1. Invaders from the Future

Fans are Slans

Geek supremacy dates at least as far back as the heyday of John W. Campbell Jr.’s pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog Science Fiction and Fact). Science fiction readers during the midcentury period often joked that they were the next stage of evolution. “Fans are slans,” they would say, referencing the advanced race of mutants in A. E. van Vogt’s Slan (1940).22 What Brian Stableford and David Langford call “mutational romances” allowed science fiction fans to reimagine themselves as members of a superior species that would someday rule the world.23

Some science fiction fans adopted these attitudes with enthusiasm. Van Vogt’s Slan encouraged readers to identify with its protagonist, and soon fans gathered in communal houses or “Slan Shacks” where they enjoyed the company of like-minded individuals who half-jokingly claimed to possess superior intelligence.24 Other fans called for a self-contained intentional community they called the “Slan Center.”25 Claude Degler went even further to develop an ideology he termed “fanationalism.”26 He spent much of the 1940s calling on fans to retreat to a rural compound in the Ozarks where they’d initiate a eugenics program, breeding science fiction enthusiasts together to produce a race of supermen or “Homo Cosmens” who’d rise up to build a new civilization.27 The Cosmen’s defining feature was the unlimited scope of their interests, including an appreciation for boundless reaches of space and time.28 Although Degler claimed that fans aren’t limited by race, he suggested they’re born as a result of genetic mutations.29 They are what H. G. Wells called the “Star-Begotten,” the vanguard of a new species that will supersede homo sapiens.30

Backlash against Degler came swiftly. Mutational romances had long taken pains to distance themselves from the master-race concept promoted by fascism, and many fans were revolted by selective breeding’s affinity with Nazism.31 (Degler’s public profile was also hurt by rumors of statutory rape and institutionalization.) Despite this widespread ridicule, Degler’s ideas clearly appealed to some fans: James H. Madole, whom we encountered in the Introduction, shared the same dream.

Fannish elitism was common in the science fiction community. While science fiction fans and their mutant analogues often claimed superiority based on intelligence, many prided themselves in inhabiting larger temporal horizons than regular human beings.32 During his guest of honor speech at the third World Science Fiction Convention in 1941, Robert A. Heinlein argued that “science fiction fans differ from most of the rest of the race by thinking in terms of racial magnitudes—not even centuries, but thousands of years.”33

Mutational romances reflected these ideas by presenting posthuman protagonists who think and act on a grand scale. Slan especially emphasizes this trait, depicting mutants capable of executing plans that take a hundred years to fulfill.34 Slans aren’t alone in possessing the gift of foresight: mutants in other novels cast their minds forward through time or use their supernormal longevities to carry out longer-term projects than any baseline human could achieve.35 Most of van Vogt’s novel is devoted to a series of plots and counterplots orchestrated by slans over many years, all of which are ultimately subsumed into a vast conspiracy to save the slan race that unfolds over centuries. The slan protagonists exemplify what Ursula K. Le Guin would later call the “the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic,” pursuing distant narrative goals with the efficient path of a ranged weapon.36

If mutants are the future in these narratives, baseline humans represent the past. Slan likens them to “the Java ape man, the Neanderthal beast man, and the Cro-Magnon primitive.”37 As John Rieder has shown, early science fiction such as alien invasion and lost world narratives figured colonial relations as anachronistic encounters between societies or species inhabiting vastly different stages of technological development.38 Mutational romances transpose the temporal logic of these subgenres onto differences within American or European populations, positing a futuristic elect who no longer shares a common history with the living fossils that make up the popular majority.39 Because normies dwell in the past, they find it difficult to participate in a mutual dialogue with mutants, let alone work together with them in a shared political project.40

Mutants in these narratives therefore tend to choose exit over voice, forming separatist enclaves or secret societies to pursue their interests without having to explain themselves to people who do not understand them.41 Wells’s Star-Begotten avoid politics and choose instead to deal with problems in “material science and mechanical invention,” where mutants can achieve success through practical results not easily discounted by inferior intellects.42 His characters predict that someday the Star-Begotten may need to assert themselves by withdrawing their technical abilities from baseline tyrants, allowing society to crumble.43

Ever changeable, the figure of the mutant has been utilized for left-wing causes as well as for right.44 Mutants frequently appear as marginalized misfits rather than masterminds, and overconfidently masculine superhuman narratives later found a feminist rejoinder in superwoman stories.45 However, for all the mutational romance’s political complexities, reactionaries such as Madole and Land are drawn to the simplified image of the forward-looking few who triumph over the backwards many. Although the authors of many mutational romances undercut fascist readings of their texts—Stapledon describes Odd John and his posthuman companions as nonwhite, for example—the far right relies on creative misreadings when it suits their purposes.46

Nevertheless, mutants and other “pariah elites” possess an ideological flexibility that makes them useful for the far right.47 Mutational romances often characterize democracy as a tyranny of the majority that oppresses the exceptional individuals who are immune to “mass emotions,” “crowd loyalties,” and “herd influences.”48 Paradoxically they hint that mutants are most fit to rule the masses precisely because they are anti-totalitarian. This move gives reactionaries a pretext to claim liberty, toleration, and progress in the name of an authoritarian political program. When mutants embark on a quest for world domination as in Slan, it is to save themselves from the normal humans who want to restrict them from realizing their true potentials. Mutant freedom proves incompatible with baseline democracy.

Perhaps for these reasons Star Trek would later reject the mutant figure as antithetical to Starfleet’s political principles in the 1967 episode “Space Seed.” In it, the crew of the starship Enterprise clashes with the cryogenically revived superhuman dictator Khan Noonien Singh, played by Ricardo Montalbán, who along with his master race ruled over much of Earth during the Eugenics Wars that took place centuries earlier. Khan—who is sexy and aristocratic, styling himself as Milton’s Satan—represents an enticing but ultimately rejected alternative to the crew’s socialist values. Unsurprisingly, then, Khan is the only Star Trek character beloved by Richard Spencer. He glosses over the villain’s mixed racial heritage, presenting him as a Nietzschean superman whose Aryan spirit allows him to stand against the Jewish and Marxist egalitarianism embodied in Mr. Spock.49

Superhumans are a longstanding obsession for Spencer, who often reads science fiction against the grain to find superior beings to admire. He is thrilled by Bond villain Hugo Drax in Moonraker (1979), who plots to release poison gases into Earth’s atmosphere and repopulate the planet with “new god men” hidden on his space station, and he hails the posthuman replicants of Blade Runner (1982) as awesome “Aryan-like figures” in an “Asiatic, decrepit world of ant people.”50 Spencer even imagines that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator is “an Austrian Nazi coming to us from the future,” representing a “superman” produced by eugenics who is “as far away from us as we are from the great apes.”51 In this bizarre reading, the Terminator traveled to the past to revise history by killing Jews, but he is ultimately reprogrammed by “white guilt” to commit (racial) suicide.52 Spencer’s antisemitism leads him to worry over what he sees as the cooptation of the Übermensch figure by the Jewish creators of Superman comics, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, and he wonders if it’s possible to recuperate the Man of Steel for white gentiles.53 All the ambivalences of the mutational romance seem to disappear in Spencer’s superhuman power fantasies.

