Hyperbolic Futures
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The Cascadia Su bductio A LITERARY n Z QUARTERLY on April 2011 X Vol. 1. No. 2 e FEATURE ESSAY Hyperbolic Futures: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction by Steven Shaviro POEM She Lives by Shweta Narayan GRANDMOTHER MAGMA Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake by Ursula K. Le Guin IN THIS ISSUE BOOKS REVIEWED Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor Birdbrain by Johanna Sinisalo On Time Series On Time The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin Destination: Future edited by Z. S. Adani and Eric T. Reynolds X Of Blood and Honey (Fey and the Fallen) Susan Simensky Bietila Simensky Susan by Stina Leicht The Universe of Things by Gwyneth Jones Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft FEATURED ARTIST Susan Simensky Bietila $4.00 Managing Editor VOL. 1 NO. 2—APRIL 2011 Lew Gilchriist Reviews Editor Nisi Shawl FEATURES Features Editor Hyperbolic Futures: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction h 3 L. Timmel Duchamp Essay by Steven Shaviro Arts Editor She Lives h 7 Kath Wilham Poem by Shweta Narayan RANDMOTHER AGMA EATURE $4.00 G M F The Wild Winds of Possibility Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake h 6 Reviewed by Ursula K. Le Guin REVIEWS Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor h 8 Reviewed by Uzuri Amini Birdbrain, by Johanna Sinisalo h 9 Reviewed by Carrie Devall The Broken Kingdoms, by N. K. Jemisin h 10 Reviewed by Ama Patterson H Destination: Future, edited by Z. S. Adani and Eric T. Reynolds h 16 Reviewed by Karen Burnham 2 Of Blood and Honey (Fey and the Fallen), by Stina Leicht h 17 Reviewed by Paige Clifton-Steele The Universe of Things, by Gwyneth Jones h 18 Reviewed by Nisi Shawl Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft h 20 Reviewed by Liz Henry FEATURED ARTIST Susan Simensky Bietila h 22 © The Cascadia Subduction Zone, 2011 Subscriptions and single issues online To order by check, payable to: at: www.thecsz.com Aqueduct Press Print subscription: $15/yr; P.O. Box 95787 Print single issue: $4 Seattle, WA 98145-2787 Electronic Subscription (PDF format): [Washington State Residents $10 per year add 9.5% sales tax.] Electronic single issue: $3 In This ISSUE Cover banner collagraph of the Cascadia subduction zone by Marilyn Linden-Bode n | Hyperbolic Futures: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction Essay by Steven Shaviro “I’d say a practicing free market econ- to be “carefully and artificially constructed” omist has blood on his hands, or he isn’t through a series of “lengthy efforts.” In the doing his job properly. It comes with the terms of Morgan’s novel, we need to im- market, and the decisions it demands. Hard pose “conflict incentives,” in order to force decisions, decisions of life and death.” So people to work at their highest potential. says Mike Bryant, a finance-company ex- In Market Forces, the vast majority of the ecutive in Richard K. Morgan’s near-future population lives in violence-ridden squa- thriller, Market Forces (2005). The tone of lor behind barbed-wire fences, sequestered [Market Forces] depicts Bryant’s utterance — on a financial news- in so-called “cordoned zones.” Meanwhile, a neoliberal, free-market and-commentary TV program, no less — is members of the corporate elite compete society, characterized by pitch-perfect. It has a kind of blunt, empir- for contracts and promotions through Mad violence and aggression ical directness, as if to say: I’m giving it to Max-style road rage duels to the death. It on all levels. you straight, no alibis, no evasions. It may is simply “realistic” — a “hard-edged so- not look pretty, but the world is a harsh lution for hard-edged times” — to make and cruel place. Tough decisions — prag- life-and-death decisions that can only be matic and realistic, free of illusions — have enforced and justified through competitive to be made, one way or another. If you struggle. Under the harsh discipline of the don’t have blood on your hands, you are market, morals are an unaffordable luxury. just an ineffectual dreamer, out of touch Even the slightest weakness or hesitation with the world as it actually is. is immediately punished. I think this is a tone that we are all fa- In the world of Market Forces, the hot- miliar with; we hear it often, coming from test field in finance is Conflict Investment, i politicians and financiers alike. It’s all which funds civil wars and rebellions in there in Morgan’s novel, with the rhetoric “developing” countries in return for ex- 3 ramped up just a little bit: the appeal to travagant profits (from kickbacks, interest a hard-nosed “realism”; the contemptuous payments, and the control of factories in dismissal of idle dreams; the cynical justi- tax-free “enterprise zones”) if the side you