No longer are other planets spaces to spread the virtue of human civilisation but reflections of its moral torpor. These spiky narrative fractals marshal the generic tropes of science fiction to navigate the disorientating moment under this ideological penumbra. This is the period which saw “the systematic reversal of utopia into dystopia,” as Berardi puts it. It opens with ‘Women and Women’, a matriarchal utopia in which men are condemned to an exclusion zone, and ends with its proto-cyberpunk titular story set in a defamiliarised and degraded TV-addled present with politics reduced to people voting for celebrities through their remotes. Across this collection, the utopian energies that animated the sixties counterculture peter out and give way to a punk-ish nihilism. Terminal Boredom is the first publication of the Japanese countercultural icon’s fiction in English, her detached, steely prose rendered ably by a score of established translators providing a vital addition to the science fiction canon in the anglophone world.Ĭoming of age during the mass political movements of the sixties, Suzuki initially made her name as a model and actor in Japanese pink films before turning to writing. If the future is the province of science fiction, what happens to science fiction when it disappears? Writing science fiction from the early 70s until taking her own life in 1986, the work of Izumi Suzuki straddles this border, inhabiting a liminal zone. What could be a hollow polemical flourish turns out to be an instructive juncture from which to consider how the twentieth-century belief in progress came to be replaced by the neoliberal malaise that persists to the present. The oil crisis exposed the volatility of the post-war economic model and the mass movements of the sixties fragmented. “This was the year when the punk movement exploded, whose cry – ‘No Future’ – was a self-fulfilled prophecy that slowly enveloped the world,” he argues in his 2011 book, After the Future, sketching a knotty complex of social, cultural, and economic trends that all reached their terminus that year. According to Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, the future ended in 1977.
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