Throughout the “Operative Fictions” research project, during which I studied how speculative fiction influenced the practices and thinking of climate change activists, there was an interesting redemptive theme in how some activists cited fiction as being influential. Most of these activists were associated with the Danish branch of Extinction Rebellion. Furthermore, for the most part, they held master’s degrees or higher certificates of postgraduate education. Many were also Danish, which also bestows upon them certain privileges, occupying as they do what I have called elsewhere “the penthouse suite at the end of the world”. I say this not to diminish the sacrifices and efforts they make in trying to slow the destruction of this planet’s livability by monied and powerful interests who, make no mistake, are responsible for keeping us trapped in our dependency on fossil fuels, which entraps us in a relationship of complicity in this destruction. Indeed, except for the European Union passport, I occupy a similar position. I say this to underline the particularity of their relationships to fiction and to activism; to highlight their expectations of democratic efficacy, however tacitly held, and their placement in a culture in which narratives, fictional or otherwise, are structured after a redemptive appeal
While this appeal was not present in all of the fiction related to by the activists I talked with, it was a common structure. Some pointed to The Lord of the Rings or the film The Dark Crystal, both of which articulate messianic narratives of small groups of friends who stand up and ultimately sacrifice themselves to save the world by restoring balance (Holt & Alacovska 2024). Others recognised in dystopian fiction, such as TV series like The Rain, warnings of a future we are on track to reach and a redemptive imperative to act to avoid it (Alacovska and Holt 2025). This talk, however, is not going to dissect the relationships that these activists have with this fiction. Needless to say, when you repeatedly put your body and freedom on the line to struggle for even the slightest reprieve of a crisis that is already largely locked in, then whatever devices you reach for to make this labour more possible will have proven themselves as worthwhile, especially as the resistance one faces in this is strong, whether it be in the form of state violence, capitalist corruption or public apathy.
What I want to call attention to here, in the epilogue to this work, is a step removed from what was found in the field. Instead, I want to focus on, to use Donna Haraway’s oft-quoted but as often under-examined formulation, the “stories that tell stories” and particularly “whose stories tell stories” (Haraway 2019), in a way that looks past the self-flagellation of a critique of institutional positionality, warranted as it may be, to consider how the stories that undergird that problematic position may be deeper and wider in their influence than is entirely comfortable for those of us committed to a narratives of green transitions as a redemption to that havoc capitalized humanity has wrought on the planet. To do this, I will, of course, take us on a detour to Sun Ra’s song, “It’s after the end of the world” by way of the TV show Atlanta.
Sun Ra was a Black American composer and poet who lived in the mid-20th century. Despite probably having encountered it years earlier, this song “It’s after the end of the world” from one of the soundtrack albums of his film Space is the Place re-entered my consciousness more recently when it was used in the teaser trailer for the third season of Atlanta, Donald Glover’s black afrosurreal-comedy about blackness that has, not unproblematically, made explicable to white critics like me the surreality of systemic injustice, and with that, the profound arbitrariness and fragility of the privileges I, and many of us in this room, enjoy in such systems. The teaser dropped when I was a couple of years into an “Operative Fictions” research project, which juxtaposed the song with ghost-town images of European capitals and cultural institutions that gave it a new resonance.
Throughout his career and life, Ra presented himself as a pharaoh from outer space. And in the film, the song was composed alongside, he states in a mythscience fiction deadpan mode that he is here to return the black people of Earth to their home in the stars – this world ended for them a while ago, so there is no need to mourn or stay in this dead place. But this should not be read as a moral redemption narrative. As the artist and theorist Kodwo Eshun points out, “In his (Ra’s) MythScience systems, Ancient Africans are alien Gods from a despotic future” (Ehsun 1999, 155), which I have connected elsewhere to Lyotard’s conception of postmodernity as “incredulity towards the grand narratives”. (2006, xxiv). But here the incredulity is different from the typical examples of postmodern cultural practices in which subjects question their position. In Ra’s incredulity, there is an act of refusal to accept the blackmail offer that there is any redemption to be found in the white supremacist subjectivity on offer to him.
This frames how I read the song’s use in the trailer; a speculative sonic fiction in a televisual fiction about the narrative of redemptive success in the music industry that allows the Black US American at the centre of show to visit Europe on tour, the imperial core from which the capitalized violence and ideas of natural order emerged to would kidnap their ancestors from Africa, destroying the lives and worlds of millions, only to find in present day an uncanny, desolate and impotent monument to its days imperial ingloriousness. It’s this world and the worlds of enslaved Africans that June Tyson is singing about in Ra’s song as having already ended, and it is Ra’s insistence to the Black people of the US that the case is not different for the United States of the 1970s.
