The NeoSciFi Manifesto
The NeoSciFi Manifesto - August 2025
Paul Valery, Yogi Berra, William Gibson, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and Alan Kay all share some version of the famous phrase "the future is not what it's supposed to be." None, however, have explained why. One possible answer lies in the fact that today's future—as depicted in thousands of novels and films, across multiplex screens, and on streaming services—has simply become another commodity in the age of promiscuous commodification.
Today's sci-fi future is a landscape of spectacular violence, with heroic empty saviors who maintain the status quo, and technological marvels that flash, sparkle, explode, and magically transform everything under the sun except the very underlying structures of power that enable them. This pattern is no accident. Call it a narrative conspiracy—a profitable one that ensures insane profits for wealthy studios and producers.
This manifesto argues that mainstream science fiction now operates as a powerful system of control, a "disciplinary machine" that has colonized our imagination and trained us to accept a narrow, apocalyptically violent, and marketable future as being the only one possible. It has replaced the act of imagining with the addictive consumption of spectacle.
We don't need much research to see that since 1990, science fiction has become increasingly obsessed with futures signaling the end of the world as we know it. A steadily increasing portion of sci-fi movies and books feature apocalyptic scenarios—whether deadly viruses, environmental collapse, technology gone wrong, or alien invasions. The 1990s alone saw Hollywood release at least 24 apocalyptic films, and this trend has only intensified in recent decades. Perplexity tells me that the 50% of the 30 top grossing sci-fi films since 2020 have world-ending, apocalyptic and dystopian endings.
This NeoSciFi Manifesto is a diagnosis and a call to action, an archaeological project unearthing the subjugated, more critical modes of thought buried deep in the genre's past, and a practical guide for resisting the hyperreal future and insisting on the reality of the possible. Given the appropriation and subjection of truth and insight into current American social politics, the reclaiming of science fiction as the pursuit of real meaning, of critical insight, of interrogations into the corruption of power, requires a resistance. The NeoSciFi Movement celebrates the discovery of new resistance landscapes.
Part I: Hyperreal Colonizations of the Imaginary
What we now call "science fiction"—a far richer, more intricate and subtle genre than Poe or Verne ever imagined—has become preoccupied in large measure with the systematic derealization of the world. This collective capitalized intention has evolved into an enormous machinery of hyperreal production, producing not futures but the signs of futures: spectacles that anticipate and then supplant any real encounter with the possible, the entire phenomenon equivalent to the elimination of variables we see in algebra and calculus.
The issue isn't so much a matter of nostalgia as it is genealogy. We need to unearth the discursive sites in which SF has been shifted from technologies of thought to technologies of analytic pacification.
Spectacular Violence's Disciplinary Machine
For the most part, today's science fiction has become an industry, functioning as a "disciplinary-spectacular complex"—a power-grid of relations that represents consumers as subjects who can acceptably be consumed with violence as entertainment and conditioned to recognize it as inevitable. In many instances, it's difficult to separate characters in science fiction from their readers or viewers. This conditioning that makes us passive consumers of violent entertainment rather than questioning why violence is so prevalent or inevitable is the byproduct of a system that operates through several integrated processes:
The Normalization of Exception: Violence is normalized as the fundamental condition of the future; its absence simply cannot be imagined. A "peaceful" future becomes quite literally unthinkable through steady elimination.
Emotional Biopolitics: Trauma becomes marketable as a hot commodity. Viewers become trained to metabolize misery into pleasure, turning them into docile consumers of humanity's debasement.
Resistance Simulated: Heroes are created to channel rebellion into harmless, predictable stories. Rebels become the best agents for system maintenance.
The Temporal Conquest: By physically domiciling the future, today's spectacular science fiction evicts the rest of the possible. These formulaic hyperreal futures become more real than any real future.
Digging Deep for Layers of Resistance
Beneath the surface of contemporary science fiction lie buried forms of knowledge—what we might call "subjugated knowledges" that once made different kinds of thinking possible:
The Philosophical Strata (Shelley, Verne, Wells): The machine was interrogated, not celebrated. Technology emerged not as an answer but as a question.
The Structuralist Strata (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein): The effort to do thinking by the rules, to legislate imagining something else.
The Critical Strata (Dick, Le Guin, Butler): The realization that war is what occurs on/over consciousness.
The future as the ground of ontological struggle.
These forms were not "better than" what we have today—they too were agents of different regimes of power/knowledge, each with their own forms of subjugation. Here's the real difference though: they harbored options the spectacular regime has methodically closed off.
