I would never attempt—nor even wish to attempt—to gainsay Gary Wolfe on the matter of science fiction as it appears in ink on pulp or text on screens; he is a model of critical generosity, and a very nice chap to boot.

But there’s an aside in his review of the new Lavie Tidhar that I want to riff on for a moment:

Tidhar returns to [the world of Central Station] in Neom, but the setting has shifted to a huge, built-from-scratch metropolis on the eastern shore of the Red Sea, which is already ancient as the story opens. (As Tidhar tells us in a headnote, the city Neom is already under construction by Saudi Arabia, and a quick Google search of im­ages reveals a whole passel of SF illustrations that don’t know they’re SF illustrations.)

My gripe is with that last clause there. Far from being unwittingly sfnal, the whole of the Neom project is quite unabashedly so, and no part of it more so than the “artist’s impressions” that get bandied around (as seen at, for instance, Teh Graun and some web-based “news vertical” whose business model is presumably based on the uncritical regurgitation of press releases). These images might usefully be thought of as larger-scale versions of those architectural renders one sees on the hoardings around a building site; architecture is a fundamentally speculative exercise in both senses of the term (namely speculation-as-in-extrapolating-imaginatively and speculation-as-in-financial-investment), and arguably always has been. This ability to conjure and convince (through what Sherryl Vint calls promissory narratives), to concretise a political imaginary (if only figuratively, at first), is why totalitarians have always had a boner for particular forms of monolithic architectural hubris, as well as being why conservatives—who, as noted many times here, are distinguished not by their not having utopias, as they often claim, but rather by their always locating their utopian horizon in a past that is just as fictional as any future could ever possibly be—end up fetishising places like Poundbury. Political theory is necessarily abstract, and thus not much use on the campaign trail; architecture, by contrast, is concrete (pun fully intended), even when (if not particularly when) it is speculative.

(Fans of Poundbury would presumably be the first to decry the pernicious influence of postmodernism on architecture, which makes all the more piquant the irony that Poundbury is in many ways exemplary of the cultural exhaustion that defines postmodernity as a theoretical social condition, rather than as some sort of architectural or artistic playbook.)

What’s interesting to me about what has been called Gulf futurism—of which Neom and many other Ozymandian projects-in-waiting are exemplars—is its fusion of conservatism and technofuturism: these images are slight remixes of paleofutures, which is to say they are futures initially conceived in the past and then discarded, only to be retrieved by conservatism’s restless search for a utopian past which is more resistant to critique; that neoliberal technocracy and the post-ww2 futurities of golden age sf have become the hindmost temporal limit of that search is interesting, as well as depressing.

But it also underlines one of the reasons I’m always baffled about the “too many dystopias!” critique of sf media, which always seems to forget that beyond the sphere of science-fiction-presented-as-fiction are swarms of reheated science-fiction-presented-as-positivist-prophecy: dystopian futures in media should perhaps be seen as a cultural white-blood-cell surge against these new mutations of ideas lethal to the social body which were beaten away once already. As such, they are a sign of a certain sort of cultural health—though that’s very much to leave aside the critical evaluation of such media as media, as art, where they very often fail to do anything but turn the spectacle of the technoutopian mode back upon itself in a fetishisation of destruction and suffering.

(Dystopian sf is to cinema what heavy metal is to music: 2,000 words, discuss!)

Anyway, point being, these images of Neom are knowingly science fictional, to the extent that a particular technoutopian yearning—the common currency of late-golden-age sf—has become an aesthetic native to technocratic elite cultures. It’s a sort of cargo-cultism, in a way: these are the sort of things people dreamt of back when things seemed to be working well, so if we return to dreaming such dreams and reject all critique of them, we will somehow recapture that economic and political vitality once again! (Shades of Stephenson’s Project Hieroglyph, also.)

In the case of a Gulf petrostate like Saudi Arabia, there is perhaps also an internalisation of the capital-P Progress metanarrative, which assumes that a) there is a teleology of socioeconomic development, that b) the West has been further ahead but has derailed itself because [reasons], and thus that c) e.g. SA can follow the same arc but somehow avoid the derailing (presumably by skipping what remains of liberal humanism in the neoliberal package) and build the failed utopias of Progress that the West failed to realise. And, y’know, good luck with that? But this yearning, this utopianism, even if it does not necessarily think of itself as such, shares whole lot of historical DNA with science fiction, and in particular with the old-school sf that Lavie is remixing in these particular stories.

It’s not even like I’m making some profoundly original point, here: almost anywhere Neom is written about, “science fictional” comes in as an adjective, though interestingly it is used with equal ease by approving and critical commentary. The images are aware of their science-fictionality, as are their audiences; indeed, it’s the priming of the audience (with what we might think of as the visual equivalent of Broderick’s megatext, and the associated “reading protocols” that emerge from an enduring familiarity with sfnal tropes and devices) that necessitates the recourse of the image-makers to sfnal devices. That’s just what a particular version of futurity is supposed to look like: it’s a shorthand, a dog-whistle aesthetic that summons the audience to investor story-time, offered in lieu of a more substantial engagement with the question “how might we live”, a question whose hydra-like sprouting of half-a-dozen new heads for every answer makes it anathema for anyone keen to hang on to all the good stuff they have (or at least recently had) under BAU, thankyouverymuch.

So, not to rag on Wolfe, but I think it’s really important to realise and state clearly that these images absolutely know they’re science fiction, even if their creators may not. Because by saying so, we simultaneously grant science fiction the cultural legacy and influence it always dreamed of, at the same time as connecting that influence to the consequences of its elevation of engineering rationality to the status of moral imperative.