“A Cannibal of the Moment”

Mutational romances explore how the self-appointed geek elite feels exploited by people who do not match them in intelligence or foresight. For example, Jommy Cross, the mutant protagonist of Slan, is enslaved by an unevolved human named Granny. While Jommy works to further his dead father’s long-range plan to save the slans, his captor pursues more immediate goals. The childishly impulsive Granny profits from Jommy’s psychic powers by forcing him to steal things to fund her lavish consumption. When Granny’s chaotic actions threaten his utopian project, leaving “his future abruptly blank, unplanned, homeless,” Jommy must save them both from the consequences of her ill-considered decisions.54 Unable to take care of herself, she ends the novel as Jommy’s happy, hypnotized slave. Order is restored once she submits to the mutant’s grand designs.

We can understand these stories as akin to what David M. Higgins calls “alt-victimhood,” political fantasies and science fiction plots wherein the dominant group of white men find themselves victimized by people who are oppressed in the real world.55 These include “reverse colonization” narratives in which white colonizers somehow become colonized subordinates.56 Although reverse colonization has sometimes served as a call for solidarity with the oppressed, more often this trope merely enables reactionaries including members of the alt-right to pose as victims, an “imperial masochism” that affords them both self-pitying pleasure and moral righteousness.57

Higgins finds this in more mainstream science fiction ranging from Star Wars to Philip K. Dick, but we can also see reverse colonization at work in nativist and white nationalist narratives. Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973)—a favorite of Steve Bannon—describes the destruction of Europe by a monstrous flotilla of Indian refugees. Raspail figures the migrants as a “mob of Martians” and “an army of little green men from some remote planet”—alien invaders who have nothing in common with the Europeans they despoil.58 His novel served as a key influence for Renaud Camus, whose conspiracy theory that white people are being “replaced” by nonwhite Muslim immigrants inspired the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings.59 These ideas have also fed into the white-genocide narratives including race war novels such as Kyle Bristow’s White Apocalypse (2010). Reverse colonization has become a powerful propaganda tool for the white power movement.

Mainstream science fiction tends to approach white supremacy from a somewhat more oblique angle. As I shall show in the following section, science fiction authors including C. M. Kornbluth, Ayn Rand, Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle have staged alt-victimhood narratives in which future-oriented workers and entrepreneurs are threatened with bondage and cannibalism by a racialized class of present-oriented parasites. These narratives maintain deep roots in a right-wing ideology that Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons term producerism, “a doctrine that champions the so-called producers in society against both ‘unproductive’ elites and subordinate groups defined as lazy and immoral.”60 Unlike the populist forms of producerism prevalent during the Trump era, 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.61 Without this small minority of geniuses, they suggest, society would collapse.

C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” is an early instance of this tendency in science fiction. A normal man finds himself in a distant future where he is more intelligent than most citizens. We’re informed that the average IQ dropped to 45 thanks to a dysgenic trend that started because “economic and social conditions . . . penalized child-bearing by the prudent and foresighted.”62 Sensible people who practiced family planning produced relatively few offspring, while “the migrant workers, slum dwellers, and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!”63 The remaining cognitive elite keeps society going for the so-called morons, who effectively treat them like “slaves.”64 As one smarty puts it, “millions of workers live in luxury on the sweat of the handful of aristocrats.”65

The narrative makes clear that racial degeneration has degraded executive function more than abstract reasoning. In the first scene we meet a potter who serves as a prime example of the dwindling intelligentsia. What marks him as such is not his mathematical or verbal aptitude but, rather, his ability to wait for his pottery to fire.66 He successfully overcomes the desire to open his kiln to check on the progress of his pottery, a move that would risk shattering his creation. Delaying gratification, he further demonstrates his providence by prospecting for copper to use in later ceramics projects. By contrast, his buyer nearly spends his entire budget all at once before his gifted secretary talks him out of it. This suggests that the ability to save and prepare for the future has been bred out of all but the eugenically selected.

Heedless of consequences, the shortsighted masses overpopulate the planet and begin consuming all its resources. At first the cognitive elite attempts to eliminate the impulsivists by withdrawing to the South Pole, allowing civilization to collapse into famine and war, but after a few disastrous weeks they realize that letting their inferiors die would leave them with five billion bodies to clean up.67 They eventually solve this problem by shooting all intellectually disabled people into space in rockets designed as death traps, a program suggested by the visitor from the past’s recollections of Hitler.68 The cognitive elite feel regret afterward and execute him for proposing it.

The story’s politics are complicated, especially given the author’s membership in the left-leaning Futurians. It operates through irony and paradox, satirizing both ruthless intellectuals and the unintelligent citizens they murder in a program of mass killing that appears as simultaneously monstrous and necessary to preserve civilization.69 Nevertheless, in subsequent decades Kornbluth’s short story became a touchstone for scientific racists who failed to acknowledge its ambiguities.70 Unsurprisingly, they prefer the one-dimensional version of the narrative found in Idiocracy (2006), one of the alt-right’s favorite films.71

Understood in this light, Kornbluth’s title is as precise as it is odious. Henry H. Goddard, a central figure in the history of eugenics, coined the term “moron” to describe an adult with a mental age of between eight and twelve years who, possessed with a “defective mentality” since birth or childhood, proves to be “incapable of competing in the struggle for existence or of managing his own affairs with ordinary prudence.”72 According to Goddard, a “high-grade moron” can perform many of the tasks within the grasp of a normal individual, but they are “unable to plan.”73 Stanley Porteus, Goddard’s successor at the Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Children, drew upon these ideas when he developed a test to measure “prudence, forethought, planning capacity, ability to improve with practice, and adaptability to a new situation.”74 He used this diagnostic instrument to rank nonwhite races as inferior and reaffirm settler-colonial control by supposedly demonstrating that many nonwhite populations including Filipinos and Native Hawaiians were incapable of governing themselves.75 By invoking Goddard’s terminology, Kornbluth implicates the narrative’s elite in a long history of racist and eugenicist thinking about hereditary differences in foresight.

Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) pursues the same theme of a genius minority swamped by imbeciles, but it does so with a much more earnest and didactic tone. Rand’s dystopian novel is best known for sending many young people down the path of free market capitalism. It features a small elite of capitalist entrepreneurs who resist the redistributive state’s parasitism by withdrawing to a secret enclave called Atlantis or Galt’s Gulch, where they watch as civilization folds without their help. This libertarian utopia’s residents are bound together by a strong work ethic, individualistic principles, and, above all, a shared politics of time. Rand admires entrepreneurs who set a distant goal in the future and strike out for it with a monomaniacal focus.76 Because these heroic innovators seem to dwell in futurity, a trip to Galt’s Gulch seems like a voyage to another world filled with pioneering technology unfathomable to the citizens of the outside world.77 Despite the antagonism between the two thinkers, Friedrich Hayek imagines something similar when he compares elites to “men on a previously unknown continent or on another planet” who possess an “advanced knowledge” that they may graciously bring to Earth’s more backward inhabitants.78

Not everyone is fit for Rand’s future. Rand labels Indigenous peoples, collectivists, and welfare recipients as “savages” who can never accomplish their goals because they do not understand the laws of causality.79 Instead of planning for the future, they follow the “expediency of the moment.”80 When they do follow the steps laid out by Promethean inventors, they enact them with “the jerky motions of an ape performing a routine it [has] learned to copy by muscular habit.”81 Because these so-called savages cannot innovate for themselves, they must enslave their future-oriented superiors to invent for them, but once they have achieved this goal technology quickly reverts to prior developmental stages as regulation and taxation stifle entrepreneurial initiative.82 The savage society can do little more than devour reserves built up by heroic individuals during freer times, consuming capital at the expense of future prosperity. The collectivist becomes “a cannibal of the moment, devouring the unborn children of greatness.”83

Rand’s temporal politics rest on deeply racist assumptions. She patterns her heroes on pulp serials from her childhood reading that feature hypermasculine British explorers with stereotypically Aryan features who dominated and exterminated the natives standing in their way.84 Throughout Atlas Shrugged, Rand racializes the collectivist moochers by calling them “primitive,” “tribal,” and “Asiatic.”85 As Jessica Hurley demonstrates, the novel presents a paranoid racial fantasy in which “whiteness is a worldly orientation that has sole access to both rationality and futurity,” consigning the nonwhite world to “apocalyptic futurelessness.”86

Rand’s racial ideology finds its reflection in the neoliberal economics of the Austrian school. Many neoliberal thinkers insisted that socialism is merely a regression to irrational savagery.87 Lars Cornelissen shows that early Austrian theorists contrasted the economizing civilized subject favorably against the “futureless savage” who does not bother to construct a shelter before winter, store food in advance, or otherwise anticipate future needs.88 In this view, capitalist accumulation becomes an expression of racially determined providence.

Atlas Shrugged inspired Ward Kendall’s white nationalist science fiction novel Hold Back This Day (1999). The novel is set in a future in which a multicultural world government has almost eliminated the white race through clandestine ethnic cleansing operations and near-compulsory miscegenation. State propaganda attributes all technoscientific achievements to Africans, and children are taught that the first astronaut on the moon was a Black woman. But, according to the narrative, innovation has stalled and spaceflight is all but lost because there are so few white technicians and scientists. White people are the “progenitor of human progress,” we are told.89 To underscore this point, the protagonist comes upon a ruined industrial park with a sign that reads, “Reardon Steel: South Africa Division,” an allusion to the business destroyed by collectivists in Atlas Shrugged.90 Following John Galt’s example, white nationalists secede to a Martian colony before leaving for Alpha Centauri. Driving home the message, one white man says, “we have no possible future left on this world . . . [b]ut there may be a future for our Race elsewhere.”91 Once white people are gone, an overpopulated Earth falls into mass starvation and a new Dark Ages begins. Although this novel is relatively recent, the idea that white people possess a technoscientific aptitude absent in people of color can be traced as far back the eighteenth century.92

Mainstream science fiction joins Rand in presenting collectivism as racialized. Robert A. Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold (1964) depicts a distant future in which a Black ruling class called the Chosen runs a welfare state dependent upon white slaves. Heinlein describes this Black-dominated society as “stable, even static” with “few innovations” to its credit.93 The Chosen culture carries out little scientific research, and most of the breakthroughs it does achieve are discovered by white, castrated slaves, who have little motive to innovate because their ideas are always stolen by Black masters who take all the glory.94 Even this ingenuity is in short supply because the Chosen breed drive and intelligence out of white slaves in captivity, forcing the Chosen to maintain free populations of rebel whites whose members can be captured to replenish the bloodlines of expert slaves.95 When a freeborn white man with extraordinary entrepreneurial abilities is teleported from the distant past, he appears as a mutant or a “freak” in this world.96

For their part, the Chosen seem incapable of speculation. They see their present order as eternal, their prejudices as natural law, and major changes as impossible.97 We never meet a Black character in the novel who is as dynamic and imaginative as the white protagonist. As if to literalize Rand’s racist metaphor for the redistributive state, Heinlein reveals at the end of the novel that the Chosen are cannibals, devouring the white people they exploit.98 This theme reappears in Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), in which an army of cannibalistic criminals and hippies led by an impulsive Black race hustler threatens civilizational progress by attacking the survivalists working to rebuild technological society after a comet strikes Earth.99 Once more, futurity is equated with whiteness while Blackness is relegated to the savage state of the futureless present. This novel was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1978. Although it did not win, the tradition it represents would resurface in the 2010s.

Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies

The Hugo Awards at the World Science Fiction Convention have been one of the signature events of fandom since 1953. Every year fans select the best science fiction and fantasy in categories ranging from best novel to best fanzine. Despite their reputation for populism, the Hugos have often rewarded formally experimental social science fiction with left-leaning politics and countercultural themes: past winners include Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler. However, in the 2010s the Hugo Awards experienced a right-wing backlash that came to be known as science fiction’s GamerGate. A group of conservative fans calling themselves the Sad Puppies ran slates designed to block what they saw as literary fiction penned by “social justice agitators.”100 Promoting a revisionist history of the genre, the Sad Puppies claimed that they were saving science fiction and fantasy from the “literati.”101

The Sad Puppies were unsuccessful when they were mobilized in 2013 and 2014 by Larry Correia, but after Brad R. Torgersen took over in 2015 they swept the nominations thanks to a coordinated campaign. Although most Worldcon members did not support the Sad Puppies, these opposition votes were divided among too many choices to prevent a small troll army working in lockstep from dictating the Hugo Award nominees. After many weeks of flamewars and some tense moments at Worldcon, protest votes for “No Award” won out over the Sad Puppy picks in most categories. Fandom soundly rejected reaction.

