Post-American Speculations

Post-American Speculations We are all acquainted with the fearful forecast . . . that what with the whole trend toward collectivism, we shall end up in such a total national socialism that any faint semblances of our constitutional American democracy will be totally unrecognizable. Henry Luce, “The American Century” (1941) [H]ow had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way? Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) 1. If It Happened There On 3 December 2014, Slate published an article with an alarming headline: “Courts Sanction Killings by U.S. Security Forces.” The article begins, “The heavily armed security forces in this large and highly militarized country have long walked the streets with impunity, rarely if ever held accountable for violence committed against civilians” (Keating). The author, the foreign affairs analyst Joshua Keating, continues in this style, using language Slate readers might expect to find in a report about another country. The New York City Police Department is described, to alienating effect, as “U.S. Security Forces,” the US itself as a “large and highly militarized country.” And so on. Keating is satirically commenting on a Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner, and he does so not by distorting the facts of the Garner case but by describing the US from a perspective outside itself. Keating wrote multiple articles featuring this gimmick across *Lee Konstantinou is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse (Ecco, 2009), the literary history Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Harvard University Press, 2016), and the single-novel study The Last Samurai Reread (Columbia University Press, 2022). American Literary History, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 290–304 https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajac230 C The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. V For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 Lee Konstantinou* American Literary History Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 the 2010s in a series for Slate called “If It Happened There.” The series, the title of which alludes to Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here (1935), asks how the US media would cover this or that story if it happened in “other countries,” rendering each story as if our American here were some foreign there. How should we assess the politics of such satire? On the one hand, Keating seems to be targeting the conventions of US foreign affairs journalism. If we (elite American infovores) described ourselves the way we conventionally do foreigners, the argument seems to be, we’d recognize the demeaning condescension in how we may imagine those others. What appear to be signs of another country’s backwardness would now be recognized, from our newly cosmopolitan vantage point, as ordinary domestic conflict. By light of this satire, US journalistic norms are shown to be racist and provincial, a prop for imperialism and exploitation. Keating would be making a point not far removed from Noam Chomsky’s when he asks Americans to observe US foreign policy as if from the perspective of a Martian—and to judge themselves wanting by the standards of that alien outlook.1 On the other hand, in the second term of the Obama presidency and with increasing force during the Trump years, Keating’s style of satire suggests that the US may actually be something like a failed state, with bad governance and dysfunctional social institutions. On this reading, Keating’s satire risks reinforcing, not condemning, the reactionary and imperialistic assumptions of the journalists whose lazy writing is, to be sure, also the object of fun. As it turns out, we’re the baddies, no better than—or perhaps worse than—those shithole countries over there. If we had any selfrespect, we’d work harder to live up to our exceptionalist self-image and banish from our political life the far-right factions, enabled by the Republican Party, that Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas once called the “American Taliban.” What the world needs, on this analysis, isn’t less American hegemony but a better, more enlightened hegemon. Perhaps we should be sending our killer drones not only to Kandahar but also to Kansas City. The contradictory political implications of Keating’s article are, I’d argue, symptomatic of the struggle of US elites to come to terms with the advent of what Fareed Zakaria has called the “postAmerican world.” These elites try—and ultimately fail—to imagine a credible and secure future for US power they can believe in. It’s the rhetoric of elites who suddenly find themselves on an alien planet: Earth in the twenty-first century. “Look around,” Zakaria observes. “The tallest building in the world is now in Taipei [not the United States], and it will soon be overtaken by one being built in Dubai. The world’s richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese” (2). One response to this new order 291 292 Post-American Speculations Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 might be to welcome the world’s growing multipolarity. But, within the US, writers and intellectuals