January 21, 2025

SFitze What Mad Universe in 2024/2025

Hello Y’all. Thanks for reading my increasingly erratic newsletter posts. Happy New Year to everyone and keep your skins on (while the Dragon becomes a Serpent). Of course, it’s mad, but let us see in how many ways.

“By any standard, 2024 has been a remarkable year for Indian SF.”~Gautam Bhatia

“No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.”~Lenin.

My wager is that not only has ‘the West’ been incredibly inept at imagining a future abolition of capitalism during the last hundred of years or so since Lenin's death, but it has also shown itself less imaginative in other ways. Dear departed American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist Fredric Jameson’s (1934 - 2024) often quoted “easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism” hides another (related) big failure: to understand, relate, and imagine the what-is-it-aboutness of a global majority that works, lives, fabulates, struggles and dies outside the monoculture of still largely Western owned legacy media channels.

Those lucid enough may understand that “there is a weakness in our imagination” that fails to anticipate and extrapolate from the past anti-imperialist struggle into the immediate future. For many pundits and members of the fourth estate it is a failure to come to terms with what role decolonization has played in imagining a different world (“the central event of the 20th century for the vast majority of the human population” in the words of Pankaj Mishrah). But also, in our more narrow [SFitze] sense, it fails to acknowledge that so much new global SF is written by a new generation of non-Western authors. Gautam Bhatia (in his invaluable substack Words for Worlds) marks 2024 as a prolific year for Indian SF: “By any standard, 2024 has been a remarkable year for Indian SF. On my count, there are nine distinct book-length SF works published by Indians this year, and they range across the spectrum of genre (science fiction, fantasy, spec fic) and format (novels, short story collections, anthologies), comprising both debuts as well as non-debuts, and books published in India as well as abroad.”

For the global majority, the experience of decolonization since the 1940s has been essential in understanding “their past and measure their potential future” or in Leibnizian terms - its Tricontinental (Asian, African, Central and South American) compossibility (a term picked up from Leibniz and discussed by Guy Lardreau in 1988 and Steven Shaviro in his magnum opus - 2024 book Fluid Futures on potentiality and futurity). The catch-up necessitated by SF fans (as well as fourth estate members) nowadays is no mean task. But to reiterate what Bruce Springsteen in his 1992 musical video has said - that there's 57 Channels (And Nothin' On) -is simply disingenuous. Today, 30 years later, there is so much more online content from the “rest of the world”. More publications and #SFintranslation (a short scroll of Rachel S. Cordasco will give you an idea) than ever before if anyone cares to look closely.

During high school, in the waning years of real existing socialism, a few of us at the local high school developed some real interest and curiosity about other continents and other cultures, combined with a certain disdain for Eurocentric thought and the supposed “civilizational mission” as well as for Romania’s role as the frankly ridiculous (S. H. I. E. L. D. anyone?!) Shield of European Christianity in the face of Ottoman (Muslim) invaders. A spurious idea that has justified vast massacres, so-called wars against terror and genocides even today, a lazy view that promoted a very simplistic and brazenly Eurocentric (similar to Plato-to-NATO) version of triumphalist history. Avoiding such simplistic stories and ready-made justifications for conquest, environmental disasters, exploitation, and white settler colonialism and supremacist essentialism is still important today.

