Both authors envision futures of the Anthopocene that are discursively (and recursively) engaged with colonial pasts, a conception of the future that finds it is, as Henriette Genkel argues in her anthology Futures and Fictions, ‘already implicated in the different dimensions of time’. This dual vision - both proleptic and retrospective - is present in the novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) by Octavia Butler and The Stone Gods (2007) by Jeanette Winterson. Kathryn Yusoff writes that the ‘Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds as long as they have been in existence’. Further, the futures of the peoples most subjugated and exploited under capitalism have always already been under threat. At the same time, the future of the planet - the future of the human species - is threatened by the rapacious extractivism that capital demands. The hyper-commodities of the Star Wars franchise are another. The financialisation of the economy is one way that sf capital colonises the future. In science fiction writing, the future is both a territory for extraction and a site of resistance. Through what cultural theorists Kodwo Eshun and Mark Fisher have called ‘sf capital’, capitalism extracts value from futurity.
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