have, for the most part, lamented the failure of civic institutions in the face of such change. These writers see the nation as having played a positive role in upholding a set of norms that bolstered a liberal world order, and they lament the decline of democracy and evince nostalgia for a dying world system founded on US dominance. “Why not make America greater than ever[?]” asks Matthew Yglesias in his pronatalist manifesto One Billion Americans (2020). “Today,” he writes, “our international situation is imperiled because we have let a staggering array of lingering problems fester and prevent us [America] from becoming as big and as rich a country as we ought to be” (xi). Science fiction (SF) authors, too, have speculated upon the prospects and perils of our post-American world, though they have, as I will show, deployed a richer world-building machinery than have liberal pundits, offering more critical leverage on the political logic undergirding these often confused debates. Indeed, SF authors, who write from both within and outside the US, build on a long tradition that has imagined the decline and end of the country. Here, I discuss two prominent Trump-era series—Malka Older’s The Centenal Cycle (2016–2018) and Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota (2016– 2021)—that imagine the end of America, but not the end of global democracy. Older and Palmer repeat many characteristic tropes and narrative gestures of the tradition of post-American science fiction. Yet there’s also a difference in their imaginings of the end of the US. They figure the end of US hegemony not as a crisis but as an inevitability, a mundane reality hardly worthy of mention in their ambitious exercises in world-building. They both also link the end of the US to the end of the system of Westphalian sovereignty, the system international laws and norms often associated with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War. If after World War II, the US arrogated for itself the job of the world’s policeman, these authors suggest, a better world should not simply swap in a new cop. Nor should a post-American future revert to multipolar sovereignty, where this country happened to be liberal and that one fascist. These SF authors highlight how the US has played a contradictory role in the capitalist world order. It’s both a sovereign nation-state acting in its own interest, as well as a power that seeks, with equal parts alacrity and brutality, to organize capital accumulation on a planetary scale in the name of a higher interest or principle. America’s paradoxical position highlights why the end of US power comes to seem, in the speculative imaginings of these authors, like the necessary precondition for the development of a better form of global democracy. Ultimately, for both Older and American Literary History 293 Palmer, the end of the US entails the end of the nation-state form as such and the global subordination of capitalism to democracy. Narratives dramatizing the decline or end of the US are as old as speculative fiction itself, perhaps originating with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), which depicts a world in which a global pandemic lays the world to waste, leading to an act of reverse colonization in which frenzied American refugees cross the Atlantic and rob and pillage Ireland, before turning their malign attention toward England. More often, speculative fiction that imagines the end of the US has been written by Americans who mean to critique the sclerotic, polarized, and/or decadent habits of their countrymen. John Ames Mitchell’s The Last American (1889), for instance, satirically portrays the US from the perspective of a future Persian civilization that rediscovers the remnants of a once-great people brought down by climate change. In many fictional representations of the end of the US, the nation is undone by internal antidemocratic movements, not by external enemies. Such stories usually leave room for a restoration of some version of American democracy. This pattern recurs from Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), which tells the story of the rise of a dictatorship called the Oligarchy (or Iron Heel) from the perspective of the socialist revolution that supplants it, to Philip Roth’s The Plot against America (2004), in which the restoration of democracy happens after President Charles Lindbergh’s plane disappears. Even Octavia Butler’s bleak Parable books—Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998)—end with the failure of the novel’s Christian theocratic president, who is voted out of office after one term, though the novel’s true hopes for a better future lie with its portrayal of the Earthseed religion. One might multiply examples of stories that envision the end of the US from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, but many of these narratives either precede or do not address the rise of what Henry Luce called “the American Century.” At the instant US power was consolidated after World War II, the question of what will succeed America became a new kind of question, for the world and for science fiction. The fate of the US wasn’t only a question of concern to Americans or to those directly touched by American power, but one of material interest to every person on the planet. Writing in 1941 in Life magazine, Luce meant the American Century to name an era in which national ideals, enforced by economic and military might, would self-consciously spread across the world. His editorial was a brief against isolationism and an argument At the instant US power was consolidated after World War II, the question of what will succeed America became a new kind of question, for the world and for science fiction. The fate of the US wasn’t only a question of concern to Americans or to those directly touched by American power, but one of material interest to every person on the planet. