In 1937, John W. Campbell took over Astounding Science Fiction, gathering a talented group of writers and launching the Golden Age of Science Fiction (SF). One year later, European intellectuals attending the Colloque Walter Lippmann in Paris coined the term "neoliberal" to describe their anti-collectivist vision of political economy. Both sets of writers responded to similar world events: in the United States and Great Britain, the rise of the welfare state; in Europe, the rise of fascism; throughout the world, the expansion of the professional-managerial class.

This panel traces confluences and conflicts between SF and neoliberalism from the 1930s to the present. Extending the recent work of scholars like David M. Higgins and Jordan S. Carroll, the panel argues that Golden Age writers like Campbell and Robert Heinlein shaped neoliberalism, providing intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Alan Greenspan with some of their central metaphors and conditioning a generation of readers to perceive neoliberalism as an inevitable alternative to socialism and the welfare state. By the 1960s, New Wave writers, while still indebted to their Golden Age forbearers, began to perceive the emerging neoliberal worldview and find cracks within it. This critical perspective would flourish in the work of left-wing writers of color who extended and complicated the legacy of the New Wave into the new millennium.

The panel begins in the Golden Age, with Stephen Schryer's "Ayn Rand, Theodore Sturgeon, and the Neoliberal Superhuman." The superhuman trope, popularized by Campbell, Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt, and others, imagines the evolution of a higher species of humankind, usually persecuted because of their special abilities. American SF writers used this trope to voice their distrust of procedural democracy and the welfare state. This distrust fed into explicitly right-wing political projects; Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957), which imagines capitalist superhumans seceding from the welfarist masses, was a foundational text for the 1960s New Right. This distrust also shaped the politics of the emerging New Left; Sturgeon's More than Human (1953), the story of mutant outcasts who combine to form a gestalt consciousness, became a cornerstone text for the 1960s counterculture and New Wave SF. Ultimately, SF writers' development of the superhuman trope contributed to the hollowing out of democracy that, according to Wendy Brown, would become a defining feature of neoliberal governance.

Jason Haslam's "Carceral Futurity" turns to the 1960s, focusing on figurations of the prison in late Golden Age and New Wave SF. As Ruth Gilmore, Löic Wacquant, and others argue, the prison is a singular institution within neoliberalism, "an instrument," Wacquant writes, "for containing the social disorders created . . . by neoliberal policies." Haslam extends this argument to suggest that the figure of the prison also delimits the futures neoliberalism can imagine, a carceral futurity best seen in mainstream SF. While some radical SF has imagined an abolitionist future, in mainstream SF, prison abolition, as Walidah Imarisha notes, is "mostly absent." This paper argues that while both Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) and Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration (1968) critique elements of the neoliberal prison, they still represent the prison as a necessary space of reflection and labor, and they propose neoliberal reforms as solutions to the "prison problem" (e.g., techno-utopian medical treatments as pharmacological social management). Even as these works eschew the "barbarism" of "our" punishment regimes, they underscore that prison is both a material and a conceptual block to alternative future social models.

Lastly, Lysa Rivera's "Imagination as Resistance: Chicana Feminist SF & the New World Order" turns to recent works by writers of color that use SF tropes to imagine elsewheres that disrupt and transform the neoliberal status quo, developing possibilities foreclosed by mainstream SF. Drawing inspiration from Imarisha's claim that "whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction," this paper explores the fiction of Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Lunar Braceros (2009) and its sequel Keep Me Posted (2020) redeploy common cyberpunk tropes to imagine a future in which late capitalism has ravaged the Earth to the point that the moon, a new "spatial fix for capitalism," serves as an extraterrestrial landfill for capitalism gone awry. Within this imaginary dystopia, Sánchez and Pita also envision scenarios of resistance and survival. They refuse to foreclose on the possibility for change by exploring imaginary oppositional spaces that must inspire the next generation of writers and SF visionaries.