nietzsche and Ubermensch, is to make as much money as possible.
00:31:47.300and then invest that money right back into AI, you know?
00:31:50.760Like, how does the narcissistic impulse
00:31:54.980in the right-wing science fiction reader
00:31:57.260emerge so consistently in spite of these other,
00:32:00.960like maybe less rosy or less gratifying
00:32:36.700which is a central conceit of science fiction.
00:32:40.020They don't accept maybe as a ravening horde to fight back.
00:32:44.500But really, there are very few fascist narratives about extraterrestrials. It's a lonely universe. It's a narcissistic universe. Even though they talk about expansion and the beyond and the Faustian soul going out into the cosmos, it feels very claustrophobic and self-obsessed and narrow-minded in a way that's really, I think, fundamental.
00:33:07.860all. Yeah. And that feels sort of, as you say, hyper-masculinized too, because there is of course
00:33:12.280kind of also, especially at mid-century, a kind of science fiction of belonging, right? Like where
00:33:16.900you find yourself, you realize that you belong to something greater than you. There's a story
00:33:20.840sometimes taught back in the day by Robert Sheckley. Have you ever read Specialist? No. So
00:33:26.180this is about a spaceship where you realize that different components are different beings. They
00:33:30.760all, they've evolved to have different things that they do and together they can propel this thing
00:34:03.440So there's like this very, this acceptance of the fact that what is out there might in fact make you feel small, might make you part of something bigger, might make you collaborate and cooperate with others and might challenge your very sense of selfhood, right?
00:34:21.140And there's a lot of science fiction that does that. But it's really interesting to sort of see the way that entire element, right, this sort of fundamental human fantasy can sort of be completely read out of it by these alt-right readers.
00:34:34.940Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. The alt-right, in some moments, is obsessed with belonging and trust and friendship and comradeship of a certain kind, and yet seems totally unable to imagine a future where that is important or, for that matter, to enact it.
00:34:55.040Part of the reason why the alt-right has fallen apart is they all seem to distrust and often hate one another, and so they're unable to collaborate on anything. Their vision of the future, I think, reflects that. It's a Darwinian struggle or a struggle to the death. They point to a very bad reading of Hegel to describe themselves.
00:35:16.560Thank you. Everyone always repeats that as a reading of Hegel. I'm like, that's not what he means.
00:35:21.740Yeah, and it didn't get to the end of even the chapter.
00:35:35.580It's all conquering one another or conquering the universe.
00:35:39.100They can't see space colonization as maybe a collective project of building a better world.
00:35:45.640They see it as dominating the stars.1.00
00:35:48.280And the stars are especially appealing to them because they don't contain non-white people that they might end up coming into contact with.1.00
00:35:56.460And so it is like a very aggressive, a very dominating view of the world that can't conceive of other modes of sociality.1.00
00:36:06.540It strikes me that what you're describing really is a vision of masculinity, right? Solitary, domineering, conquering, adventurous, kind of broadly antagonistic, right? You mentioned earlier that a lot of these texts, or at least the right-wing misinterpretations of these texts, have a preoccupation with eugenics and with breeding, right?
00:36:29.400How do these readers engage with the appearance in these texts where they do appear of actual women and children?
00:36:38.200I mean, they really do write women out of science fiction, it seems like. They don't really attend to the strong and longstanding presence of women in science fiction going at least as far back as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
00:36:55.700And in their narratives about the future, they often don't have much of a place for women. Women are there to bear children for white men. Or in some of the more bizarre fantasies that they have, women are essentially replaced by biotechnology that will breed more white men.0.96
00:37:15.060And so it is a very hyper-masculine narrative and one that doesn't attend in any way to women or women's experience beyond a very stereotyped image of the trad wife, I think.
00:37:34.160We should think about sci-fi tradwives at some point, but I do wonder, one book that you dwell on a little bit too that will be fresh in people's minds, and that might be kind of a confusing addition to the alt-right canon, is Dune, right?
00:37:48.980It's an odd one at first glance, right?0.82
00:37:51.100I mean, with the marching morons, you could see how they got there.0.99
00:37:53.620But Dune is so obviously steeped in non-Western tradition.1.00
00:37:58.320The white savior trope is brutally, you know, deconstructed in it.
