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Dan Hassler-Forest, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 246 pp., ?91.60)
Dan Hassler-Forest's insightful new book positions the contemporary practice of transmedia worldbuilding as a privileged site for reading the tensions of contemporary global capitalism. It's a persuasive choice. Contemporary story-telling in the fantastic mode is less a matter of contained narratives, and more an immersion in - and continual construction of - storyworlds, in which any number of discrete stories can take place. Our focus has shifted, Hassler-Forest argues, 'from the linear and teleological structure of narrative to the environment that surrounds and sustains it'. Such work is 'transmedia' because it 'takes place not within but across media' - think films, books, games, webpages, toys, and more, all funneling in to (or more precisely, filling out) one big world.
It is a productive site for political analysis because these worlds are produced through the tension between the official, for-profit canonical output of commercial franchises, and 'fandom's radically heterogeneous creative work'. From fan fiction to conventions to online debates and remixes of canon, there are enormous possibilities for creative grass-roots engagement by fans. HasslerForest figures this tension by mapping it onto Hardt and Negri's influential theorizing of Empire and Multitude. As global capital spreads its tentacles ever further, it also opens up new networks of communication and collaboration with radical, anti-Empire potential - Multitude. Transmedia story-worlds are thus the site, and emergent signature of, the tension between capital's top-down impulse to colonization, and the radical bottom-up potential for creativity, playful subjectivities and community-building that such worlds hold open to their fans.
The book takes a Jamesonian cue for interpreting these storyworlds, reading three levels on which they mobilize the anti-capitalist imagination, and on which the radical potential can be re-appropriated back into Capital's fold. First, the basic narratives of the stories; second, the way the storyworld itself is organized; and Anally, the level of production, encompassing the creative and collaborative work of the fans, and its varying relationship with the profit-driven work of the media conglomerates.
The book's argument depends upon the assumption, argued from Ernst Bloch to Richard Dyer and beyond, that the fundamental attraction of these cultural products, whether fans know it or not, lies in...