The Sad Puppies presented themselves as sensible and nondoctrinaire. They claimed to oppose political correctness and foster cultural diversity by promoting “unabashed pulp action that isn’t heavy-handed message fic.”102 In actuality, the Sad Puppies in 2015 turned out to be little more than a stalking horse for an extreme right-wing faction known as the Rabid Puppies, who were led by alt-right blogger, author, and publisher Theodore Beale (also known as “Vox Day”). Although the Sad Puppy leaders sometimes distanced themselves from Beale, most of the successful Sad Puppy nominations also appeared on the Rabid Puppy slate, suggesting that their campaign may have been another nonstarter without Beale’s followers.103 The Sad Puppies complained they merely wanted to bust up the social justice cliques at Worldcon to make way for more classic genre fiction—the Rabid Puppies hoped to burn the Hugo Awards to the ground.

Beale’s journey toward the alt-right began with a regular column for the paleoconservative site WorldNetDaily, where his father served as an investor and board member.104 Beale’s columns regularly espoused Islamophobic and misogynistic opinions, and his antifeminist bona fides allowed him to reinvent himself as a master of pickup artistry, offering sexist dating advice to “involuntary celibate” or “incel” readers.105 Always a contentious figure, Beale’s vendetta against the rest of fan culture can be dated to his failed presidential bid for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) in 2013.106 Following the election, N. K. Jemisin spoke out against Beale, publicly expressing her dismay that “a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole” could win a tenth of the vote.107 Beale confirmed her accusation by releasing a volley of racist and sexist tirades on his blog. Beale shared these remarks using the SFWA Twitter account, an action that resulted in his expulsion from the organization.

Beale’s comments must be understood within the context of Jemisin’s career. Early on Jemisin criticized science fiction “as one of the most racist genres in American literature.”108 Many science fiction novels featured all-white casts of characters, erasing people of color in what amounted to “literary genocide.”109 When she told people that she wrote science fiction, many seemed incredulous that a Black woman would write in the genre. One of her cousins even suggested that science fiction was “white people’s stuff.”110 Jemisin devoted herself to proving that science fiction was not inherently white: “I’m always surprised that there aren’t more people of color writing in this genre, because the future is ours.”111

Beale’s rejoinder to Jemisin’s speech proves her critique of the field, othering the author while reaffirming the genre’s whiteness:

[u]nlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males. If one considers that it took my English and German ancestors more than one thousand years to become fully civilized after their first contact with advanced Greco-Roman civilization, it should be patently obvious that it is illogical to imagine, let alone insist, that Africans have somehow managed to do the same in less than half the time at a greater geographic distance. These things take time.112

Beale positions himself here as an emissary of the future, looking backward on Jemisin. He tries to write Jemisin out of the science fiction community by asserting that a Black woman could never build a future world because she is a thousand years behind the white civilizational present. It’s clear who won fandom’s hearts and minds: Jemisin later earned Hugo Awards three in a row, but Beale’s entries repeatedly placed behind “No Award.” A stinging rebuke.

Beale’s peevish castigation that “these things take time” reflects a dominant racist discourse on temporality that, as Michael Hanchard points out, positions Black populations as lagging or delayed.113 Because white supremacists demote Black people to a prior stage of development, dooming them to repeat past European accomplishments, they have often been made to wait for the rights and goods white people have long enjoyed. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy can be read as the most eloquent response to Beale’s white supremacist stalling tactics. The novels’ vision of social change defies gradualism, choosing instead to end racialized slavery through an apocalyptic rupture that immediately abolishes the world’s predictable rhythms.114

Beale’s anti-Black racism runs deeper than procrastination in the face of racial inequality. In another post, Beale explains that when he suggested that native-born English and Germans are more civilized than Black people, he meant that white people have lower time preferences, a farsightedness that allows them to maintain self-discipline and accumulate wealth.115 Beale contrasts the civilized whites with “the pure savage [who] lives entirely in the moment and does not control his impulses.”116 His argument sounds remarkably like the one presented by Cochran and Harpending, but he just as easily could have drawn upon Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy—The God That Failed (2001) or Edward C. Banfield’s The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974).117 Reactionary discourse often slanders Black people as impetuous criminals who commit antisocial acts due to their allegedly high time preferences.

Racist pseudoscience has also long held that white people are naturally given to forethought. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) argues that cold winters killed off Northern Europeans who did not have the “industry and foresight [to prepare] the year’s food, clothing, and shelter during the short summer,” leaving only the provident behind to become the white race.118 Richard Lynn and J. Phillippe Rushton revived the cold winters hypothesis in almost identical terms in the 1980s and 1990s, sometimes using it explain the purported high intelligence of Asian as well as white populations.119

Beale alludes to Rushton, whose life-history approach argues that race determines temporality.120 Rushton’s work depends on the r/K selection theory proposed by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson. They argue that r-selected species produce large broods that are quickly abandoned to chance, while K-selected species invest more time in a small number of offspring. Rushton illegitimately applies this outdated theory of interspecies difference to racialized groups within the human species: Black people are more r-selected, and white people are more K-selected.121 He claims that white life histories steadily progress toward ensuring the success of future generations, while Black people live fast and die young, leaving behind many unclaimed children who survive by chance. Although Beale often uses r/K selection as a metaphor rather than a literal scientific concept—he expresses skepticism about evolution—Beale agrees with Rushton’s basic ideas about Black life histories.122 Beale would later embrace the alt-right and endorse a version of David Lane’s white supremacist Fourteen Words slogan.123

Now that we have unpacked Beale’s vituperations against Jemisin, it becomes clear that the inciting event for the Rabid Puppies movement rested on a fundamental conflict over the racial nature of time. Beale attacked Jemisin because he believed that as a future-oriented genre science fiction is inherently white and closed to Black people. Jemisin proved him wrong by launching one of the most illustrious careers in postmillennial speculative fiction, but these ideas persist throughout the far right. The Rabid Puppies scandal turned out to be rooted in a battle over who has the capacity to imagine the future.

