Theory for the World to Come

Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology

2019
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Author:

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer

Theory for the World to Come

Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future?

Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead.

Rather than merely diagnosing problems, both these modes of thinking pose ‘necessarily unsettling’ questions about alternative worlds and how to bring them into being (100). This is also the modus operandi of Theory for the World to Come, which treats its source material as a repository of possible paths forward, and of tools to chart them. Wolf-Meyer succeeds at this task in admirable fashion, and in doing so provides a study that is likely to be of significant interest to students and scholars working in the cultural and literary disciplines, those whose inclinations are theoretical and especially those working at the intersections of these areas.

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LSE Review of Books

The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities.



Forerunners: Ideas First is a series of short books publishing contemporary topics, polemical arguments, and fresh ideas. This is thought-in-process scholarship: where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.


Theory for the World to Come

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer is associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (Minnesota, 2012).

Theory for the World to Come

Rather than merely diagnosing problems, both these modes of thinking pose ‘necessarily unsettling’ questions about alternative worlds and how to bring them into being (100). This is also the modus operandi of Theory for the World to Come, which treats its source material as a repository of possible paths forward, and of tools to chart them. Wolf-Meyer succeeds at this task in admirable fashion, and in doing so provides a study that is likely to be of significant interest to students and scholars working in the cultural and literary disciplines, those whose inclinations are theoretical and especially those working at the intersections of these areas.

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LSE Review of Books

Theory for the World to Come... packs a punch and has gained a considerable following ever since its publication in 2019.

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PoLAR