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 2. Plots against America 294 Post-American Speculations Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 that the US should consciously choose to be the “Good Samaritan of the entire world” (65). For a moment, Luce’s hope seemed plausible. By 1960, the US represented 40% of world GDP (Patton). It established multilateral institutions that defined the postwar global political order, an order that has endured beyond the end of the Cold War through institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization—not to mention the 800 US military bases in over 70 countries (Vine). But the US share of world GDP has steadily declined since that high-water mark, and ongoing processes of decolonization have challenged the US multilateral system and its military might. The steady economic rise of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries has inspired predictions that, at the very least, the world is becoming less unipolar. In the light of this history, I’d argue that a properly postAmerican speculative narrative—by which I mean to refer not only to science fiction but also to other paraliterary genres that construct secondary worlds—isn’t possible before the peak of US hegemony. Even alternate histories like The Plot against America and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), though written after World War II, sidestep the question of US hegemony by setting their stories at a moment before that power came to be consolidated or in a world where that power didn’t consolidate. Post-American speculative narrative, by contrast, represents a vernacular form of the kind of world-systems analysis found in Fernand Braudel’s account of the long duree of world history, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, and Giovanni Arrighi’s discussion of systemic cycles of capital accumulation, which may or may not be coming to an end with the end of American hegemony. Indeed, I’d underscore that such speculative narratives aren’t exactly popularizations or useful illustrations of existing or established theories. Rather, speculative narrative is a vital and active genre of thought, one quite capable of holding its own with writing by sociologists and economic historians.2 It’s perhaps worth mentioning here that Older and Palmer both hold PhDs—Older in the sociology of organizations and Palmer in intellectual history—and that their fictions are as informed by their academic specializations as by their literary explorations of the possibilities of speculative fiction. When considering speculative accounts of the end of America, Arrighi is the especially relevant thinker. His division of capitalist history into long centuries emphasizes that each cycle of growth and consolidation is driven by the revolutionizing of the means of organization. The world economy swings, on his account, between great waves of formalization/centralization and deformalization/decentralization, each time with a final recentralization on a higher level. The American Literary History Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 rise of the US represents, in this story, just another swing of this cycle, and the nation’s turn to financialization in the neoliberal period is a harbinger of a new systemic change. Cyberpunk as a subgenre or a movement may be described as a morbid symptom of living in the interregnum between the decline of American hegemony and the rise of some alternative order. For cyberpunk’s special interest in computer technology is, on closer inspection, an interest specifically in the digitization of the means of global telecommunications (the matrix, the Metaverse, etc.). Digitized telecommunications drives, or contributes to, the decline of the US in such classic works as William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (1984–1988) and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995). Gibson’s trilogy is named after the Sprawl, a post-American configuration of city-states, the Boston–Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, which forms a single megaregion along the Eastern seaboard. In the world of Snow Crash, meanwhile, the US has been carved up into corporate-franchise city-states, each running according to its own local laws and norms, which are analogized to computer operating systems. In this franchised world, the federal government is reduced to little more than another private corporation, and the CIA merges with the Library of Congress to sell