August 14, 2025

SFitze Acceptable Wastage

I come from a different future than you, dear reader, and am soon approaching 49 (crying a Lot 49). That's a good excuse for my broken promises (what’s yours?). So forget about keeping up the productivity quotas, and apologizing for reading short stories collections by Georgina Rodica Rogoz called The Mermaid’s Season (1975), a volume that will probably never get an English #SFintranslation or in any of the major languages with a properly large readership. Maybe we might dream that Rodica’s purple prose (as one reviewer put it) will get used to train an MML model, but I doubt that.

Back then, we did not have memes, but we had lots of jokes about the leaders and the crazy times of late Socialism (in the former Soviet Union, they used to be associated with a fictitious Radio Yerevan - named after the capital of Armenia). Actually, this is how we (or I) found out about the Chernobyl radioactive catastrophe, probably the most disastrous catastrophe in my lifetime apart from the anthropogenic climate catastrophe. I could never tell good jokes (like some of my friends did), and it is hard to believe those jokes (mostly dank and corny) had real consequences back then, and you could land yourself in jail. Luckily, it never happened in my surroundings. What happened was that someone from my school got reprimanded, kicked out as ‘anti-social’, or shipped to a dreaded correctional facility (we were all scared of that) because of trading ‘obscene’ Western decadent materials such as Playboy/Hustler mags in school (which, in retrospect, were never transgressive in that sense). The 1980s were also an arms race of cheesiness across the Iron Curtain, as the video below demonstrates.

Most of you do not remember a time far, far away in a distant galaxy where all media was state-owned media, where you were supposed to get lots of paper to the recycling center, and got a rough (unperfumed) toilet paper roll in exchange. There was censorship, Securitate stooges, portraits of The Man in your high school classes, and every schoolbook (even SF anthologies) had a photoshopped version of Ceaușescu’s radiant 2/3 profile so his ears would not look funny. That was before authoritarian entrepreneur bros. Romania scored very low in terms of the freedom index back then, but one cannot say it was an anti-egalitarian time. I distinctly remember how a former student (now US emigree and probably expat oligarch) visited our school in his brand new Rolls-Royce, because no one, ever ever remembered seeing something like this in real life (only in stories). Well, all these visits are stuck in traffic. It was also a time when a lot of disco “Year 2000” and “3rd millennium” songs were around, like the above. Because of its Nazi association, genetics and physical anthropology were still fairly contested sciences under real socialism, even if eugenics had a long half-life in Romania (like Marius Turda’s recent book demonstrates). Anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism were hot for a number of years, but a lot of early historical involvement by Romanian freebooters in South America was left untouched, it seems (check out the new Tara de Foc/Tierra del Fuego exhibition review).

None of that lies in the past, if now, like everyone else, you are being targeted and relegated by the new right and the new “oligarch-intellectuals” flag you - as an unproductive race- or country- traitor terrorist (or as in Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky) “a species traitor” to be relegated to penal colonies, ‘mega prison’ or the “low IQ” neurocastes, ready to be deported or ‘re-immigrated’.

To return to new bad now, against the neo-feudalist thesis where all reactionaries just want to live a happy God-fearing family life in the white homestead settler colonialist past or rule like a new digital boyar class, much recent scholarship deals exactly with how cuts & a SF veneer coats all techbro governmental contracts or fascistoid futurism defines altright fandoms (David M. Higgins and Jordan S. Carroll) and ‘new fusionist’ scientistic (Quinn Slobodian) imagination. Claiming futurality or freezing those “fluid futures” according to regressive politics was never a settled business -it was always contested terrain.

Despite the ample proof that there is an incredible output and excellent quality of non-European, non-white world SF authors (thx to Sergiu Sas for this one), all around the world, “there are fascists who hold that nonwhite people are genetically incapable of imagining and inhabiting science-fictional futures”. But does that come as a surprise in a capitalist world and, frankly, increasingly ecocidal situation when distracted by futurist (evil) paradises? Meanwhile, “Acceptable Wastage” so intensely and woefully expressed in Alien Clay SF is meant to evoke a lot of things besides the holocaust, genocide, historical association; it becomes an expedient way to justify any new austerity measures, diamond-studded chainsaws, and annihilationist measures under the guise of “efficiency”.

MORE TO READ

You can read my review of Steven Shaviro’s Fluid Futures here.

“After Chu, metaphoric claims get literalized (Literal Fabulation chap in Fluid Futures), "as ontological facts within a narrative universe" and this ontological claim is "basic to the genre" (also a big departure from the epistemological Suvinian stance). Many theorists of SF and the fantastic (Tzvetan Todorov, Le Guin, Samuel 'Chip' Delaney) have previously called for such a literalization of the metaphoric content, but nowadays SF seems to be the time when SF claims about bedrock reality hit us full on.”

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) 4k restoration review here.

30 years of Autonomous Astronauts Association.

Small review of Georgina Viorica Rogoz, Season of the Mermaids (1975)