00:38:03.320And women are super important in it, right?1.00
00:38:06.320Like, I mean, so they're super powerful.0.91
00:38:09.240I guess I'm answering my own question.
00:38:11.320They're portrayed also fairly negatively, but so is everyone else, right?
00:38:14.280But yeah, I mean, just given that, you know, Dune just came out as two very, very successful films.
00:38:20.080We'll have Mark put in the, at this point, for the movie.
00:38:27.680How do they grapple with the kind of dissonant aspects of the Dune universe for them?
00:38:41.920Yeah, I mean, at first glance, it would not seem like Dune would be very appealing to fascists.
00:38:47.600It is, in some ways, a cautionary tale against the figure of the superhuman dictator.
00:38:53.440Paul Atreides, in some sense, is a mutant who can see further than everybody else.
00:38:59.420He has this gift of prescience, and he utilizes that in order to remake the galaxy.
00:39:06.820And yet, by the time we get to the end of that project, we see that he and his family
00:39:12.800are transforming into monsters, and they have killed millions upon millions of people.
00:39:18.360and ultimately the only thing left for them to do
00:41:38.960I feel like as we talk about archaeofuturism, I do have to ask you, I know you don't talk about it much in the book, but I know you've also written on Warhammer 40K.
00:42:53.760And then I was like, whoa, they like that?
00:42:56.140It's like basically people just get into this,
00:42:59.580trump as god emperor like it's like it's quite astonishing like that that they really look at
00:43:05.140that which like i feel like the creators of i think they're called games workshop right it's
00:43:09.440called yeah that that games workshop really went out of their way to be like this is parody you
00:43:13.800guys i really don't know like like heinlein was soft pedaling it you know herbert was soft pedaling
00:43:19.300it like this is obvious you're committing genocide and like everything has a skull everywhere it all
00:43:24.760looks like you know if the ss was mechanized like please don't take this seriously and or don't don't0.63
00:43:31.040take this as an endorsement and the the all rights like yeah it sounds like an endorsement to me you
00:43:36.500know yeah definitely i mean i am obsessed with warhammer 40k and have been for decades and you're
00:43:43.060right it's the same dynamic as a lot of these other texts where 40k is very much supposed to
00:43:51.180be a satire um this was i think more explicit in the early materials in the 80s and 90s there was
00:43:58.840an element of ridiculousness to it that i think as it's become more popular has faded a little bit
00:44:05.400um but there's a a kind of contradiction running through 40k that that we've seen before where
00:44:13.920on one hand it's um a parody it's a satire it's a lot of british people looking in some ways at
00:44:22.460american pop culture and making fun of it so you have like rambo is in there and terminator and
00:44:29.240aliens and american science fiction and they kind of blow it up to hyperbolic proportions
00:44:35.400And it's set in this universe where these armored space marines are protecting humanity from aliens, but they're doing so in the service of this grotesquely dystopian dictatorship where any kind of free thought is stomped out immediately.
00:44:55.420And where there's often, due to this hidebound and traditionalist way of organizing things, we see a refusal to develop new technologies, or because it's so centralized, entire planets just get lost in this world and eaten up by aliens because nobody noticed them.
00:45:19.040And so, yeah, it's really meant to satirize adolescent male power fantasies. And there's a large leftist fan base. Shoutouts to Snipe and Wibb and Arbiter Ian and a number of other YouTubers and commenters who are looking at this from a critical perspective.
00:45:38.920and yeah like part of the enjoyment is a world where there's only war i think which is i think
00:45:46.120a very right-wing fascist view that everything is this eternal struggle yeah i mean just to give
00:45:52.580listeners a sense of just how absurd this world is i forget what he's called but the empire of0.80
00:45:57.780of the imperium of man right the the emperor is a psychotic zombie to whom 10 000 people a day
00:46:04.540have to be sacrificed in order to sustain him it's like you've left the realm of metaphor and
00:46:09.260you're just like okay it's like we're just we're just saying it at this point it is just so
00:46:13.440obviously satirical but i hadn't thought about the gender dimension quite so much which is that
00:46:19.000like the output for the player is a bunch of dudes hanging out and being bros together and
00:46:25.140they're like sure the demented god emperor might be a bit of a problem but like in the end you're
00:46:31.020in your armor, you got your guns, you're hanging out with your buddies. And like, you know,
00:46:34.780there is a kind of male wish fulfillment fantasy bound up with this absurdly dystopian future,
00:46:41.760right? Like really hard to top any of that in terms of just sheer bleakness. And yet it is
00:46:48.960very much a story whose output is male purpose and male companionship.