In retrospect, it seems like other possibilities for futurity have been derided by some of Romania’s most respected philosophers and their well-trained classicist instincts. Modernity couldn't be found at home neither South or East. As Ion Dumitrescu, Bezna fellow traveller and theoretician of “pre-”, recently wrote in an essential text On Lăutărism (from Dimitrie Cantemir to Dan Armeanca) comissioned for the Land of Fire / Țara de foc’ show in Timisoara 2024, one can retrospectively feel that pioneering musicologist, writer, philosopher and proto- ethnographer (Descriptio Moldaviae), Dimitrie Cantemir (1672-1723) shared the same mission with Dan Armeanca's magisterial reinvention of the lăutarie musical manifold. We can envision a transhistorical encounter between the two because the “manea [musical style] meant opening up lăutărie to Turkish arabesque, Greek, Egyptian and Iraqi electrified disco-pop, but also western jazz-funk, and to the Balkans in general”. Such wider, bewildering orientation and eager participation towards a branching, non-Eurocentric transnational non-canonic Third-worldism was anathema to many Romanian academics and intellectuals who would rather accept a romanticized pre-technological ahistorical “acoustic fiddler”- lăutar. For Ion, this welcome complicity & matchmaking was condemned by conservative philosopher Constantin Noica’s regressive ideological engagement with modernity & Dimtrie Cantemir that transformed this early Enlightenment figure into a representative of "lăutarism" and enemy No 1 of “the great Romanian cultural project”, and one might surmise to Romania’s adhesion to Western axial values, because he was raised at the Ottoman court and eminently open towards myriad influences (“Armenian, Sephardic, Persian”). If for Noica - Cantemir and by extension the neo-lăutari - became examples of inveterate dilettantism and Eastern European cultural relativism, at the dawn of 21st history we have no excuse not to see them as veritable cultural chrononauts and hacktivists, representatives of the most advanced and future-oriented “modular” expressions Romania had to give.

I had a history teacher who was no mean guy and played soccer with us after classes. Endowed with incredible wit, he used to joke, play tricks, and be a cheeky sympathetic pedagogue. Yet, he scolded us that we paid too much attention to the “outside”. Meaning that we did not have enough interest in national history. We strayed too far away from our ‘origins’. How am I to take this today, when every brand of crackpot white nationalist and Christian civilization protectionist sing the same tired song? Even if tainted by childish exoticism and pop xenophilia (not dissimilar to what Erik Davis describes in his SW Cantina post), our huge attraction for and appreciation of non-European civilizations from Central America, South America, Egypt, India, China, etc. meant that during adolescence we already knew who the oppressors were and could not brush aside the Conquistador massacres. It was not so much ‘clash of civilisations’ and more like génocide, looting and disrespect for any cultural and civilizational artefacts found their way (mostly illegally) into European hands. Like the gold pre-columbian objects stolen from what was definitely not a New World - few admired the skills of their makers or where curious enough about their cultural or ritualic value (Dürrer was supposedly one of the few European admirers, getting a glimpse of the loot before it got melted down into ingots if I'm not mistaken). We somehow became aware of this bloody history. A mindblowing, shattering contact with Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire followed when it got translated in Romanian. Maybe this was the last flicker of a soon-to-be-extinct solidarity with The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a faint memory of the 1955 Bandung Conference, and a soon-to-be-forgotten comradeship for internationalist anti-colonial struggles everywhere?

There was always fan speculation around the Back To the Future trilogy’s villain Biff Tannen, if he was based on Donald Trump or not. Back in 2015 Back to the Future writer Bob Gale confirmed the speculation of fans that Marty’s nemesis was indeed based on the presidential candidate. While the Trumpian potential was implicit and contemporary developments prefigured it, no one could anticipate things happening elsewhere. Even if prescient in this one important regard this key SF movie from 1989 leaves out another possibility, a big fat blindspot - that was never taken into consideration. Back then the ideology of 1.0 capitalist globalization was omnipotent, and could not acknowledge nor imagine “the rapid diminishment of Western power, legitimacy, and prestige”. High (or hyper-) modernism brought by others than the industrial core countries, not China's otherness or the uniqueness of its different path to socialism was the big Ooops moment.

Back to the Future - means very different things today, but again it seems that we can only see Biff/Trump, tariffs, and Tiktok tribulations. There's also sinking Chinese mega-cities, US Tiktokers Great March to Red Little Book/Xiaohongshu, and there's pissed off comments at Hunyuan's AI’s video-to-video modeling of Keanu Reaves in the Severance series.