information services to the highest bidder on the open market. In The Diamond Age, the institution of the franchise-state morphs into “phyles,” voluntary associations that share some core set of values (again analogized to computer code), all of which operate under the umbrella of the Common Economic Protocol. In the world of the book, phyles have replaced nation-states, though two of the world’s three largest phyles are defined by ethnicity and nationality—the Han and Nippon. In all these books and series, literary representations of an absent or diminished US come alongside representations of an ascendant Japan, supporting the view that cyberpunk is a mediation of the US trade rivalry with Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. Cyberpunk, in this view, is searching for a way to represent the possibility that the planet may be transitioning from one hegemon to another, one cycle of capital accumulation to the next. Many cyberpunk classics belong on the same bookshelf as business writing from the 1980s that extolled the special genius or special danger of The Art of Japanese Management (1981), the philosophy of kaizen, the Toyota Way, and so on; indeed, these texts often posited that Japanese forms of corporate organization might manage the global economy better than the US. Similar concerns have shaped science fictional discourses about China at least since the 1990s. Chris Fan has suggested that “post-cyberpunk” fiction has articulated “US perceptions of China’s post-socialist rise and the beginnings of the two countries’ interdependency” (2). Fan’s primary example is Maureen 295 296 Post-American Speculations 3. Post-Westphalian Fictions In the twenty-first century, SF authors have developed intriguing, ambitious, and arguably new strategies for representing the end of America. The most notable tendency is the rise of science fiction that ties the end of the US to the decline of Westphalian sovereignty. “Westphalian sovereignty” names a set of norms said to characterize the system of international relations that can be traced back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The term exceeds any empirical account of the specific terms of the treaties that made up that Peace, and the term “Westphalian sovereignty” has been criticized as both a falsification of the history of the early modern period and an inaccurate account of the way that sovereignty functions in the present worldsystem (Schmidt). Yet the concept matters in debates about US hegemony. After all, as Arrighi argues, the Westphalian system was founded “on the principle that there was no authority operating above the inter-state system.” American “[f]ree-trade imperialism,” by contrast, “established the principle that the laws operating within and between states were subject to the higher authority of . . . a world market” (56). Does globalization threaten the Westphalian order? Some would argue so, but the nation-state seems far from disappearing, and the primary manager of the world market is nothing other than a Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 McHugh’s great 1992 novel, China Mountain Zhang, which dramatizes the decline of the US following a second Great Depression and socialist revolution, and in which the US becomes a client state of China. As Fan notes, McHugh doesn’t glamorize computers or cyberspace, and she deflates the charisma of the entrepreneurial hacker-heroes who populate more canonical works of cyberpunk. Her protagonist, Zhang, is listless and anomic, searching for meaning in a world that seems unable to provide it. In Fan’s account, postcyberpunk aesthetic is “neither romantic nor melodramatic but bounded by a naturalistic closure” (5). Unlike novels that warn of the danger of a rising US totalitarianism, China Mountain Zhang offers no prospect for a restoration of American power, nor does it straightforwardly condemn Chinese hegemony: “I don’t believe in socialism but I don’t believe in capitalism either,” the book’s protagonist explains. “We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks” (McHugh 6). McHugh’s novel goes beyond the technoorientalism of classic cyberpunk, but it seems nonetheless unable to imagine the end of US power as much more than the substitution of one global hegemon, one planetary cop, for a slightly different one. The book is, politically, as torpid as its protagonist. American Literary History Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 nation-state. In the face of American empire, one might object that the US is merely acting in its own narrow interests. Alternatively, one may object to the idea that the US has the right to impose global rules of the road as a violation of the sovereignty of others. But these two charges are not the same, and they are arguably in tension with each other, especially in a postcommunist world where the prospect of planetary socialism or communism seems fanciful. The US coruscates between a merely national and a genuinely hegemonic power. This ambivalence mirrors Marxist debates about the state, which usually boil down to the question of whether Marxism needs a theory of the state at all. Marxism sees capital, after all, as fundamentally cosmopolitan in