ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ideological implications of speculative temporalities and how narrative structures can naturalise antisemitism, race, and/or gender-based oppression in speculative fictions that outwardly seek to counter discrimination. The future alterity of Katharine Burdekin’s 1930s novels, Jo Walton’s alternate history Farthing (2006), and Naomi Alderman’s alternate future-history The Power (2016) are explored in this light. Yet work by academic Ruha Benjamin and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) show that temporal and spatial displacement in speculative fiction can work to counter oppressive logics by foregrounding the structural consequences of their encounters with historical and on-going trauma. These texts are open to a utopian futurity.