Ostracized by most of science fiction fandom for his racist trolling, Beale saw the Rabid Puppies as an opportunity to wreak vengeance on the field. In terms of literary content, both the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaigns seemed backward looking. The Sad Puppies called for a return to the Campbell years of science fiction, while the Rabid Puppies militated for a renewal of pulp fiction along the lines of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard.124

But Beale’s public persona during these affairs privileges his relationship to futurity. Beale often wrote from the perspective of a criminal mastermind who, like Doctor Doom or a James Bond villain, seemed to possess ingenious planning capabilities.125 Everything in the campaign supposedly followed his cunning plans in which every possible outcome—including apparent defeat—was a victory already foreseen.126

Historical events seem to have proven otherwise. The Rabid Puppies were shut out, and the Hugo Awards still continue (albeit not without subsequent political controversies).127 Nevertheless, Beale’s failure did not stop him from applying this rhetorical strategy to electoral politics. Beale became wrapped up in QAnon, a conspiracy theory claiming that Donald Trump had orchestrated an immense secret operation to expose and convict all his political enemies as Satan-worshipping pedophiles.128 Beale condemned Democratic operatives and nonwhite immigrants as heathen cannibals perpetrating child sacrifices, consuming reproductive and civilizational futurity.129 But he knew Trump would win against them. Even Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020 became in Beale’s eyes another clever plot by the most brilliant tactician ever, the president he hailed as God-Emperor. “Trust the plan,” as the QAnon cultists would say.130

“No More Lily-White Futures”

The temporalities we have examined in this chapter are structured by whiteness. White time casts the present as a fleeting transition on the way to an anticipated goal.131 Whiteness therefore demands sacrifice: it denies the body and defers its demands in the service of a long-awaited transcendence that will never come.132 Some white people double down on this temporality when it disappoints them. Social psychologist Raphael S. Ezekiel’s group portrait of white nationalists leading dead-end lives in the 1990s describes them as dwelling in the present: “The piece of time they live in is also small . . . a couple of days at the most. The subject was almost always now.”133 Bereft of hope or imagination, inhabiting “a world with no possibilities,” white nationalists try to expand the scope of their temporal horizons by embracing the fictive past and confected destiny offered by racist mythology.134 This aimless despair has become a generalized condition now that late capitalism makes it appear impossible to hope or plan for anything in the long run.135 Under these social conditions, many white men are left with an impoverished historical consciousness that cannot find any way out of the present except through libertarianism’s Horatio Alger fantasies and, when those fail, a chiliastic leap into a perfect white world. White temporality therefore offers a depleted and paralyzing view of the here-and-now, one that fails to see that each moment contains traces of the past with unrealized possibilities as well as nascent prefigurations of dawning futures.136

As we have seen, science fiction and other speculative genres have often divided the world into those who have a future and those who reside in the past or present. These divisions have always been racial and political, frequently placing white producers on the side of tomorrow while banishing everyone else to futureless savagery. Optimistic mutational romances gave way to apocalyptic narratives about makers and takers, but the narrative remains remarkably durable.

Nick Land’s fantasies take these ideas to the extreme when he insinuates that nerds are being used as remote manipulators of a Terminator-style artificial intelligence from the future to constitute itself in the present “as if a tendril of tomorrow were burrowing back.”137 Land’s irrational contempt for the present leads him from temporal confusion and philosophical incoherence into suicidal ideation. He looks forward to a god-like computer that will initiate a positive feedback loop of self-improving intelligence, assimilating the entire solar system including human biomass. Using atoms for any purposes more short-term than digital immortality appears trivial and futile to him. Indeed, Land denigrates all ends other than the naked pursuit of instrumental reason. He imagines a perfectly roundabout method of production that produces nothing other than more efficient versions of its own means of production, an infinitely self-revolutionizing capital that somehow never realizes itself in consumption.138 This is time preference zero. Nevertheless, for all his extravagance, Land’s dreams of nerd supremacy are only the latest in a discursive tradition that includes pulp novels, capitalist propaganda, and racist pseudoscience.

Although Land remains a marginal character even on the right, we see echoes of this ideology throughout Silicon Valley culture. A new generation of geeks has embraced longtermism, the belief that we should prioritize the well-being of the trillions unborn who may someday exist in the distant future. As part of the project, some right-wing longtermists lobby for pronatalist practices and policies that ensure that the future will be populated by the descendants of the most intelligent and productive citizens.139 Several longtermist thinkers worry that geniuses may be outbred by the intellectually stunted, who will halt technological progress by bringing about Idiocracy.140 To reverse this trend, some longtermists hope to emulate Genghis Khan by producing enough offspring that they’ll eventually constitute a major planetary population.141 These plans are no longer purely speculative: tech entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel are investing in reproductive technologies to make this happen.142 By generating a super race of “Gattaca babies” that’ll someday rule the world, these right-wing geeks intend to “set the future of our species.”143 All of this sounds even more sinister when we realize that longtermism has always been racialized.

Coda: Nazi Ufology

In this chapter, we have seen how many authors use science fiction to figure white people as taking the next step in evolution, but some fascists believe these stories about mutants and aliens to be literally true. They argue that white people descend from a superpowered race of extraterrestrials or god-men.144 Many ufologists starting in the 1950s adopted the racist ideas of George Hunt Williamson, a disciple of fascist leader William Dudley Pelley, who imagined an advanced race of Nordic aliens locked in a cosmic battle against a conspiracy of small, sickly aliens with “oriental type eyes” who manipulate others for materialistic gain.145 The gray alien of popular imagination thus emerged out of antisemitic stereotype. While alien researchers wrote about blond-haired, blue-eyed extraterrestrials, occult fascists claimed that flying saucers were piloted by a breakaway group of Nazis who established secret bases in Antarctica, the hollow earth, or another dimension after their apparent defeat in the Second World War.146

AltRight Corporation cofounder Jason Reza Jorjani takes up all of this in his own white supremacist writings, especially in his didactic science fiction novel Faustian Futurist (2020) and his New Age opus Closer Encounters (2021).147 Jorjani is an Iranian-American who claims that the Persian race will someday return to its former Aryan glory once advanced genetic manipulation removes the Arabic and Mongol admixtures from the population’s genomes.148 Alluding to Williamson, Pelley, and Nazi UFO mythology, Jorjani argues that postwar Nazis fled the allies by time traveling to the distant past where they established civilizations on Mars, the moon, and the lost continent of Atlantis. Using eugenics, they evolved into a race of Nordic supermen who ruled as gods on antediluvian earth, engineering humankind to serve as slaves divided by racial castes. In a scenario that recalls the time travel paradoxes of science fiction, Jorjani speculates that the Nordics may have interbred with Cro-Magnons to produce the white race with its purportedly unique genetic gifts.149 The Nordic invaders from the future now plan “their reemergence with the patience of titans, each of whose lives span thousands of years, and who have total recall from one incarnation to the next.”150

However, the Atlanteans and their descendants are divided into two factions. The Olympian traditionalists want to close the loop of cyclical time by recreating a static totalitarian order, but they are opposed by the Promethean or Faustian futurists, fascists who want to break into an open-ended future.151 The anti-Olympian resistance is aided by an even more superior entity from millions of years hence who has traveled to our present era in order to “expand the existential horizon of possibilities for life at any cost.”152 The Prometheans intend to achieve this expansion by using their exceptional “foresight”—“the superior power of precognition, projection, and anticipation”—to overthrow the Olympian gods and bring about a technoscientific revolution.153