fication of rapaciousness as sheer necessity. are backing wins. The rationale for this is Of course, all these are alibis for a system entirely market-based. “Human beings of well-nigh universal expropriation and have been fighting wars as long as history extortion. Anglo-American politics today recalls,” another finance executive tells us is founded on the premise that vigorous in the course of the novel. “It is in our na- market competition is the best way to solve ture, it is in our genes. In the last half of all problems. Market Forces simply takes the last century the peacemakers, the gov- this notion at its word. The novel depicts ernments of this world, did not end war. a neoliberal, free-market society, charac- They simply managed it, and they man- Under the harsh discipline terized by violence and aggression on all aged it badly. They poured money, without of the market, morals levels. In the seventeenth century, Thomas thought of return, into conflicts and guer- are an unaffordable Hobbes argued that a strong State was rilla armies abroad… They were partisan, luxury. Even the slightest needed in order to suppress an otherwise dogmatic, and inefficient. Billions wasted weakness or hesitation is unending “war of all against all.” But in in poorly assessed wars that no sane inves- immediately punished. the twenty-first century, Morgan suggests, tor would have looked at twice.” But what our philosophy is very nearly the reverse. governments did poorly, the market can Now, the important thing is to incite and do better. When faced with a rebellion in a promote competition, to make sure that a poor country, a Conflict Investment man- “war of all against all” takes place, no mat- ager says, “we are concerned with only two ter what. As Michel Foucault remarked, things. Will they win? And will it pay? … for the neoliberalism of today “competi- We do not judge. We do not moralize. We tion is not a primitive given.” Rather, it is do not waste. Instead, we assess, we invest. an ideal, a desideratum: something that has And we prosper.” Cont. on p. 4 n Hyperbolic Market Forces is a work of futurist sci- Science fiction is one of the best tools ence fiction, but it’s not that much of an we have for making sense of hyperbolic Futures extrapolation from present-day actuality. situations like these. Both in its large-scale (cont. from p. 3) It simply makes overt what is already start- world-building and in its small-scale at- ing to happen. The novel seizes upon in- tention to the particular ways in which cipient tendencies and emerging patterns social and technical innovations affect our in the world today and imagines them lives, science fiction comes to grips with pushed to their ultimate consequences. abstractions like economies, social forma- Already today, even the core security ac- tions, technological infrastructures, and Both in its large-scale world-building and in its tivities of the state, like war, espionage, and climate perturbations. These are what the small-scale attention to prisons, are increasingly being outsourced ecocritic Timothy Morton calls hyperob- the particular ways in and privatized. Speculative financial firms jects: entities that are perfectly real in and which social and techni- make their profits wherever they can find of themselves, but that are so out of scale cal innovations affect our opportunities for arbitrage and market with regard to our immediate experience lives, science fiction comes manipulation. They accumulate vast sums that we find them almost impossible to to grips with abstractions by developing ever-more-exotic finan- grasp. The effects of hyperobjects are so like economies, social cial instruments and by shuffling money massive, and so widely distributed across formations, technologi- around the globe in milliseconds. If the time and space, that we cannot apprehend cal infrastructures, and budgets and currencies of entire coun- them directly. We never experience any climate perturbations. tries are destroyed in the process, then so particular moment as the one in which be it. Financial firms “do not moralize”; climate change, or technological change, they just “invest” and “prosper.” Ordinary actually happens. Either these changes are people are caught in the crossfire of this incipient, just on the verge of happening, manic financial competition, losing their or else they have happened already, before jobs, their homes, and sometimes their we were able to notice. Global capitalism, lives; but this is just unfortunate collateral like global warming, is altogether actual, damage. We can no more prevent it — or and yet oddly impalpable: its traces are H so we are told — than we can prevent hur- everywhere, and yet it is never before us ricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other as a whole at any given moment or in any 4 natural disasters. given place.