Review of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll (University of Minnesota Press)

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right. By Jordan S. Carroll. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024, 120 pp. (paperback) ISBN 978-1-5179-1708-1. US List: $10.

Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right won one of science fiction’s most prestigious prizes, a Hugo Award, in August 2025, indicating how powerfully it speaks to a moment Carroll perhaps wishes he hadn’t anticipated. Challenging a tendency among critics to treat science fiction as a straightforward vehicle for left-utopianism, Carroll argues that right-wing readers assert “ownership over sci-fi,” too, often because they “think white people maintain a monopoly on modal imagination” and innovation generally (11). Why is Richard Spencer obsessed with Dune? Why do disaffected sci-fi fans, nerds, and intellectuals like Nick Land become reactionaries? Why did the founder of a neo-Nazi party write prophecies about eugenicists from the lost city of Atlantis breeding a species of white “Homo Superior” to launch an intergalactic empire? Theodore Beale (“Vox Day”), who was dismissed from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association a decade ago after losing a bid for the organization’s presidency and later orchestrated an internet campaign to torpedo the Hugo’s nomination process (an episode the book analyzes in depth), responded to Carroll’s win by asserting that “science fiction is, and has always been, an inherently white male genre,” which affirmed, in principle, the book’s central argument.¹

As the abandonment of consensus reality is posited as symptom and cause of the present’s turmoil, Carroll helps us understand how stories about our “separate worlds” are also stories people tell themselves. Speculative Whiteness attends to ways of reading that cement mythologies like the “inherently white male genre” and make whiteness and maleness seem knighted with exclusive claims on the future. “Speculation serves a . . . fundamental purpose” for the Right, Carroll argues, in that it becomes about “who has the power to imagine other worlds in the first place” (9). Carroll shows how the “speculative imagination” scholars have used to define sci-fi is wrapped up in all the ways people have sorted people and imagined themselves and their futures as separate from one another. Categories through which knowledge itself is valued, like forethought or rationality, are shot through with racial thinking: the idea of a cognitive elite “who can withstand delayed gratification” to “triumph over the backwards many” for example, has suffused both right-wing thought and sci-fi (35). As tech industry leaders now profess a desire to hasten the end times or go off-world, Carroll explores the conscription of these narratives into openly authoritarian political projects.

Speculative Whiteness is helpful here, and remarkable, for the breadth of the analysis it accomplishes across an introduction on “fascist worldmaking” and two short chapters, one on the “alt-victimhood” that has been a bridge between sci-fi and a century of right-wing political culture, and another on white nationalist discourses of futurity. Carroll reads sci-fi texts and their reception, in official and informal institutions, through political discourse mediated by everything from pulp magazines to digital platforms. Under consideration are avowedly far-right thinkers and their fictions, like The Turner Diaries, a book about a conspiracy to subjugate white people admired among white supremacists. But Carroll brings sustained attention to more apparently ambivalent right-libertarian strains in sci-fi—a Robert Heinlein, for example—to understand how the Right reads, imagines its ideal futures, and imagines the actions it needs to take to bring those futures into being. The Right approaches sci-fi as if it were “an imperative,” Carroll argues, stripping the genre of “speculative indeterminacy” that otherwise allows readers to understand it as a “warning” or “wish-dream” (8).

Speculative Whiteness, traversing the feedback loop between a genre and the interpretive communities that have evolved with it, is also in this sense a study of the broad diffusion of sci-fi fan culture. Sci-fi has often “appealed to [a] sense of geek ressentiment,” Carroll writes (31). A right-wing thinker like Guillaume Faye, then, who believes only white people can play the long-game technoscientific advancement requires and who wants Europe to “return to its primordial destiny” as a white enclave in order to launch civilization forward (83), ends up sounding like Heinlein, speaking at an sci-fi convention: “Science fiction fans differ from most of the rest of the race by thinking in terms of racial magnitudes—not even centuries, but thousands of years” (33).

With the ascendance of the Silicon Valley Nerd Reich, the assertion that “there is nothing inherently progressive about futurism” is both as apparent as ever and essential to think through.² For Carroll, the sticking point is what the Right has in mind when they talk about shoring up the futures they want. One way today’s fascists exact their imagination-denying imaginary—through spectacular violence intended to shore up the borders of an in-group, give flesh to a mythology, and strike fear into people who would live differently in community—is familiar in all the historical analogies the Left increasingly feels compelled to reach for. A major obstacle that critics on the Left face navigating contemporary tech-inflected fascisms is that the media infrastructure that brought its architects into power, and which Left critics also rely on to circulate ideas and connect, often amplify these reactionary world-making tactics. As the imposition of “genAI” and apocalyptic narratives suffusing it as an object of financial speculation further erodes collective capacity to tease apart the threads that distinguish representations of the world, including the stories we tell about it, from the world itself, Speculative Whiteness gives us powerful tools to do just that. By scrutinizing how genre matters to people, how they imagine their worlds and imagine the power of that imagination, Carroll shows why genre continues to matter as a subject for critical cultural inquiry motivated by commitments to a “tomorrow [that] belongs to everyone” (105).