Jorjani sides with the Faustian rebels, but that insurrectionary impulse shouldn’t be taken as a wholesale rejection of his former alt-right comrades. Jorjani believes that the Faustian spirit is unevenly distributed: “Only a small minority of individuals, comparable to Magneto’s band of rebel mutants, will be strong enough to take the leap into a positively Posthuman future.”154 The Olympians want to rule over baseline humans, but the Faustians remain indifferent to them. Jorjani is evasive on this count, but he indicates many people will die in the upheaval leading up to the Faustian ascendence, including large numbers of Muslims and others he believes to be unfit to be free. Jorjani’s heroes follow in the footsteps of not only X-Men’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants but also Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Star Trek’s Khan, the Incredible Hulk, and the Ghostbusters in risking baseline humanity’s total destruction in the pursuit of Promethean fire.155

Steeped in scientific racism, Jorjani seems to believe that Faustian mutants will generally be found in the white population. He argues that Indo-Europeans are responsible for most discovery and exploration, because only “Western man is ceaselessly driven beyond himself, as restless as a vampire in the night of time.”156 Jorjani alleges that Chinese people demonstrate a “fear of change” and Africans have “poor impulse control,” while Arabs and “the Dravidian majority in India” betray an “undisciplined and unfocused laziness.”157 White people, Jorjani claims, possess “the genetic predisposition to bold inquisitiveness, curiosity to the point of dangerous risk taking, iconoclastic individuality, wondrous enjoyment of pure creativity, and a horizon-expanding will to transcend all apparent limitations.”158 Jorjani provides a precise description of the Faustian myth, which we will examine in the next chapter.

Notes

1. 1. Nick Land, “Revenge of the Nerds,” Outside In: Involvements with Reality, March 21, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140322073447/http:/www.xenosystems.net/revenge-of-the-nerds/.

2. 2. Land.

3. 3. Land.

4. 4. Land.

5. 5. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 3–5.

6. 6. Raymond B. Craib, Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2022).

7. 7. Land, “Revenge of the Nerds.”

8. 8. Gregory Cochran qtd in Nick Land, “Hyper-Racism,” Outside In: Involvements with Reality, September 29, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20211127200915/https://www.xenosystems.net/hyper-racism/.

9. 9. Nick Land, “Lure of the Void, Part 3A,” That’s Shanghai, September 29, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20130629145658/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/blog/view/9739. Nick Land, “Lure of the Void, Part 2,” That’s Shanghai, September 6, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20121014161640/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/2694/lure-of-the-void-part-2.

10. 10. Emphasis deleted. Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4f(inal)),” That’s Shanghai, July 20, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20120726012138/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/2497/the-dark-enlightenment-part-4final.

11. 11. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 82.

12. 12. Cochran and Harpending, 164.

13. 13. Cochran and Harpending, 117.

14. 14. Cochran and Harpending, 113–18.

15. 15. Cochran and Harpending, 127.

16. 16. Land, “Revenge of the Nerds.”

17. 17. Nick Land, “Monkey Business,” Outside In: Involvements with Reality, November 24, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20131127053347/http://www.xenosystems.net/monkey-business/.

18. 18. Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment, Part 1,” That’s Shanghai, March 2, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20121114085845/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1880/the-dark-enlightenment-part-1.

19. 19. Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), 44; Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (2001; repr. New York: Routledge, 2017), 17–33.

20. 20. Land, “The Dark Enlightenment, Part 1.”

21. 21. Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment, Part 4b,” That’s Shanghai, May 3, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20120514163626/http://thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/2159/the-dark-enlightenment-part-4b.

22. 22. Andrew Pilsch, “Self-Help Supermen: The Politics of Fan Utopias in World War II–Era Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 41, no. 3 (November 2014): 526.

23. 23. Brian M Stableford and David Langford, “Mutants,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, September 13, 2021, https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mutants. See also Colin Milburn, “Posthumanism,” The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, ed. Rob Latham, 524–36 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

24. 24. Brian Attebery, “Super Men,” Science Fiction Studies 25, no. 1 (March 1998): 64. Pilsch, “Self Help Superman,” 529.

25. 25. Pilsch, “Self Help Superman,” 530.

26. 26. Pilsch, 536.

27. 27. Pilsch, 538.

28. 28. Claude Degler, “Announcement of Cosmic Fandom and the Cosmic Circle,” Cosmic Circle Monthly 1, no. 1 (June 1944): 5, https://fanac.org/fanzines/Cosmic_Circle_Pubs/Cosmic_Circle29.pdf.

29. 29. Degler, 6.

30. 30. Degler, 3.

31. 31. Pilsch, “Supermen,” 539. H. G. Wells, Star-Begotten (1937; repr. New York: Manor Books, 1975), 132, 138–39; Olaf Stapledon, Odd John (1936; repr. New York: Garland Publishing, 1975), 76–78; Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon (1942; repr. New York: Baen, 2002), 87–88, 157–58; James Blish, Jack of Eagles (1952; repr. New York: Avon, 1982), 113–15; Robert A. Heinlein, Methuselah’s Children (New York: Signet, 1958), 42–43.

32. 32. Milburn, “Posthumanism,” 525.

33. 33. Robert A. Heinlein, “Guest of Honor Speech at the Third World Science Fiction Convention—Denver, 1941,” Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master, ed. Yoji Kondo (New York: Tor, 1992), 155.

34. 34. A. E. Van Vogt, Slan (1940; repr. New York: Tor, 2007), 159.

35. 35. Stapledon, Odd John, 130–32. Heinlein, Methuselah’s Children, 50.

36. 36. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World (1986; repr New York: Grove, 1989), 170.

37. 37. Van Vogt, Slan. 251–52.

38. 38. John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 5–6.

39. 39. See Rieder, 78–80.

40. 40. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 31.

41. 41. See, for example, Stapledon, Odd John, 150–57.

42. 42. H. G. Wells, Star-Begotten (1937; repr. New York: Manor Books, 1975), 124–25.

43. 43. Wells, Star-Begotten, 143–45.

44. 44. Sean Cashbaugh, “A Paradoxical, Discrepant, Mutant Marxism: Imagining a Radical Science Fiction in the American Popular Front,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 10, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 63–10; Ramzi Fawaz, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Andrew Pilsch, Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Colin Milburn, “Mutate or Die: Neo-Lamarckian Ecogames and Responsible Evolution,” Ecogames, eds. Laura op de Beke, Gerald Farca, Joost Raessens, and Stefan Werning (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022).

45. 45. Brian Attebery, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 82–105.

46. 46. Stapledon, Odd John, 9, 159.

47. 47. David Langford, “Pariah Elite,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, eds. John Clute and David Langford (London: SFE/Ansible Editions, 2015), https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/pariah_elite.