The refrain’s phrasing deserves attention, too. “It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” It presents the case of the apocalypse as a matter of fact, of which the listener’s ignorance renders the speaker incredulous in a different but related mode to the incredulity of the grand narrative. It is a classic example of a call to “get woke”, in black American vernacular, to how this place works. In the context of Ra’s work, it is addressed to black US Americans who still labour under the belief that they can make a place for themselves in this settler colonial “former” slaver nation. And it is its incredulity that I want to expand out to better understand the stories many of us unwittingly let tell us the stories we wish to believe could be made true.
Many of us know the phrase variously attributed to Zizek, Jameson and Fisher – It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It can conjure up images of 90s disaster movies in which the symbols and landmarks of Western civilisation, along with the planet, are blown to smithereens. The ease with which these images of the annihilation of everything come to mind alongside the popularity of this phrase and the seeming impossibility of imagining a different system is an unsettling thing to consider. Especially as the word world is far from a perfect synonym for planet. Think about how different states across the planet have been casually and albeit officially categorised into the first, second and third worlds, as if economic policy and prosperity were the means of designating ontological status. Think about every person who declares that “music is my world” or one enraptured lover whispers “you are my world” to the other.
The word world, then, actually talks about how a particular set of relationships between people, places, plants, animals and things and how these relationships can come to be rendered meaningful. If this is what a world is – and is as significant to our experience as being the conditions under which significance can appear at all – then if it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end, and to the extent our world is the relationships and meaning hewn by capitalism, we might want to consider taking the easier option. Because in this formulation, then, imagining “the end of the world” is simply imagining the end of capitalism and yet the difficulty persists. Like the weight of capitalist realism has all but crushed any sense of possibility, and yet, committing to living under this weight is too painful to accept. Perhaps, then, the phrase is better put as what it is: a death drive resolution to the tension between the capitalist reality and post-capitalist pleasure principle in the intolerable conditions of the present. It is more difficult to imagine something we’d like better than capitalism to the point that we’d rather imagine annihilation.
In his book, And: Phenomenology of the End, Franco “Bifo” Berardi lays out what the end of a world as a system of giving reality significance entails.
“A world ends when the signs proceeding from the semiotic meta-machine grow undecipherable for a cultural community that perceived itself as a world … When signs proceeding from the environment are no longer consistent and understandable with the frame of the shared code, when signs that convey effectiveness and potency escape the shared cultural code, a civilisation ceases to be vital”. (2015, 331)
By meta-machine, Berardi refers to the concrete processes through which meaning emerges (social identities, rituals, ethics, etc.) rely on assumptions about the significance of these processes as pointing to particular ways of relating to material and experience that can not be ultimately justified and yet persist and function. Berardi’s conception also suggests some other qualities of worlds. They are not fixed or stable, but are instigated and shifted by social practices and environmental contexts. In this way, worlds never exist in the definite singular form, nor can they belong to one person.
What is horrifically remarkable about what we might call the modern world, of which the European colonisers and slavers represented an earlier phase, and which Kathryn Yusoff and other have shown is inextricably connected to capitalisms environmental crisis, is the scale of destruction (both kinetically and symbolically) it has wrought on an incalculable number of worlds in an attempt to scorch the Earth of any but its own symbolic meta-machine.
Martin Savrasnky calls this the modern world’s project of “world modification” – the use of force to make the world of the moderns the only permissible and possible way to experience, move through and shape reality. This project is, however, paradoxical. Because not only is it internally incoherent, but even granting this incoherence, were its suppositions about its own correspondence with reality to be true, then it would not be necessary for it to violently enforce the boundaries of its world. Rather, the violence used in the project of world monification points to the fragility of the modern world that many of us are scared that it might be ending, and, with Sun Ra, we might suggest that it has ended already.
What I want to suggest by this, then, is that it is much more difficult to escape the stories that we tell other stories with than many of us would like to believe. Finding a messianic tendency in the fiction that has influenced activists should then provide an opportunity to reflect upon the stories that take a researcher concerned about the climate crisis to activists or speculative fiction in the first place. As Timothy Clark has argued, there is something amiss with the focus on the power of fiction amidst the ongoing destruction of the environment, which seems to wish the problems we face merely follow from ‘false values or intellectual mistakes’ (2019, 15). This certainly seems clear when we consider the discourse of sustainability, which at times seems to strive to save the modern world, the world of extractive capitalist realism, from the consequences of producing the world of extractive capitalist realism. Paradoxically, attempting to sustain a world heading to its own destruction.
