I’ve been a science fiction fan since my grandfather brought me the entire Dune series at a yard sale. I loved them so much that I stored them in a huge, silver box separate from all my other books.
I see the genre’s spaceships and robots as accessories to an extended metaphor about the absurdity and beauty of our species. So it always seemed strange to me that the tech industry is so eager to bring those imaginary worlds to life as described.
A recent article by academic Ali Rıza Taşkale finally put a finger on my unease. Sci-fi, he argued in Aeon, has been looted by Silicon Valley. The Musks and Zuckerbergs have selectively adopted tales of lone heroes and futuristic aesthetics, leaving aside more complicated narratives about collective struggle and societal collapse.
Ali joined me this week to talk more about his research and how we can reclaim sci-fi.
I reached out because what you described in your article aligns with what I see in my day job working with founders and venture capitalists on their narrative. I see a lot of people manipulating stories in the service of building their own mythology and justifying their own methods.
Thank you. I expected this response from science-fiction readers and academics. But it also came from people like you, which surprised me in a good way.
Maybe this is because people are more aware of how tech companies use these narratives, and the balance of public opinion is again tipping into widespread skepticism about big tech companies. What caused you to see this link and write this essay?
I’ve been a science-fiction fan my whole life. I’ve watched these films since I was a child. Blade Runner is still one of my favorites, and I love 2049 too.
In October 2025, I finished a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at Roskilde University in Denmark. The project examined the relationship between speculative finance and speculative fiction. Finance is built on abstractions you cannot see or touch, and I wanted to know whether fiction could make those abstractions legible.
While I was finishing the project, I kept noticing what was happening in American tech. One day, this actually happened: I was swimming when it clicked. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg: they do not just talk about science fiction; they build it. The fiction is being materialized. The Aeon essay came out of that. What I have done is develop it into a framework and test it against specific cases.
How do you think the way these industries — finance and tech — use stories is different from companies or leaders in the past?
There is a real difference, and it is the difference between legitimation and materialization.
Earlier elites used stories to justify decisions they had already made: manifest destiny, the Cold War, the space race. The story sold the policy. This generation is doing something else. They are building what the novel describes. Palantir is named after the seeing-stones in The Lord of the Rings. Musk constantly cites Asimov’s Foundation. Meta is named after the metaverse, a word Neal Stephenson coined in Snow Crash, a novel that is itself a satire of corporate America.
What makes this moment different is that the people who were science fiction’s ideal readers now hold real financial and political power, especially under Trump. They can therefore loot the genre for product names, mission architecture, and, most importantly, pricing.
What do you mean about pricing?
This is the argument of my forthcoming book, Fictional Worlds and Financial Realities in Speculative Literature and Film. Speculative vocabulary is the mechanism that makes speculative infrastructure financially legible. It is how you put a number on something that does not yet exist.
Read SpaceX’s IPO prospectus. It is a piece of materialized science fiction: the references are there, and so are the AI-generated images. That is not decoration or a creative flourish. It is doing valuation work. It gives investors a story they can price.
There is a second part of this that often gets missed. If the story sets the price, someone has to carry the risk when it does not come true. That risk does not sit with the founder. It sits with the public: in subsidies, procurement contracts, land, power for data centers, and the labor of the people who make them run. The upside is private. The downside is shared.
“Someone has to carry the risk when it does not come true. That risk does not sit with the founder. It sits with the public…The upside is private. The downside is shared.”
What are the science fiction narratives that tech ignores?
The collective ones. These men see themselves as lone visionaries saving the world, so they choose the stories that flatter them.
Think about Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Why does no one in tech ever cite it? That is not an accident. It is a novel about an anarchist society built deliberately against frontier individualism, against the idea of one genius, one hero, one rocket, one escape.
Le Guin has also written stories that challenge binary notions of gender, something which I think would make many tech leaders uncomfortable. In your article, you cite a Peter Thiel essay that contends that the extension of the franchise to women is one of the reasons that he believes capitalism and democracy can no longer coexist. Do you think Thiel hasn’t read Le Guin?
I think he has read enough, and that is exactly my point. In her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Jill Lepore at Harvard argues that these men misread science fiction. I disagree. I think they understand these books perfectly well. They are looting them, not misreading them.