48. 48. Wells, Star-Begotten, 94, 143, 151. See also David M. Higgins, Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021), 37.

49. 49. Richard Spencer, Colin Lidell, and Andy Nowicki, “Nerd Socialism,” Vanguard Radio, Podcast Audio, May 20, 2013, https://archive.org/details/NerdSocialism.

50. 50. Many alt-right podcasts have been removed from mainstream platforms. Whenever I could not locate a version of the podcast audio referenced in this book on a stable, reputable, and freely accessible website, I have cited the version kept in my personal archive. Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin, “Unconscious Cinema—Goldeneye,” Radix, podcast audio, December 30, 2020, author’s archive; Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin, “Unconscious Cinema—Less Human Than Human,” Radix, podcast audio, October 29, 2017, author’s archive.

51. 51. Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin, “Unconscious Cinema—The Terminator,” Radix, podcast audio, August 9, 2017, author’s archive.

52. 52. Spencer and Brahmin, “Unconscious Cinema—The Terminator.”

53. 53. Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin, “Superchrist—Unconscious Cinema: Man of Steel (2013),” Radix, podcast audio, March 30, 2021, author’s archive.

54. 54. Van Vogt, Slan, 117.

55. 55. Higgins, Reverse Colonization, 23.

56. 56. Higgins, 1–3.

57. 57. Higgins, 2.

58. 58. Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints, trans. Norman Shapiro (1973, repr. Petoskey, Mich.: Social Contract Press, 1987), 50, 260.

59. 59. Sasha Polakow-Suransky, “The Inspiration for Terrorism in New Zealand Came From France,” Foreign Policy, March 16, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/16/the-inspiration-for-terrorism-in-new-zealand-came-from-france-christchurch-brenton-tarrant-renaud-camus-jean-raspail-identitarians-white-nationalism/.

60. 60. Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford, 2018), 6.

61. 61. See Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1991), 54–61; David Duke, My Awakening (Covington, LA: Free Speech Press, 1999), 651.

62. 62. C. M. Kornbluth, “The Marching Morons” (1951), reprinted in The Best of C. M. Kornbluth, ed. Frederik Pohl (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1976), 149.

63. 63. Kornbluth, 149.

64. 64. Kornbluth, 150.

65. 65. Kornbluth, 148.

66. 66. Kornbluth, 133–35.

67. 67. Kornbluth, 150.

68. 68. Kornbluth, 153.

69. 69. John Huntington, Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Story (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 64.

70. 70. Steve Sailer, “Idiocracy: The Morons Shall Inherit the Earth,” The Unz Review, October 6, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20221111092128/https://www.unz.com/isteve/idiocracy/; Gregory Cochran, “Live Not by Lies,” West Hunter, April 8, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20240328101152/https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/live-not-by-lies/.

71. 71. Howe Abbott-Hiss, “Why We’re Getting Dumber,” Counter-Currents, February 14, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20240301041847/https://counter-currents.com/2019/02/why-were-getting-dumber/.

72. 72. Henry H. Goddard, “Who Is a Moron?” The Scientific Monthly 21, no. 1 (January 1927), 42–43.

73. 73. Henry H. Goddard qtd in Richard A. Berry and Stanley Porteus, Intelligence and Social Valuation: A Practical Method for Diagnosis of Mental Deficiency and Other Forms of Social Inefficiency (Vineland, N.J.: The Training School at Vineland Jersey, 1920), 67.

74. 74. Goddard, 91.

75. 75. David E. Stannard, “Honoring Racism: The Professional Life and Reputation of Stanley D. Porteus,” in The Ethnic Studies Story: Politics and Social Movements in Hawai‘i: Essays in Honor of Marion Kelly, ed. Ibrahim G. Aoudé. 95–100 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa).

76. 76. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957; repr. New York: Penguin, 1996), 30, 158.

77. 77. Rand, 1136.

78. 78. Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 100.

79. 79. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 917.

80. 80. Rand, 363, 912, 933.

81. 81. Rand, 560.

82. 82. Rand, 632, 917, 1039.

83. 83. Rand, 335.

84. 84. Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2019), 14–15, 43.

85. 85. Rand qtd in Duggan, Mean Girl, 60.

86. 86. Jessica Hurley, Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 54–55, 32.

87. 87. Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (New York: Verso, 2019), 14, 35–74; Julia Elyachar, “Neoliberalism, Rationality, and the Savage Slot,” in Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, eds. William Callison and Zachary Manfredi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 186.

88. 88. Lars Cornelissen, “Savage Economics: Race, Futurity, and Civilizational Hierarchy in Early Austrian Neoliberalism,” Global Perspectives 2, no. 1 (2021): 4–6.

89. 89. Ward Kendall, Hold Back This Day (1999; repr. United States: Alternative Future, 2020), 239.

90. 90. Kendall, 89.

91. 91. Kendall, 146.

92. 92. Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 26–27.

93. 93. Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham’s Freehold (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964), 177, 205.

94. 94. Heinlein, 225.

95. 95. Heinlein, 285–86.

96. 96. Heinlein, 183.

97. 97. Heinlein, 211.

98. 98. Heinlein, 262.

99. 99. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Lucifer’s Hammer (New York: Ballantine, 1977), 73, 528.

100. 100. Brad R. Torgersen qtd in Emily St. James, “How Conservatives Took Over Sci-Fi’s Most Prestigious Award,” Vox, August 22, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/4/26/8495415/hugos-sad-puppies-controversy.

101. 101. Larry Correia, “How to Get Correia Nominated for a Hugo. 😊,” Monster Hunter Nation, January 8, 2013, https://monsterhunternation.com/2013/01/08/how-to-get-correia-nominated-for-a-hugo/.

102. 102. Correia, “Nominated,” n.p.

103. 103. Elizabeth Sandifer, “Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and His Supporters,” in Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and around the Alt Right (Monee, Ill.: Eruditorium Press, 2017), 353.

104. 104. Camestros Felapton, The Complete Debarkle: 1880–2020 (Sydney, Australia: Cattimothy House, 2021), 28.

105. 105. Felapton, 76.

106. 106. David Forbes, The Old Iron Dream (Oakland, Calif.: Inkshares, 2014).

107. 107. N. K. Jemisin, “Continuum GoH Speech,” N. K. Jemisin, June 8, 2013, https://nkjemisin.com/2013/06/continuum-goh-speech/.

108. 108. N. K. Jemisin, “No More Lily-White Futures and Monochrome Myths,” The Angry Black Woman, April 21, 2007, http://theangryblackwoman.com/2007/04/21/no-more-lily-white-futures-and-monochrome-myths/.

109. 109. Jemisin, “No More Lily-White Futures.”

110. 110. N. K. Jemisin, “Author Statement,” Transcriptase, accessed October 6, 2022, http://transcriptase.org/statements/nkjemisin/#more-324.