What Mad Universe was written by American author Frederic Brown in 1949. In the frame of this fabulation, a brash and promising SF magazine editor by the name of Keith Winton is answering a letter from a teenage fan when he’s catapulted into an alternate reality by the faulty tech - during the first attempt of a rocket to reach the moon. What makes this book hilarious and unnerving is how Winton, a purveyor of low-brow genre literature, an author of SF pulps paid by the story/word count, is forced to confront in real life what had been the realm of pulps: “Seven-foot purple monsters? Earth at war with Arcturus? General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Venus Sector?”(as the book cover announces).

This new Reality - in What Mad Universe takes by surprise and endangers even the best of us; the most experienced and ingenious SF creators. Secondly, such 1949 story offers some kind of relief that in a World Gone Mad, the weird implausibility of SF might help out to deal with unpredictable techno-fascist maniacal multibillionaires and their surfing the hype cycles and churning countless "bad novums".

Ever since Lenin’s set of writings on imperialism from 1916–1920 (that includes his classic work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism) what followed in the wake of the first globalized stirrings of the anti-imperialist world revolutionary activity, especially following the Russo-Japanese War(1904-1905), was a spat of “white fear” tracts that influenced the Völkisch and Nazi movement. Many had to reckon with how Imperial Japan - once the hope for all “the dark nations of the world”(W. E. Burghardt DuBois) turned into a local hegemon and imperialist fiend that even today refuses to admit its crimes against humanity (Nanjing Massacre). But in order to understand what anti-imperialism was up against at the time and where the ideological roots of today’s white supremacism lie, I think it is essential to historicize and confront such “white fear” propaganda. This potent blend of fear-mongering and racist pseudo-scientific xenophobic vitriol nourished the Western reactionary imagination with tracts that F. Scott Fitzgerald lampooned in his novel The Great Gatsby. Whenever the Great Replacement and Eurabia conspiracy get mentioned, I am sorry to say but we are constantly being fed the same damaging and obnoxious “white fear” fodder. Enough is enough.

BOOKS/ZINES/ARTICLES/EVENTS

I heartily recommend Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt Right by Jordan S. Carroll (published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2024). This and David M. Higgins’s Reverse Colonisation: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood (University of Iowa Press, 2021) are essential recent books that help us remember and understand how reactionary and fascist strains of SF have been informing both alt-right and the reactionary International, coloring the outlook of ex-nerds from the Right Tech billionaire’s (Social-Darwinist) ‘select’ club.

I also contributed with the article SF and Impermanence 無常 (for Zero Gravity magazine) at the behest of Heliu to another issue of Zero Gravity (my thanks to RiverFlow - indefatigable fan-of-fans, global SF editor and 2023 Hugo best fanzine Zero Gravity Editor). Thanks to (newlywed!) friend SF scholar and fan Zixuan 子旋 from Chengdu for the translation.

Desert Planets/Stellar Silk Roads Cozzzmonautica edition 2024 was another success (thanks largely to Indecis new Timisoara Bastion space - with Mimi & Sergiu caravan leaders and their feisty gallery friends in tow). This edition also had the best Cozzzmo poster in living memory thanks to Lucian Barbu's incredible imaginary powers. Many thanks to the lecturing scholars, artists, performers, participants, and skillful co-pilots.

Many thanks to inspiring Indonesian artist, theoretician of gharib [weird or strange in the context of Sufism] dear friend Riar Rizaldi (check a great interview here) for his kind invitation and participation in last year's unique event: the Stranglet Symposium and the chance to meet some weirdness luminaries at Gasworks Gallery in London as part of Riar’s Mirage solo show (more on that amazing series of presentations and recs in the next SFitze newsletter). My own contribution to the symposium is highly indebted to Ion D., who made possible our pilgrimage towards Babadag’s Cosmic Saltukism in the Dobrogea region.

More articles I wrote recently:

Hacking the Networks of Power: How We Became Energy Parasites Counting the Rays of the Sun (for BG)

Overcapa-City: SF Megacities, Massive Urbanization, and Ecological Civilization (for BG)

DECOMMISSIONING HUMANITY: FOR A BETTER BETRAYAL OF YOUR SPECIES (for Diffractions - many thanks for the invite)

THANKS FOR READING!