In After Capitalism, Jo Lindsay Walton uses speculative fiction to tackle some of the largest, most urgent, and strangest political questions of our time. Is climate science itself a speculative practice, even as it conveys some of the hardest facts we know? Does the end of capitalism require the end of money, or might money mutate into something new—a currency based on time, labor or reputation? As AI threatens to take over more aspects of social life, might we think of money itself as a kind of AI, one that could be reprogrammed? Why do ecological forms of calculation—from real world carbon credits to speculative energy currencies—fail to protect the planet that sustains us?
Drawing on the works of Edward Bellamy, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Cory Doctorow, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee, Karen Lord, Malka Older, Nnedi Okorafor, Marge Piercy, Adam Roberts, Joanna Russ, Wole Talabi, and more, Walton explores whether science fiction can create space for fugitive dreams to thrive, or whether it serves merely as a laboratory for capitalism’s own reinvention.Weaving together literary criticism, critical political economy, and perspectives from the environmental humanities, After Capitalism argues that the worlds beyond capitalism are neither unimaginable nor entirely elsewhere.