Fredric Jameson has argued that the consolidation of global capitalism in the twentieth century is underpinned by a widespread belief “not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible” (Archaeologies of the Future, xii). As financialization, speculative markets, and other processes of economic abstraction have rendered the future increasingly precarious and unpredictable, they have made the necessity for new forms of political agency and imaginative possibility increasingly apparent. Speculative fiction has emerged as a key literary form providing both a sustained critique of the capitalist present and efforts to imagine alternative futures. This panel will consider some of the most interesting economic visions in speculative fiction with papers focused on both the narrative and real-world implications of various forms of real-world financial speculation. We have asked the three presenters to limit their papers to 15-18 minutes, leaving ample time for discussion.

Liam Lanigan’s paper leads with a reading of the depiction of urban space in the works of Ursula Le Guin in the context of theories of the global city that emphasize their role as nodal points within the world-system of capital on which flows of financial capital, migration, and infrastructure converge. Le Guin’s “utopian” experiments in novels such as The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed, he argues, imagine alternative modes of production to capitalism emerging from within the totality of capitalism. The “ambiguity” of Le Guin’s utopian writing is not just ethical or moral, but also structural. The narration of city space in Le Guin’s work is always generative of new modes of social organization that are at once responsive to, and emergent from, the global city as it is shaped by world-systemic capitalism.

Kristin Hogue then examines what she calls “cryptocurrency discourse” in relation to proposals for market-based strategies for combatting climate change, which she interprets as a form of speculative world-building that parallels and extends the economic imaginaries of recent science fiction. Placing Annalee Newitz’s novel The Terraformers in dialogue with the rhetorics of blockchain discourse, she shows how both domains construct visions of planetary governance in which ecological systems are rendered legible through computational and market logics. In The Terraformers, corporate actors manage entire ecosystems through long-term infrastructural planning, producing a world where environmental stewardship is inseparable from profit, ownership, and data-driven coordination. Cryptocurrency projects similarly frame blockchain as a tool for decentralizing environmental governance and coordinating climate action, while often obscuring the extractive material infrastructures that sustain them. Such speculative economic visions do not simply imagine alternatives to capitalism but actively reconfigure its terms, demonstrating how narrative speculation operates as a mode of economic reasoning that shapes real-world approaches to climate crisis, resource management, and financial sovereignty.

Arne Sander then examines “prediction market” platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which attempt to forecast the future by asking users to place bets on the likelihood of various predicted events, from the trivial to the metaphysical. Their proponents cast prediction markets as “meta-epistemic” mechanisms capable of accelerating the production of knowledge. However, prediction markets convert epistemic inequality (insider knowledge), interpretive play (rumor, intuition), and speculative desire (profit-seeking) into a single probabilistic signal misrecognized as objective knowledge—a process recent work terms “prediction laundering.” This logic of prediction—and prediction laundering—has long been anticipated in speculative fiction, from E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels (1951). These works not only informed cybernetic thought and economic modeling, and thus the emergence of “information markets,” but also offered an overlooked critique of their epistemic dangers: the recursive feedback loops through which predictions begin to shape and produce the realities they claim to forecast—dynamics that, Sander argues, have now found their material realization in prediction markets.

Each of these papers examines different approaches to present real-world challenges—overcoming urban inequality, combatting climate change, seeking greater mastery over uncertainty about the future—through the lens of speculative fiction, highlighting the search for emancipation from current forms of capitalist exploitation. In so doing, they ask important questions about the ability of speculative fiction to break out of what Mark Fisher has called "capitalist realism," which tends only to reinforce the widespread belief in the “naturalness” of capitalism, and the impossibility of imagining a beyond of current economic and political structures.

With the participation of one full professor, one associate professor, one graduate student, and one postdoctoral fellow, this panel incorporates voices from several countries while focusing on several different national literatures and representing a variety of levels of professional advancement.