Part II: Science Fiction and Governmental Technology
SF operates as a governmental technology because its implicit ideology shapes the "conduct of conduct," teaching SF consumers to consider the future in definite ways. The genre works through what we call "disciplinary futurism":
Surveillance: Science fiction's panoptic surveillance mechanisms normalize the surveillant society as unstoppable.
Normalizing: Dimensions beyond the norm-violating hypermasculine, violence-solving protagonist become literally unimaginable.
Examination: There's never a quiz, but readers are tested on their ability to identify with power, to find violence exciting, to accept hierarchies as natural.
Confession: The hero's "backstory" becomes machinery for turning pain into pleasure, for training audiences to eroticize trauma.
This machine produces what we might call "docile futurists"—consuming subjects who can imagine new gadgets but not new relationships, who can chart new possibilities for market penetration but not systemic or structural alternatives to capitalism.
Part III: The Media Awakening: The Architecture of Illusion
Current sci-fi works rarely depict the future as it potentially might be but have rather become the main mechanism to keep the future from happening. The hyperreal future of science fiction itself precedes and determines the real future, giving birth, as Baudrillard wrote, to a "precession of simulacra."
There are four stages to this process:
The Future as Mirror: Science fiction purports to act as a change agent in the real world.
The Mask of the Future: Science fiction acts as a screen hiding the future.
The Future as Absence: Science fiction comes to stand in for futurism itself.
The Future as Simulacrum: Science fiction becomes more real than the future we can imagine.
Given this process, reality is constructed in such a way that we do not have a future, but only its simulated semblance. The apocalyptic imagination becomes the sole imagination.
Part IV: Disassembling the Apparatus
NeoSciFi, as a movement, does not propose a recycling of old abandoned cultural systems (the essence of "new wave"). Rather, it promotes the archaeological—a digging up of buried options, a trespass on a disciplinary machine that today colonizes the imaginary.
Although not formally codified, our efforts as science fiction creators involve:
Genealogical Analysis: Through fiction, videos, or critical analysis, the goal is to explore how violence came to be naturalized, how certain ways of thinking were made impossible, and how the machine of spectacular consumption was built.
Counter-Conduct: Cultivating modes of reading and writing that consciously thwart the governmental apparatuses of popular science fiction.
Subvert the Simulacra: Fabricating stories that read the hyperreality of contemporary "futures," that read and hopefully deconstruct the mechanism of simulation itself.
Biopower Resistance: Experimental modalities of storytelling that refuse to metabolize human suffering in the name of entertainment, that refuse the biopolitical management of affect.
Part V: The Productive Dimension
What we advocate is not a negative critique or a form of disabusal, but rather efforts on behalf of readers and writers to produce new technologies of the self—practices that enable them to make themselves into subjects who are able to do the work of genuine future-thinking.
These technologies might include:
Slow Reading: Ways of paying attention that counter the acceleration of spectacular consumption.
Genealogical Writing: Narratives that dig into the past as excavations of their own possibility.
Ethical Experiment: Stories as laboratories of new forms of human relationship.
A Revolt Against Ontology: Fantasies that demand to be other than they are.
Part VI: Constructing Counter-Apparatuses
NeoSciFi works as a resistance network—a growing collection of writers, readers, and thinkers who are actively challenging the mainstream science fiction industry. Through small but strategic actions, this counter-movement works to break down the current system by reviving forgotten ways of thinking about the future, creating new pathways that reveal how the current approach isn't inevitable, and building independent spaces where different kinds of stories and ideas can develop.
These efforts involve:
Educational Intervention: Creating new forms of literacy that can read against the grain of spectacular consumption.
Institutional Critique: Investigating and subverting the economic and cultural structures that maintain the existing order.
Alternative Production: Producing and circulating new circuits of production that defy the logic of the spectacle.
Community Building: Creating collectives that are organized according to criteria other than those of the marketplace.
Part VII: Beyond Spectacle
What we ultimately put forward is not a reform, but an insurrection—the creation of spaces where other kinds of imaginings become possible, where the future can be newly, if not wonderfully, thought and analyzed. This isn't about making "better" science fiction; it is about creating an ecology in which real future-thinking is possible again, one in which we consciously refuse the continuous consumption of a hyperreal future in favor of the reality of the possible.
The issue is not about whether we are able to imagine better futures, but rather if we are able to imagine in the first place: if we can think outside the spectacles that have invaded our dreams.
NeoSciFi represents a cautious and self-aware freedom—freedom to think the unthinkable, to imagine the unimaginable, to reject ad nauseam representations of a future that has been given to us for the futures we can create. Our manifesto works not as a program but as a kind of diagnostic device: a way to make sense of how power works through the colonization of the imaginary, and of how resistance might be possible.
If interested in working with the NeoSciFi Movement, contact paul@paulprivateer.com