The Realism of Speculation: Contemporary Speculative Fiction as Immanent Critique of Finance Capitalism

Abstract

“BY N O W,” CH R I S T I A N MA R A Z Z I A R G U E S I N H I S 2011 B O O K TH E VI O L E N C E of Financial Capitalism, “finance permeates from the beginning to the end the circulation of capital.” And because today “every productive act and every act of consumption is directly or indirectly tied to finance,” Marazzi continues, we must understand our moment in time as the period in which finance’s “speculative logic” has become the logic of capitalism’s dominant form (Marazzi 2011, 107). But when speculation becomes the dominant logic of material reality, what happens to speculative fiction (sf)? The editors of this special issue have chosen a poignant title for this collection of essays, one that, as I will show in what follows, gets at the heart of the logical and structural relationship between speculative finance and speculative fiction today. In fact, I would suggest, one could think of this issue’s title—“Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction”—as shorthand for the dialectic of speculation