Look at the Banks example. Musk keeps recommending the Culture novels as the best picture of an AI future. SpaceX’s drone ships are named after Culture starships. Neuralink’s whole premise comes from Banks’s neural lace. Then, in a recent interview with The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes pointed out that Banks was a socialist and Musk disputed it. He said he was not sure he agreed.
That is not a man who missed the politics. That is a man who saw the politics and decided they were not there. They take the aesthetics and leave the economics on the shelf.
Iain Banks was Scottish, but a lot of the other authors we’re talking about are American. These narratives of venturing, voyaging, and overcoming feel very American to me.
Silicon Valley draws on a very narrow slice of the genre: mid-century Anglo-American Golden Age science fiction, plus a little cyberpunk with the critique surgically removed. The recurring themes are white fear, the frontier, the lone genius, and the founder as hero. Corporate capitalism is also central because much American science fiction imagines corporate power as either utopia or dystopia. Blade Runner is the obvious case.
I don’t want the tech world to loot any more great literature, but it’s almost a shame, given the richness of science fiction outside of the U.S.
We should keep reminding people that science fiction was never only white and American. Afrofuturism treats the future as reclamation and diasporic memory, not as an empty frontier waiting for a flag. There are Chinese futurisms: Liu Cixin is the most famous example, but Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide and Hao Jingfang’s ‘Folding Beijing’ are closer to what I mean. Regina Kanyu Wang is a Chinese writer and scholar doing important work on co-futures alongside Indigenous futurisms and Afrofuturism. Then there is solarpunk, which is still emerging: international, small-scale, repair-minded, ecological, and explicitly post-frontier.
The word to watch is ‘the future’. What gets called the future in a tech pitch is one narrow, linear dialect within a much larger and more contested vocabulary. The industry is enclosing it.
What do you think people like myself, or people working in tech, should take from the fact that tech leaders are being very selective in what they take from science fiction?
Three things.
First, understand how the references work, but do not stop at cultural criticism. The names came from novels, but the companies carrying them now generate enormous wealth and increasingly govern public life. Palantir is not just a Tolkien reference; it is a company embedded in policing, immigration enforcement, and defense procurement. DOGE was the clearest case of all: a piece of speculative governance installed inside the state. That is the part that matters.
Second, hold them to their own sources. Gibson warned about cyberspace decades ago. Banks wrote the economics into the Culture series. Keep saying it: you cite these writers, and they are telling you something different. Take the references back.
Third — and I am still working out how to say this — the answer is not hope instead of fear. We are not living in nice times, and a nicer story will not help. The answer is to put back the part where people have to work things out together: labor, negotiation, failure, and repair. Keep those things inside the frame instead of resolving everything into either a launch or a collapse.
If you want one practical test, it is this: when you read a founder’s story, ask who does the work in that future and what happens if it fails. If the answers are ‘nobody’ and ‘nothing’, you are not looking at a vision. You are looking at a valuation.
“When you read a founder’s story, ask who does the work in that future and what happens if it fails. If the answers are ‘nobody’ and ‘nothing’, you are not looking at a vision. You are looking at a valuation.”
That is also why journalists matter here. People need somewhere to put forward their own accounts of the future, and there is not much of a forum for that right now. This is not really about tech; it is about who gets to author the future. The future is contested, and it has not yet been written. If we do not take part in that contest, someone else will fill the space.
If this interview has inspired you to re-examine the books that Silicon Valley loves to cite, here is list of the works mentioned:
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (Palantir is named after the seeing-stones)
The Foundation series, Isaac Asimov (cited by Musk)
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (coined “metaverse,” source of Meta’s name)
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
The Culture series, Iain Banks (referenced for SpaceX’s drone ship names and Neuralink’s “neural lace” concept)
Waste Tide, Chen Qiufan
The Remembrance of Earth's Past series, Liu Cixin
“Folding Beijing” (short story), Hao Jingfang
As a little extra, my favorite sci-fi writer is Ray Bradbury. Start with his short stories ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ and ‘The Veldt.’
If you’ve seen any science fiction shenanigans or want to share your favorites, reply to this email.
this is such an excellent and fascinating conversation!