This is symptomatic of what Savransky argues is modernity and progress’s “promise of redemption”, which renders the future as a temporal place, ever receding, in which the violence, destruction and cruelty of the present will retroactively become justified by the arrival of progressive utopia. A redemptive promise speculative fiction does not automatically eschew such, especially when it is deployed by academics who, Clark notes, can tend to act “as if all human society were an academic seminar” (2019: 132). Here we see a story that feigns innocence to tell a story of how imagination, whether a utopian goal or dystopian warning, can save us by forming our thinking more “correctly”, and thus all the suffering and violence will have been for something in the end.
Against this, I read the speculative, sonic fiction of Sun Ra, as displaying, in the words of Martin Savransky, an irreverent pessimism of an unfuturism. That is a pessimism which takes “seriously the tragic swelling of joy at the mass improvisation that is sometimes set loose even amid irredeemable loss,” and “the wild lucidity and inventiveness to which one can be given over when it’s all over” ( 2026, 102). This echoes the remarks of the anarchist writers like Ursula K Le Guin or the recent work on anarchitecture, queer theorist Jack Halberstam, that we have nothing except what we can give to each other.
And it is in this embrace of the nothing that is further expended for the other, from which social life emerges, a kind of nested potential of what may come and what already is appears. Halberstam quotes Moten in the introduction to The Undercommons by Moten and Harney.
“I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that” (2013)
Moten’s belief in the world offers a provisional commitment not to but through and beyond the present by way of the subtraction from nothing. From this, we can begin to think through the formulation Moten borrows from Eduard Glissant, that to “consent not to be a single being” would seem to be the condition of adequately accounting for what and whose stories tell stories. Practising such a subtraction that would, in the present, remove the definite article from “the” is perhaps then part of what Savransky means by living “an insubordinate life”;
“at one and the same time a life without ground, without the hope or promise of another world or another life, and the active affirmation of the risk of living this life while one can— however fragile and improvised, however rugged and unstable, however, subject to the inextricable connections that bind one’s projects and aspirations to inhuman dynamics of chance, contingency, peripeteia and catastrophe no plan can account for and no amount of progress can overcome.” (2026, 106)
To which we may add a life lived with the refusal of the comforting structures produced by telling stories with other stories that would claim correspondence with the idea of nature they invented.
With this irreverent nothing comes a temporal disposition the indefinite of an “unfuture” which Savransky attributes to Sun Ra in his forthcoming book as “a kind of unfuturism as a praxis of temporal disorientation that sustains what vibrates for now and renders ‘the future’ undone, that rhymes with Sun Ra’s lyrics when he sang that “the future is never/Never comes tomorrow/Never is not” (Savransky Forthcoming NP). What this points to is that the excitement and horror of the future is in the inability of anyone in the present, which is to say anyone who has concretely existed, to contain, predict or, let alone, know it. Futurity as something that is never and not is what makes it contestable now and never definite. In this way, to speculate is to act in the present, with all the problems that being and acting presently unfurl.
To end then, what seems clear to me, if still resistant to neat formulation, is that when we consider what speculative fiction may do for others, we need to be attentive to what we may hope it may do for us. In the ethnographic stories we tell of fiction “getting in action” in social life, what are the larger stories of which this is a part? Nothing we find out in the field, in fiction or publish in papers or books or present and nothing we do with any of it can redeem the violence that has led to the crisis we are living through. And so in our speculative research about what fiction may do, it is important to hold on to the irreverence of Sun Ra’s and Tyson’s refrain “It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” if we are to escape the stories that let us get comfortable in a world set up to annihilate us and itself and so much more.
Works Cited
Alacovska, A., & Holt, M. (2025). Speculative experimentations with other worlds: How cli-fi sustains radical hope among environmental activists in Denmark. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0(0).
Clark Timothy (2019). The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Eshun, K. (1999). More brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books
Haraway, D. (2019). It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories. A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 34(3), 565–575. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2019.1664163
Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning& black study. Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions.
Holt, M. & Alacovska, A. (2024). “Speculative wagers on the end of a world: Worldquakes, speculative fiction, and climate activism”, Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organisation. https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/speculative-wagers-end-world-worldquakes-speculative-fiction-and-climate-activism
Lyotard, J-F. (2006) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press.
Savransky, M. (Forthcoming). Exology: Planetary Upheaval and Social Life. Open Humanities Press.
Savransky, M. (2026). “Irreverent Pessimism (A Planetary Life Without Appeal)”. Theory & Event, 29(1), 90. https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2026.a978971.
Savransky, M. (2021). Around the day in eighty worlds: Politics of the pluriverse. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Yusoff, K. (2018) A billion black anthropocenes or none. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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