Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics : Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism

From Tolkien to Star Trek and from Game of Thrones to The Walking Dead, imaginary worlds in fantastic genres offer highly detailed political worlds beyond capitalism. This book examines the complex ways in which these popular storyworlds offer valuable conceptual tools for anti-capitalist participatory politics.

From Tolkien to Star Trek, from Game of Thrones to Battlestar Galactica, and from The Walking Dead to Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist concept albums, transmedia world-building offers us complex and immersive environments beyond capitalism. This book examines the ways in which these popular storyworlds offer tools for anticapitalist theory and practice. Building on Hardt and Negri’s theory of global capitalism, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics shows how transmedia world-building has the potential of offering more than a momentary escape from capitalist realism in the age of media convergence and participatory culture. The book features eight fantastic storyworlds that offer vivid illustrations of global capitalism’s contradictory logic. Approaching transmedia world-building both as a cultural form and as a political economy, it demonstrates the limitations inherent in fandom and fan culture, which is increasingly absorbed as a form of immaterial labor. But at the same time, the book also explores the productive ways in which fantastic storyworlds contain a radical energy that can give us new ways of thinking about politics, popular culture, and anticapitalism.