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Why do right-wing extremists find science fiction and fantasy so appealing? This edited collection sets out to answer that question by examining ten influential genre texts, comics, and their filmic adaptations through an interdisciplinary lens. The wide historical scope reveals a recurring pattern: The far right has repeatedly attempted to claim interpretive authority over popular fiction as a means of establishing what Antonio Gramsci called “cultural hegemony.” By investigating how and why right-wing audiences gravitate toward these genres—and why those works may carry an inherent susceptibility to such readings—the collection offers timely insights into how core elements of fascist ideology can be transmitted both subtly through narrative and symbolism, and more deliberately through right-wing appropriation. The volume also explores how certain authors—whether intentionally or not—have lent themselves to this agenda through ambivalent storytelling choices.

Works examined include The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and The Matrix, and many more to enable a nuanced decoding of ambivalent texts, semiotics, and cinematic codes, while also assessing their potential real-world impact. Balancing scholarly rigor and an accessible style, the collection will be of interest to students and university instructors, as well as to engaged film enthusiasts and fantasy fans eager to think more critically about the genres they love.

Examining the power of speculative fiction to reimagine historical accounts of the conquest of the Americas

The historical conquest of the Americas resides at the core of all first-contact narratives, which stage colonization and resistance in the generic guise of speculative fiction. Starting from this axiom, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period’s historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac Zimmer examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. First Contact thus poses a foundational question: Can we understand the conquest as an originary world-historical event without eclipsing the other cosmologies that existed, and continue to exist, within the contact zone? Can we decolonize the speculative imagination itself?