Slow Resilience: Speculative Fiction in the Capitalocene argues that authors of
contemporary speculative fiction, in writing about Capitalocenic disasters, engage their
characters and readers in practices of slow resilience. I develop a theory of slow
resilience as a series of survival strategies within and beyond global capitalism, allowing
for both utopian critiques of and corrections to that system, and ways of coping within its
lived realities. The project considers how speculative fiction novels, essays, treatises, and
self-styled documentaries—“what if” narratives—are uniquely suited to grapple with
imagining other futures that are based on current conditions, as they border on but do not
cross into the improbable or fantastic. Attending to the difficulties of representing slowly
evolving, non-spectacular crises like global climate change, Slow Resilience maps a
spectrum of narrative and affective responses to such Capitalocenic disasters, from
denial, fear, and sublime awe to utopian dreams of communal living, extra-solar travel,
and inter-species coexistence. I propose that speculative fiction in the Capitalocene
portrays the long, slow, monotonous business of survival under the threat of, and beyond,
apocalypse, parodying Romantic ideas of a noble Last Man while also offering up
counter-narratives of a Last Woman, who struggles to survive in what I call the Gothic
conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Each work of speculative fiction addressed in this
dissertation both participates in and seeks to challenge the conditions and consequences
of global capitalism by proposing modes of individual and collective resilience.
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