character. Is the state essential to capital accumulation, or contingent? Is the state essentially capitalist in character, or only distorted by capitalism? As Colin Hay asks in a review of the relevant literature, “Is the modern state a state in capitalist society or a capitalist state—and what difference does it make anyway?” (71). One difference lies in how we characterize US power. To the degree that the nation merely serves its own interests, it consequently doesn’t serve the mission of global capital accumulation. To envision the end of the US might seem like the harbinger of a truly planetary form of capital. To the extent the US actually does serve the cosmopolitan interests of capital, to complain about the US in particular misses its contingent role as (temporary) steward of the system. The end of America might merely clear the way for some new hegemon. Surpassing the “American Century” requires, then, not only overturning American power, but capitalism as such. For this reason, the desire to envision the end of the US has compelled some speculative fiction writers also to take a position on the future of global capitalism. This tacit position-taking, I suggest, manifests itself specifically in the structure and future history of the secondary worlds these authors construct. Hoping to envision postAmerican worlds that are also genuinely democratic worlds, Older and Palmer posit the end of the US as both a consequence and a cause of the unmaking of the form of the nation-state. The state and capital are, in their future visions, effectively inextricable. A democratic future must, it seems, dismantle the form of the state. At the same time, they do not want to imagine the end of America only to posit the rise of some new hegemon. Instead, both authors posit a genuinely postgeographic form of global governance and global democracy that replaces US hegemony. Both of their series depict a world in which power has devolved downward to microlocalities and associations of shared interest and upward toward megaregions and institutions that govern on a planetary scale. Both Older and Palmer figure their futures as better than 297 298 Post-American Speculations Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 what came before. To a degree, Older and Palmer are a little evasive on the question of whether and to what degree elements of capitalism survive the transition to the new order. Neither exactly envisions a world wholly without capitalism. Rather, capitalism in some sense gets demoted—it’s a residue or vestige of the old world. Set at the end of the twenty-first century, Older’s Centenal Cycle is a techno-thriller that envisions a global form of microdemocracy organized around political units called “centenals”— groups of 100,000 voters—whose interactions are mediated through a powerful online infrastructure called the Information. The cosmopolitan, globe-trotting employees of the Information offer a sort of digital (nonprofit) substitute for civil society, fact-checking election claims, monitoring and moderating public discourse. In an era of microdemocracy, legacy nation-states (sometimes called null states) are on the decline, and hundreds of political parties—with names like Liberty, Policy1st, Heritage, and so on—compete for planetary dominance. A party that can win a supermajority of centenals has the power to make decisions that affect the whole system and influence the rules of the road. The US, too, joins the movement toward microdemocracy, though we’re told in a gently ironized aside in the first book, Infomocracy (2016), that “[m]ost of the population of the formerly United States continues to vote in automatic swathes of Democrat or Republican, and every election season produces some variation of a political cartoon in which blinkered Statesers examine a narrow choice of governments while congratulating themselves on their democratic traditions” (199). The former US has “been polarized so deeply and so long that your choices if you stayed were pretty much A or B” (40) and, if you stay, you’re likely to be governed by “a religious autocrat” (157). In the series’ second book, Null States (2017), there’s a brief mention of “the Pacific Northwest of North America” (114). And the third book, State Tectonics (2018), refers in passing to the moment “when the United States collapsed” (158), and one character observes that “[t]he United States got two and a half centuries, the People’s Republic of China got nearly a century, [and] the French Fifth Republic seven decades” (50).3 Centenal Cycle offers little hope for those invested in an exceptionalist future for the US, but neither does it dismiss the possibility that democracy might endure in America. If it does survive, Older suggests, it will do so only to the degree that Americans dig themselves out of parochial attitudes and join the rest of the world. In place of the US, “the Information” serves as something like a global hegemon. The personnel who work for the Information arguably don’t differ markedly from the highly educated cosmopolitan professional-managerial class who dominate American cities today (who are, of course, also likely to be the primary empirical American Literary History Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 readers of Older’s series). The characters in these books are less likely to be the hacker heroes than wonky data analysts, professional activists, graphic designers, videographers, journalists, and pollsters. We might view this casting choice as a limitation of Older’s political imagination; the well-educated denizens of the post-American world she imagines would, it seems, still probably read the New York Times or FiveThirtyEight, much like her actual PMC-readers in the US. We might similarly complain that Centenal Cycle resembles a technocratic fantasy, one that mirrors the position Keating takes in his “If It Happened There.” In this fantasy, technocrats can enjoy all the trappings of their social position without the embarrassing parts of American power. Yet we might also want to reverse the polarity of this political judgment: only in a world without a global capitalist hegemon might the norms and values of a managerial elite truly matter for the first time. That is, we may recall Marxist critiques of the category of the figure of “the elite,” which blames social woes on the bad character and individual corruption of the specific personnel manning our bureaucracies, rather than on the system that they manage. If, in our world, elite lamentations about the failure of norms and the collapse of civil society provide an alibi for capital, obscuring our ability to see the structural means by which capitalism maintains itself, Older imagines a world that, for the first time, has a real civil society. It’s a world where norms have real effects and where the question of which personnel you install into middle management really does matter. The corruptibility or unflappable honesty of the individual technocrat; the conscientiousness, rigor, and dedication of the data analyst; the push-and-pull of office politics are what make the future. So this is what (global) democracy looks like! It isn’t always pretty. In a world in which capital isn’t in the driver’s seat, Older suggests, the character of our technocrats would become more, not less, important. Similarly, Palmer’s Terra Ignota tetralogy imagines a version of the twenty-fifth century in which people affiliate with free associations called Hives—with names like the Humanists, the Utopians, the Masons, and so on—which furnish different laws, norms, duties, and benefits to members. Hives are united “not by any accident of birth, but by shared culture, philosophy, and, most of all, by choice” (Too Like the Lightning 43). Facilitating the rise of Hive sovereignty is the development of fast flying cars, which can circle the globe in under four hours and which enable distributed forms of governance on a planetary scale. Nation-states determined to remain sovereign withdraw to territorial “Reservations” or demote themselves to nonsovereign “nation-strats”—which more resemble social clubs than historical nations. Hives operate within a larger organization called the Universal Free Alliance, which establishes a broad set of human 299 300 Post-American Speculations Both were crisis births, sudden necessities when too much damage made healing and homecoming impossible. Each era’s genius rose to the occasion, marshalling our newest guesses, how best to nurture human possibility amid such strange new problems. Old wisdom said of each that she would not live long, this birth unplanned, wracked in the womb by strange forces, so, as she survived, each month, each year became hope’s small defiance. . . . And even in her later years, as one by one her organs failed her judiciary, liver, senate, heart, all patched together in her infancy by scholar-surgeons who could only guess how this unprecedented body would develop under Earth’s long battering—as one by one these failed her, still we learned so much, so much from how they failed her as, smiling between her pains, this hope-child gifted us the infinite treasure of understanding what broke down. (296) Here the story of the failure of US democracy foretells the possibility that the Hive system—and the vision of a world entirely constituted by civil society—might fail. Palmer constructs a passing image of the “scholar-surgeon,” a figure that arguably describes many of the powerful, highly educated geniuses who populate Palmer’s series. The world of Terra Ignota is ruled not by middle managers, as in Older’s novels, but by brilliant and eccentric minds, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 rights, mediates disputes between Hives, and supports a worldwide taboo on public conversations about gender and religion. Though characters refer to North American locations, the novel implies that the US destroyed itself during the middle of the twenty-second century during a set of wars (called “the Church War”) with unspecified countries in the Middle East. As in Centenal Cycle, Terra Ignota figures the US as a conspicuous absence. Palmer has stated that her training as an intellectual historian of the Renaissance informs her approach to science fictional world-building. She means to show that human institutions (for example, the Roman senate) can radically transform in their composition, structure, and function while nonetheless