111. 111. Jemisin, “No More Lily-White Futures.”

112. 112. Theodore Beale [Vox Day], “A Black Female Fantasist Calls for Reconciliation,” Vox Popoli, June 13, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20240419101925/https://voxday.net/2013/06/13/a-black-female-fantasis/.

113. 113. Beale, “A Black Female Fantasist”; Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 251–52.

114. 114. Jesse A. Goldberg, “Demanding the Impossible: Scales of Apocalypse and Abolition Time in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth,” ASAP/Journal 7, no. 3 (September 2022): 640.

115. 115. Theodore Beale [Vox Day], “Mailvox: Time-Preferences and Civilization,” Vox Popoli, June 19, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20220816221100/https://voxday.net/2013/06/19/mailvox-time-preferences-and/.

116. 116. Beale, “Mailvox.”

117. 117. Hoppe, Democracy, 1–6, 67; Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1974), 57–63, 87. On Hoppe, see Quinn Slobodian, “Anti-’68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right,” Public Culture 15, no. 3 (2019): 372–86.

118. 118. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 170. See Rieder, Colonialism, 132-3.

119. 119. Richard Lynn, “The Intelligence of the Mongoloids: A Psychometric, Evolutionary, and Neurological Theory,” Personality and Individual Differences 8, no. 6 (1987): 832; Richard Lynn, “The Evolution of Racial Differences in Intelligence,” Mankind Quarterly 31, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 99–121; J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 3rd ed. (Port Huron, Mich.: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000), 228–30.

120. 120. Camestros Felapton, “Weird Internet Ideas: r/K and the Far Right,” November 4, 2017, https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/weird-internet-ideas-rk-and-the-far-right/.

121. 121. Sussman, The Myth of Race, 262–64; Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior, 199–213.

122. 122. Theodore Beale [Vox Day], “Mailvox: Evolutionary Ideology,” Vox Popoli, May 5, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20240503004208/https://voxday.net/2012/05/05/mailvox-evolutionary-ideology/; Theodore Beale [Vox Day], “Mailvox: Clinging to the Myth,” Vox Popoli, December 29, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20240503004155/https://voxday.net/2013/12/29/mailvox-clinging-to-my/.

123. 123. Theodore Beale [Vox Day], “What the Alt-Right Is,” Vox Popoli, August 24, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20231211034735/https://voxday.net/2016/08/24/what-alt-right-is/.

124. 124. Felapton, Debarkle, 389.

125. 125. Felapton, 267.

126. 126. Theodore Beale [Vox Day], “Xanatos Unveiled,” Vox Popoli, August 1, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20240503004843/https://voxday.net/2015/08/01/xanatos-unveiled/.

127. 127. See Alexandra Alter, “Some Authors Were Left Out of Awards Held in China. Leaked Emails Show Why,” New York Times, February 17, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/books/booksupdate/hugo-awards-china.html.

128. 128. Felapton, Debarkle, 375–78.

129. 129. Theodore Beale [Vox Day], “Cannibalism Is a Social Construct,” Vox Popoli, February 22, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20240503004819/https://voxday.net/2018/02/22/cannibalism-is-a-social-construct/; Theodore Beale [Vox Day], “Evil in High Places,” Vox Popoli, April 12, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20221203032531/https://voxday.net/2018/04/12/evil-in-high-places-2/.

130. 130. Theodore Beale [Vox Day], “Trust the President,” Vox Popoli, November 5, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20221007213844/https://voxday.net/2020/11/05/trust-the-president/.

131. 131. Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 158.

132. 132. Winnubst, 159–60.

133. 133. Raphael S. Ezekiel, The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen (New York: Viking, 1995), 314.

134. 134. Ezekiel, 314.

135. 135. Mathias Nilges, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time without Future (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 22–29.

136. 136. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 113.

137. 137. Nick Land, “Meat,” Fanged Noumena, Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Cambridge, Mass.: Urbanomic, 2011), 415. See Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 54–58; Shuja Haider, “The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction,” Viewpoint Magazine, March 28, 2017, https://viewpointmag.com/2017/03/28/the-darkness-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-artificial-intelligence-and-neoreaction/; Elizabeth Sandifer, “Neoreaction a Basilisk,” in Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and around the Alt Right, 5–174 (Monee, Ill.: Eruditorium Press, 2017).

138. 138. Nick Land, “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration,” #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (2014; repr. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 511.

139. 139. Julia Black, “Billionaires Like Elon Musk Want to Save Civilization by Having Tons of Genetically Superior Kids. Inside the Movement to Take ‘Control of Human Evolution,’” Business Insider, November 17, 2022, https://www.businessinsider.com/pronatalism-elon-musk-simone-malcolm-collins-underpopulation-breeding-tech-2022-11.

140. 140. Nick Bostrom, “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 9, March 2002, https://www.jetpress.org/volume9/risks.html; William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (New York: Basic Books, 2022), 156; Émil P. Torres, “Understanding ‘Longtermism’: Why This Suddenly Influential Ideology Is So Toxic,” Salon, August 20, 2022, https://www.salon.com/2022/08/20/understanding-longtermism-why-this-suddenly-influential-philosophy-is-so/.

141. 141. Julia Black, “Billionaires Like Elon Musk.”

142. 142. Black.

143. 143. Malcolm Collins qtd in Julia Black, “Billionaires Like Elon Musk.”

144. 144. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 94–97, 167–68.

145. 145. George Hunt Williamson qtd in Christopher F. Roth, “Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult,” in E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, ed. Debbora Battaglia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 56–57.

146. 146. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 160–62, 189.

147. 147. See Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, “Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia,” Jacobin, March 11, 2017, https://jacobin.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment.

148. 148. Carol Schaeffer, “Alt Fight,” The Intercept, March 18, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/03/18/alt-right-jason-jorjani/.

149. 149. Jason Reza Jorjani, Closer Encounters (London: Arktos, 2021), 179. Kindle.

150. 150. Jason Reza Jorjani, Faustian Futurist (London, Arktos, 2020), 68.

151. 151. Jorjani, Closer Encounters, 12, 301, 312.

152. 152. Emphasis removed. Jason Reza Jorjani, Closer Encounters (London: Arktos, 2021), 12.

153. 153. Jason Reza Jorjani, “Towards a Prometheist Platform,” Prometheism, January 14, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210118025811/https://prometheism.com/about/f/towards-a-prometheist-platform.

154. 154. Jason Reza Jorjani, Prometheism (London: Arktos, 2020), xxv.

155. 155. Jorjani, Prometheism, 60, 224–32.

156. 156. Jorjani, Faustian, 81.

157. 157. Jorjani.

158. 158. Jorjani.