00:46:54.700Yeah. I mean, the space marines, they're all men. And this has been a subject of controversy.
00:46:59.500the more progressive view of the hobby suggests that maybe we should change this whereas there
00:47:06.380is a contingent of fans they're like no space marines have to be men this is canon but you
00:47:13.960could see what is at play there beyond just sexism it's this fantasy of being a dude
00:47:21.060encased in armor not having to feel anything and never having to deal with women and being
00:47:27.460completely detached from any connections beyond these military relationships to other men.
00:47:33.300So it's very much a fantasy of a certain kind of heterosexual, hyper-masculine adolescence
00:47:39.960that never ends for this right-wing contingent of 40K fans.
00:48:24.460the main purpose is to sell little plastic miniatures and video games. There can't be a
00:48:30.600narrative resolution. It's just, there will be more war and it has to be a stalemate so the
00:48:35.020armies are balanced forever. It strikes me that that's like a common theme in a lot of
00:48:39.600this right-wing imagination of science fiction. It's like, there's, okay, even if you get to a
00:48:43.620triumphalist end, you do not then arrive at a utopia of peace, right? Which would be impossible
00:48:49.260for them ideologically because war is its own end.
00:48:53.000The proving ground for masculinity, exactly.
00:48:54.760Right. And masculinity is like kind of, by definition, insecure and always needing to
00:49:00.060be reproven and reproven. There's no like static masculinity that is unimpeachable,
00:49:05.200right? So you have this kind of constant, words are failing me because I cannot actually articulate
00:49:11.780the bleakness of this vision of just constant unending war and conflict and domination.
00:49:17.420Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, one thing about chaos that's worth mentioning, right? Like, so these space marines are always fighting the gods of chaos, which are these slithering, kind of changeable, mutational kind of apparitions that, you know.
00:49:32.860Right, exactly, right? Like, it's all very slimy and you don't want to go in there. And it's like, well, okay, like, you're scared of ladies. I get it.
00:49:42.640Like, you need a gun in order to confront the ladies, which, of course, gets to the irreducibility of this.0.69
00:49:50.960There's nothing Faustian about it.0.81
00:50:09.620And I mean, this is going too far afield and we need to do another episode on this at some point.
00:50:15.020But there's also something interesting about how responses to kind of Thatcherism kind of leaned into masculinity in certain ways that are just very, very interesting.
00:50:24.460On the one hand, like critiques, I think you hear V for Vendetta, which is another one of these that like ends up being weirdly sexist for the fact that like its politics are ultimately like supposed to be quite progressive.
00:56:49.100I mean, we might find a utopian dimension to the various cultural industries' attempt
00:56:55.760to expand fandom beyond a small group of primarily white educated fans.
00:57:03.020And I think this points to one of the things that we see throughout science fiction.
00:57:06.920And we see the fascist element, but we also see anti-fascist science fiction that really suggests that the future is what we make of it. It's not just the unfolding of racial destiny of a privileged few.
00:57:20.440One of the slogans that I kind of hit on at the end of the book is the idea that tomorrow
00:57:24.460belongs to everybody, that the future is not just white men, that the future will be people
00:57:31.080of all backgrounds working together to build something beyond the present, to overcome
00:57:36.640racial capitalism and to imagine a better world.
00:57:40.380And so I think that even though some of these franchises are cynical in some ways, we might0.91
00:57:46.980hold fast to those moments where they show a future where it's not so homogenous and it's
00:57:53.620not so exclusive. Yeah. I think that's a perfect place to end. That's beautiful. Jordan Carroll,
00:57:58.780thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much. This was great. I learned a lot.
00:58:05.000In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research
00:58:08.440for generous support. Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio. Our producer is Katie Lau.