persisting for centuries, if not millennia.4 By contrast, forms like the nation-state and the corporation are relatively recent (and poorly designed) inventions, which, when viewed from a larger timescale, seem little more than historical oddities. In Perhaps the Stars (2021), the fourth book of the series, the absence of the US becomes a direct object of discussion and analysis. One of Palmer’s narrators compares “the old United States of America” to “Terra the Moon Baby”: American Literary History Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 who accumulate higher degrees as if they were merit badges and whose ideas actually have the power to transform the world. Rebecca Ariel Porte and Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft observe that there’s no discussion of Marxism and communism in Terra Ignota. They lament the absence of a direct representation of class struggle in the series and debate whether this absence constitutes a problem. Their assessment is, to some degree, fair. Palmer’s series is a marvel of world-building, but one comes away unsure what she has to say about the future political economy of her world, let alone the future of capitalism. There are references to a 20-hour work week and a form of Universal Basic Income, but Palmer’s vision has worrisome affinities with far-rightist visions of anarcho-capitalists, like Balaji Srinivasan, who fantasize about protecting the free market from meddling territorial nation-states by imagining a future comprised of “network states,” organizations which people voluntarily join. Such states will be vouchsafed by the further development of cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and other technologies associated with what Srinivasan calls “Crypto Capital.” Yet, I contend that Terra Ignota figures the Hive system less as an outgrowth of the Internet or neoliberal capitalism than as a diversification of the forms of social organization available in a world without material scarcity. The question the series ultimately turns on is whether the human future is one or many. Indeed, the final volume asks whether a central authority should be given the effective power to remake the Hive system along different lines. In a conflict described as a World Civil War, some factions (Remakers) align themselves with the incarnated alien/God J. E. D. D. Mason, who is positioned to take over the Hive system as a benevolent dictator, while others (Hiveguard) fight to defend the existing (however flawed) order of Hive sovereignty. The other major conflict, the conflict between the Gordian Hive and the Utopian Hive, turns on whether humanity should focus more on developing technology to elongate human life (and to give up on the idea of expansion to other worlds) or to explore the stars (at the cost of guaranteed suffering and death). Both conflicts—the conflict between the Hiveguard and the Remakers and that between the Gordians and Utopians—recapitulate common science fiction tropes. Major works by authors such as Frank Herbert, Samuel Delaney, and Gene Wolfe imagine distant futures when contemporary political divisions transmute into abstract meditations on more general questions about the future of human governance. Such works often explore a fundamental choice humanity will someday make between either rigidly centralized control or a disbursal of myriad, infinitely diverse (and mutually 301 302 Post-American Speculations Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 antagonistic) human communities. Will the human future be centralized, with some authority having the power to determine the fate of the species, or distributed, with an anarchic array of factions spread across the Universe? Palmer splits the difference—the Remakers (and J. E. D. D. Mason) win the power to transform the Hive system, while the Utopians win the power to spread humanity, and human diversity, across the stars in ways that will ultimately evade the power of that central authority. What might be most novel about Palmer’s imagined future—what distinguishes it from its predecessors, and what makes it “post-American” and perhaps even postcapitalist—is that the decision about whether the human future is centralized or decentralized comes to be the subject of a planetary debate at all. As with Older’s trilogy, civil society only emerges as a scene of genuine and universal deliberation when it’s no longer yoked to capital accumulation. For the ultimate Utopian hope of Terra Ignota is that a future version of civil society might be structured something like SF or fantasy fandoms themselves, with individuals choosing which social clubs, colorful costumes, fun hairstyles, and fan conventions to embrace. The post-American and post-Westphalian world makes the quality of middle management bureaucrats matter for the first time in history, for Older. In the world to come, debates about ideas, tastes, and attitudes can finally, again for the first time, make (and remake) the future, for Palmer. This is, ultimately, why neither Older nor Palmer sees the end of the US as a reason to grieve—nor as an occasion to tell stories of American renewal—but as a precursor to the rise of a form of global governance that might be up