Non-liberal parables for the Millennium: speculative pasts of the West and other futurities

This paper is a reading of the Earthseed novels by Octavia Butler, also known as the Parable novels, and Millennium, aka the globally bestselling Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels, by Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson. Both series are critical texts from nation-states that have been considered exemplary transitional models, and I read both as emblematic of a speculative turn in contemporary cultural production and criticism. Reading them together shows how the speculative turn has formed across existing disciplines and geo-political sites; reading them together as part of this Inter-Asia volume situates such a transnational assessment of the West as a difficult, contradictory speculative project within the post-Cold War world of Pax Americana. I argue that both series unpack the idea of the liberal West by connecting narratives of dis/empowerment for female protagonists to the historical trajectories of fascistic white supremacism and racial capitalism. Both series are of interest to this in-between Inter-Asia project to the extent that their open-ended SF narrative elements unravel both speculative futures for neoliberal presents and speculative pasts for the Cold War construction of the liberal.