Even as I write scholarship, I'm a creative writer at heart. I've edited science fiction magazines, I've published my own sci-fi and fantasy stories, so I really enjoy narratives, and I try to open each chapter with a miniature narrative to set the scene.

One that's particularly grabbing is in my chapter about the homophobic shaming campaigns around the video games The Last of Us and Mass Effect. I open with a description of Mass Effect. I tell you that it's set in the year 2264, and Commander Shepard — the main character — has to make all these decisions. Some are: save the Citadel council, or let them die and save other people. Let a terrorist go free so you can rescue this group of scientists, or track down the terrorist and let the scientists die. They have to choose whether they're going to commit genocide against a group who has previously waged war throughout the galaxy, or let set them free with the potential that they're going to do it again. I present all these choices that Shepard can make in game. And then I say: but what people actually cared about was whether Shepard had sex with a man or a woman. Because that's really what this controversy was all about. Your character, who could be either male or female, could have sex with a character who was an alien, and this character presented as feminine. Despite all those choices in this world that's engaging with these complex themes, people were just like, well, are you gay or are you straight? Which sets up the entire controversy and analysis in the chapter.

I use these narratives throughout the book to provide an entryway into something that's happening in spec fic or the fandom, then narrow down to just this one thing people are focusing on that shouldn't be the main point but becomes the center of the controversy. I do this with Star Wars too, where I tell a little narrative about a mocumentary that, rather than being about everything happening in the world, cares about how there are Black people in Bridgerton.

Then there's a chapter that's all historical speculative fandom. I read a bunch of fanzines from England — I went to Liverpool, I went to Oxford, I read all these historical documents — and I found this story from 1980. There's a fanzine, and in it there's a person who wrote a letter just criticizing the genre. At the end of the letter they write that it's a sexist and racist genre and we should change this. People were really upset with them, but they kind of ignored that part of the critique and just attacked everything else said in the letter, saying things like, oh, you're not actually a fan. I use that story to pose questions about how we ignore legitimate critiques of our culture for the purpose of making ourselves feel better about our fandom, or what we're actually attached to. You can see this in maybe looking at political parties — you may be a Democrat, you may be a Republican, and you may realize there are these faults in your party, but you still attack people who focus on those things. In essence, it's not just fandom. This happens in politics and culture too. So I use these short narratives to try to hold up a mirror to what's happening in the wider culture, and connect it to the seemingly marginal genre of speculative fiction and its fandoms.

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It's beyond the scope of any single book to provide a framework for preemptively stopping reactionary activity. But through analyzing the affective economies — the emotions circulating in these controversies — I demonstrate the various ways that looking to the interactions of fans of speculative fiction can enable us, be it scholars or the general public, to really understand these reactionary groups' formation, their communication, and their continuation.

It reminds me of a short story by Ray Bradbury called "No News, or What Killed the Dog?" In it, this character, Roger Bentley, is waxing philosophic about the role of science fiction. According to Bradbury — or Bentley, depending on whether you want to think about the author or the character — speculative fiction is not about predicting the future. It's not about laser beams or scantily clad women. It's about the people who realize that things could be better, could be different, and their attempt at imagining ways for it to be so. But ultimately, that version of better is up to individuals.

The key I'm trying to impart in this book is that we consider what future we're trying to construct from our pasts. Is it one where there's continued supremacy for the few? Is it one driven by fear and hatred? Or is it driven by pride over how far we've come, and an anger over a lack of progress? I don't think affect or speculative fiction are inherently progressive or reactionary — they're able to be used by people in the way that they choose. Reactionary and anti-fans will continue to use speculative fiction and affect to create these nostalgic futures, where they're trying to restore the past in the present and the future. But through engaging with emotions that motivate us to act, and those emotions that motivate others to react — through considering what emotion and speculative fiction can accomplish — we can see that a future that embraces diversity, difference, and a more socially just society is imaginable as well.

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Ongoing thread. More from Max Dosser to follow.