to the job of democratically ruling a post-Westphalian and postcapitalist world. Seeing US power as a synecdoche for global capitalism, these series represent American decline, and the end of the state as a political form, as the necessary precondition for the emergence of true democracy. This vision of “true political democracy” in some ways resembles a liberal (not neoliberal) vision in which the market is kept on a leash, flourishing only within its own area of competence. In another sense, these series assume away capitalism and the market, in the manner of a philosophical thought-experiment, without extensive attention to the question of the transition to a world in which capital, as represented by the US, is no longer dominant. Yet in the absence of global American power, problems remain. Residents of these imagined futures still face the difficult task of building alternative institutions that might organize the planet along more egalitarian lines. The end of the American Century does not end history. Instead, we might describe this ending as the beginning of history as a singular human enterprise subject to some form of democratic American Literary History Notes 1. For a lucid analysis of Chomsky’s figuration of such a Martian perspective, see Bruce Robbins, “Chomsky’s Golden Rule: Comparison and Cosmopolitanism,” New Literary History, vol. 40, no. 3, 2009, pp. 547–65. 2. Moreover, I would suggest, albeit in passing, that Braudel, Wallerstein, and Arrighi, aren’t only theorists but storytellers—unavoidably deploying the narrative resources in their theorizations of the history and prospects of global capitalism. See, for instance, Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Long Duree,” Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 2009, pp. 171-203; and Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of World-Systems Analysis,” Review, vol. 21, no. 1, 1998, pp. 103-112. 3. In State Tectonics, Older also invents a Trumpian political party called “AmericaTheGreat,” which she describes as “a nationalist government that barely hides its white-supremicist platform” (60). 4. See my “Ada Palmer’s Great Conversation,” Crooked Timber, 20 Mar. 2017. Works Cited Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. Verso, 2010. Fan, Christopher. “Techno-Orientalism with Chinese Characteristics: Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang.” Journal of Transnational American Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–35. Hay, Colin. “(What’s Marxist about) Marxist State Theory?” The State: Theories and Issues, edited by Hay Colin et al., Palgrave, 2006, pp. 59–78. Keating, Joshua. “If It Happened There: Courts Sanction Killings by U.S. Security Forces.” Slate, 3 Dec. 2014. Web. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 decision. Older explores the possibility of a nonprofit organization that rationally manages global civil society, but she also addresses the forces, both internal and external, threatening such organizations with corruption and capture. Palmer questions whether a form of global coordination, planning, and decision-making can be devised that maximizes individual choice while ensuring basic civil and political rights. The aim of such speculations and conjectures is to think beyond the limits of living on a planet organized underneath a singular, unaccountable global hegemon. Perhaps a political entity historically continuous with the US will have some place in a future world without such a hegemon—perhaps not. Either way, these series are committed to figuring a post-American world as a mundane, even exciting, arena of imagination, which, in light of some of the other options offered by post-American speculative narrative, doesn’t seem like the worst future we might hope for. 303 304 Post-American Speculations Luce, Henry. “The American Century.” LIFE, no. 10, 17 Feb. 1941, p. 61. Moulitsas, Markos. American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. PoliPointPress, 2010. Older, Malka. Infomocracy. Tor, 2016. ——. Null States. Tor, 2017. Schmidt, Sebastian. “To Order the Minds of Scholars: The Discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in International Relations Literature.” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3, 2011, pp. 601–23. Srinivasan, Balaji. The Network State: How to Start a New Country. SelfPublished. 2022. ——. State Tectonics. Tor, 2018. Palmer, Ada. Perhaps the Stars. Tor, 2021. ——. Too Like the Lightning. Tor, 2016. Patton, Mike. “U.S. Role in Global Economy Declines Nearly 50%.” Forbes, 29 Feb. 2016. Web. Vine, David. “Where in the World Is the U.S. Military?” Politico Magazine, July/Aug. 2015. Web. Yglesias, Matthew. One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Portfolio, 2020. Zakaria, Fareed. The Post-American World. W.W. Norton, 2009. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/290/7049067 by University of Maryland - College Park user on 21 February 2023 McHugh, Maureen. China Mountain Zhang. Doherty, 1992. Porte, Rebecca Ariel, and Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft. “Rockets and Voltaire: A Dialogue on Ada Palmer’s ‘Terra Ignota.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 July 2022. Web.