Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction. Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism. The first chapters examine the political possibilities of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction and introduce one kind of neoliberal subject, the self-monitoring cyborg. These are individuals who join fitness/health tracking devices and applications to their body to "self-cultivate". Here, Alphin presents concrete examples of how fitness trackers are a strategy of neoliberal governmentality under the guise of self-cultivation. Moving away from Foucault’s biopolitics to themes of intensity and resilience, Alphin draws largely from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, along with the film Blade Runner to problematize notions of neoliberal resilience. Alphin returns to biopolitics, intensity, and resilience, connecting these themes to accelerationism as she engages with biohacker discourses. Here she argues that a biohacker is, in part, an intensification of the self-monitoring cyborg and accelerationism is in the end another form of resilience. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is an invaluable resource for those interested in security studies, political sociology, biopolitics, critical IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and literary theory.

Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction. Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism. The first chapters examine the political possibilities of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction and introduce one kind of neoliberal subject, the self-monitoring cyborg. These are individuals who join fitness/health tracking devices and applications to their body to "self-cultivate". Here, Alphin presents concrete examples of how fitness trackers are a strategy of neoliberal governmentality under the guise of self-cultivation. Moving away from Foucault's biopolitics to themes of intensity and resilience, Alphin draws largely from William Gibson's Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, along with the film Blade Runner to problematize notions of neoliberal resilience. Alphin returns to biopolitics, intensity, and resilience, connecting these themes to accelerationism as she engages with biohacker discourses. Here she argues that a biohacker is, in part, an intensification of the self-monitoring cyborg and accelerationism is in the end another form of resilience. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is an invaluable resource for those interested in security studies, political sociology, biopolitics, critical IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and literary theory.

Fictional narratives produced in Latin America often borrow tropes from contemporary science fiction to examine the shifts in the nature of power in neoliberal society. King examines how this leads towards a market-governed control society and also explores new models of agency beyond that of the individual.

One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera – a recent subgenre movement of science fiction – is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and privatisation of social services and programmes in the service of global free-market expansion. Providing close readings of the evolving New Space Opera canon and cultural histories and theoretical contexts of neoliberalism as a regnant ideology of our times, this book conceptualises a means to appreciate this thriving movement of popular literature.

A Dragon is dead. Corta Helio, one of the five family corporations that rule the Moon, has fallen. Its riches are divided up among its many enemies, its survivors scattered. Eighteen months have passed . The remaining Helio children, Lucasinho and Luna, are under the protection of the powerful Asamoahs, while Robson, still reeling from witnessing his parent’s violent deaths, is now a ward--virtually a hostage-- of Mackenzie Metals. And the last appointed heir, Lucas, has vanished of the surface of the moon. Only Lady Sun, dowager of Taiyang, suspects that Lucas Corta is not dead, and more to the point—that he is still a major player in the game. After all, Lucas always was the Schemer, and even in death, he would go to any lengths to take back everything and build a new Corta Helio, more powerful than before. But Corta Helio needs allies, and to find them, the fleeing son undertakes an audacious, impossible journey--to Earth. In an unstable lunar environment, the shifting loyalties and political machinations of each family reach the zenith of their most fertile plots as outright war erupts. Luna: Wolf Moon continues Ian McDonald's saga of the Five Dragons. Luna 1. Luna: New Moon 2. Luna: Wolf Moon 3. Luna: Moon Rising At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Science fiction as a vital bridge between technoscience and culture, an early warning system, a method for imagining differently. In the new millennium, science fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream. At the same time, it has undergone massive transformations. No longer can it be derided as indigestible technobabble or escapist trash or a white man’s playground—not that it ever really was. Sf is rich and diverse, serious, and fun. A vital bridge between technoscience and culture, it is an early warning system, a method for imagining differently, and a way of experiencing our increasingly science-fictional world. It is the vernacular of the 21st century. This Is Not A Science Fiction Textbook brings together leading sf scholars, including some of the most exciting new critical voices, to introduce the genre for the general reader. Its first part outlines some key ideas used to think about sf, such as Estrangement, Extrapolation, and Alterity. Its second part maps some of the genre’s global history, from the Enlightenment and European colonialism to Indigenous and African Futurisms. Its third part surveys sf at the turn of the 2020s, organised by concepts, movements and new academic disciplines, from Afrofuturism and Animal Studies to Queer Theory and the Weird—and each chapter, whether it is on Climate Fiction or Neurodiversity, is accompanied by an introduction to a major contemporary novel and film.

Provides an overview of ways that utopian thinking has shaped American culture, focusing on the need to remake imperial USA.

Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations brings together a diverse array of critical IR scholars, political theorists, critical security studies researchers, and critical geographers to provide a series of interventions on the topic of death and death-making in global politics. Contrary to most existing scholarship, this volume does not place the emphasis on traditional sources or large-scale configurations of power/force leading to death in IR. Instead, it details, theorizes, and challenges more mundane, perhaps banal, and often ordinary modalities of violence perpetrated against human lives and bodies, and often contributing to horrific instances of death and destruction. Concepts such as "slow death," "soft killing," "superfluous bodies," or "extra/ordinary" destruction/disappearance are brought to the fore by prominent voices in these fields alongside more junior creative thinkers to rethink the politics of life and death in the global polity away from dominant IR or political theory paradigms about power, force, and violence. The volume features chapters that offer thought-provoking reconsiderations of key concepts, theories, and practices about death and death-making along with other chapters that seek to challenge some of these concepts, theories, or practices in settings that include the Palestinian territories, Brazilian cities, displaced population flows from the Middle East, sites of immigration policing in North America, and spaces of welfare politics in Scandinavian states.

Combining work by critics from Latin America, the USA, and Europe, Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice is the first anthology of articles in English to examine science fiction in all of Latin America, from Mexico and the Caribbean to Brazil and the Southern Cone. Using a variety of sophisticated theoretical approaches, the book explores not merely the development of a science fiction tradition in the region, but more importantly, the intricate ways in which this tradition has engaged with the most important cultural and literary debates of recent year.

Reverse colonization narratives are stories like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which technologically superior Martians invade and colonize England. They ask Western audiences to imagine what it’s like to be the colonized rather than the colonizers. David Higgins argues that although some reverse colonization stories are thoughtful and provocative, reverse colonization fantasy has also led to the prevalence of a very dangerous kind of science fictional thinking in our current political culture. It has become popular among groups such as anti-feminists, white supremacists, and far-right reactionaries to appropriate a sense of righteous, anti-imperial victimhood—the sense that white men, in particular, are somehow colonized victims fighting an insurgent resistance against an oppressive establishment. Nothing could be timelier, as an armed far-right mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to stop the presidential election from being “stolen from them.” Higgins shows that this reverse colonization stance depends upon a science fictional logic that achieved dominance within imperial fantasy during the 1960s and has continued to gain momentum ever since. By identifying with fantastic forms of victimhood, subjects who already enjoy social hegemony are able to justify economic inequality, expansions of police and military power, climatological devastation, new articulations of racism, and countless other forms of violence—all purportedly in the name of security, self-defense, and self-protection.