Panel: Economic Imaginaries in the Ruins – Speculative Fiction and Post-Capitalist Futures

Climate breakdown accelerates, economic inequalities deepen, yet speculative fiction remains oddly timid about imagining different economic futures. Postapocalyptic narratives proliferate. Tech billionaires appropriate SF aesthetics to justify their own escape plans. Where are the stories that engage with alternative economic imaginaries and strategies?

This panel discusses how SF offers a space where economic transformation becomes thinkable, or remains foreclosed. How might degrowth, circular economies, solidarity networks, democratic planning, commons-based production….., translate into storytelling that moves beyond both techno-optimist fixes and catastrophist resignation towards genuine post-capitalist economic futures?

We’re interested in the political work economic imaginaries perform. When SF imagines post-capitalist worlds, like in contemporary solarpunk or classic eco-socialist work, what economic futures does SF make thinkable, and which ones remain stubbornly unimaginable? Should SF even provide strategic horizons, and how can fictional worlds navigate such tensions without collapsing into either utopianism or despair?