Economics and financialisation

This chapter begins by situating sf studies alongside the financial turn in global economics and humanities, examining how its insights extend across sf and what sf studies can offer to our understanding of it. One of the hallmarks of the financial turn in sf studies is that finance itself has become increasingly science-fictional in its operations. In this regard, critics often begin by interrogating the interconnections between speculative finance and speculative fiction, drawing out the similarities and distinctions in their form, world-building and narrative protocols. From this general overview, the chapter proceeds by analysing how sf reflects and challenges the hegemony of financialisation in a few key areas, including the securitisation of personal debt, and the commodification and securitisation of personal information via data-mining processes for ‘behavioural futures markets’ via ‘surveillance capitalism’. In the same way that finance ultimately seeks to control the future through transforming qualitative uncertainty into quantitative risks to be hedged against and/or leveraged, the cultural–economic turn to datafication comes down to the same desire for perfect information, for perfect prediction, to arrest contingency, history and difference. From here, the chapter moves away from issues of sf narrative and form to consider sf itself as a financial instrument, particularly in relation to contemporary franchise culture. It then concludes by analysing how sf not only cognitively maps the contours of our financialised world-system, but also imagines futures outside of it.