Conclusion: Tomorrow Belongs to Everyone

Science fiction culture swiftly mobilized against the far right in the wake of the Trump election. Readers showed renewed interest in fascist dystopias and alternative histories by Sinclair Lewis, Katharine Burdekin, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, and Philip Roth. Women protesters wore habits modeled on the ones featured in the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A wave of antifascist speculative narratives appeared in response to the fascist resurgence. N. K. Jemisin figured white supremacy as an extradimensional invasion in The City We Became (2020), and P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout (2020) imagined a supernatural battle against demonic Klansmen. Superhero narratives—a genre with deep connections to vigilante violence—grappled with right-wing extremism through television adaptations such as Watchmen (2019) and The Boys (2019–).

Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru’s Superman Smashes the Klan (2019–20) directly addresses the temporal dimensions of white supremacy. The graphic novel remediates the 1946 Superman radio serial “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” a highly successful narrative that mocked actual Ku Klux Klan codewords and rituals to discredit the organization.1 The Man of Tomorrow, himself an immigrant, fights a robed white supremacist who has been terrorizing the Lees, a Chinese American family. When the Grand Scorpion sneers at him, “The Lees aren’t ‘your own!’ You share no blood with them! No history!” Superman responds, “We are bound together by the future. We all share the same tomorrow.”2 When white nationalism tried to enroll science fiction into its metapolitical project, the genre fought back.

Other science fiction creators framed the struggle against fascism as a fight for the future. Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline (2019) features a war between feminist time travelers and a group of male supremacist incels who want to prevent all future timeline edits and freeze in place a future dystopia where women are nothing more than genetically engineered procreative vessels, “making it illegal for people to have agency over their futures. Over the future of the species, even.”3 Silvia Moreno-Garcia takes up similar concerns in Mexican Gothic (2020), which features a white supremacist patriarch who uses a pale fungus to achieve immortality by imprinting his mind onto a new host body every generation. The villain of the novel—an English settler-colonist in Mexico—exploits others’ bodies to project his identity into the future. After destroying him along with his monstrous family home, the novel’s mixed-race protagonist rejects the idea that history should be a “cursed circle,” an ouroboros of whiteness, and chooses instead to affirm that “the future . . . could not be predicted, and the shape of things could not be divined.”4

But perhaps the most formally sophisticated rebuttal to fascists comes in the unlikely form of Chuck Tingle’s queer absurdist science fiction erotica. Tingle has often parodied the far right: he created a fake version of Breitbart.com that included the “Top 5 Alt-Right Basements,” and after Trump was elected he went on a mission to reverse this “timeline mistake.”5 When Theodore Beale—blogging as Vox Day—attempted to embarrass the Hugo Awards by nominating Tingle’s Space Raptor Butt Invasion (2015), Tingle responded by trolling Beale with a website that satirized the Rabid Puppies and drove traffic to support projects created by Beale’s past targets, N. K. Jemisin, Zoë Quinn, and Rachel Swirsky.6 Tingle’s Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Nomination (2016) goes further to undermine fascist temporality by imagining a multiverse filled with parallel worlds in which the most fundamental ontological level is composed of queer utopian desire. Entire universes change retroactively in mid-sentence to fulfill the author’s yearning for infinitely diverse bodies in infinite combinations. Tingle represents the most uncompromising antidote to the fixed identitarian future, but all antifascist science fiction presents history as what we make of it. Tomorrow belongs to everyone.

Although this book examines the recent past, it must be understood as a historical study. The alt-right collapsed in the aftermath of Charlottesville. Many of its members left the alt-right for more backward-looking far-right groups that see themselves as faithful to fundamentalist religious traditions or the memory of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany. At the same time, a number of fascists abandoned the metapolitical project of changing the culture and instead encouraged their comrades to take up the gun in mass shootings such as the Christchurch mosque attacks. Even Richard Spencer, who conducted an online class on science fiction cinema in 2022, seems to have lost his optimistic belief in the Faustian impulse. He still podcasts about speculative narratives, but his interpretations increasingly obsess over paranoid antisemitic readings that reduce futuristic media to echoes of ancient mythologies supposedly invented by the Jews to corrupt white gentiles. Nevertheless, speculative whiteness—the idea that white men are the future—continues to be a pervasive idea in many far-right circles.

Even if the alt-right may have waned, we shouldn’t be complacent about fascism. As one commentator has suggested, this has been a creative if uneven period for fascist activists who have followed every political failure with new “speculative attempts” to invent formations that’ll allow them to succeed in “the mainstreaming of a violent, extra-parliamentary right.”7 As we have seen, the fascists claim they’ll unleash new potentials, but if they succeed it’ll only mean the strangulation of all possibilities for an emancipatory future. Therefore, if we want to maintain our hope for a future that belongs to everyone, we must dismantle the limits imposed upon our utopian imaginations by speculative whiteness.

Notes

1. 1. Gene Luen Yang, “Superman and Me,” in Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru, (Burbank, Calif.: DC, 2020), 236–37.

2. 2. Emphasis removed. Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru, Superman Smashes the Klan (Burbank, Calif.: DC, 2020), 220–21.

3. 3. Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline (New York: Tor, 2019), 261.

4. 4. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2020; repr. New York: Del Rey, 2021), 301.

5. 5. Chuck Tingle qtd in Andrew Ferguson, “The President as a Shrieking Pile of Void Crabs; or, The Cosmically Horrific Satire of Dr. Chuck Tingle,” Academia.edu, January 5, 2018, https://www.academia.edu/35591273/The_President_as_a_Shrieking_Pile_of_Void_Crabs.

6. 6. Aja Romano, “Satirical Erotica Author Chuck Tingle’s Massive Troll of Conservative Sci-Fi Fans, explained,” Vox, May 26, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/5/26/11759842/chuck-tingle-hugo-award-rabid-puppies-explained.

7. 7. Richard Seymour, “Is It Fascism If It’s Still Incompetent?” Patreon, January 6, 2021, https://www.patreon.com/posts/is-it-still-if-45896691.