The Apocalyptic Systems Thriller as a non-fiction genre

Political economy should steal the best tricks of science fiction and techno-thrillers.

Hari Kunzru has a really useful new piece in the New York Times on a fictional genre he calls the “apocalyptic systems thriller.”

The implication is that diverse situations are being monitored in some way, logged and recorded by a technically proficient authority that sees them as part of a coherent whole. … these books invite us to take an elevated, panoramic view of events that extend too far in space and time to be grasped by a single narrative consciousness. Conflict, climate change, pandemics and natural disasters offer ways to contemplate our interconnection and interdependence. … In this, the A.S.T. is essentially a subgenre of SF, or at least the kind of science fiction that prioritizes world-building over other kinds of narrative pleasure. … To succeed, this kind of story has to feel true. Even as the A.S.T. indulges in thriller tropes, the chases and explosions must be anchored by a kind of epistemological authority. …

The most celebrated example of the A.S.T. in recent years — and the book that, in its breadth of speculation, sets the standard for the genre — is Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” which attempts the enormous task of imagining a coordinated global response to another grave threat to humanity, climate change. … One ancestor of this kind of work is the 19th-century social novel … A more recent predecessor is the near-future cyberpunk narrative exemplified by Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. … But there’s a different tradition behind the A.S.T., one outside conventional literary history — corporate scenario planning.

The aesthetic of the A.S.T., with its flaunting of globalization, its pleasure in technical advances and its refusal of the “single window” into its stories, does have a utopian dimension — the imagination of what Bratton calls “planetary competency.” The message is one of resilience, of human beings acting in concert, muddling through problems in the hope of navigating what Pierre Wack called “the rapids” of the near future, into calmer waters beyond.

My immediate reaction: it me. Or more precisely: it my and Abe Newman’s recent book, Underground Empire. Explicit and extensively acknowledged debt to The Ministry for the Future? Check. Intellectual DNA from Neal Stephenson and techno-thrillers? Yep. New ways to contemplate our interconnection and interdependencies? That, at least is what the book tries to do. And so on for messages of resilience and muddling through problems &c &c.

But there is one important difference. My and Abe’s book doesn’t rub shoulders with the techno-thrillers. Instead, you’ll find it on the non-fiction shelves.

Just as Kunzru describes the influence of non-fiction on a new genre of fiction, that genre is re-shaping non-fiction, and should, in my opinion, be shaping it a lot more. We live in an enormously, terrifyingly complex world. We need new narrative techniques to make sense of it, and even more importantly to begin to articulate ways in which human beings can collectively respond to it. Furthermore, non-fiction writers ought steal liberally from fiction writers, just as fiction writers have stolen from the futurists and scenario planners that Kunzru describes. Rather than emphasizing the one-way passage from non-fiction to fiction, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as intertwined like twin helices, generating and regenerating new possibilities. The great advantage of thinking this way (at least from my selfish point of view) is that it focuses our attention on how to improve narrative technique in non-fiction too.

But first: why is non-fiction leaking into the fiction that Kunzru talks about? He has a tentative possible answer:

Why is the A.S.T. so salient right now? What itch is it scratching? One of the most astute thinkers about the emergent networked future is the design theorist Benjamin Bratton. In “The Revenge of the Real,” a work of nonfiction published in 2021, he proposes a “politics for a post-pandemic world,” suggesting that Covid has trained us to see ourselves in an “epidemiological” way: Like it or not, we are, inescapably, a population as well as individuals.

I have a different possible explanation (but do please note the word ‘possible’: seriously investigating how genres emerge and evolve requires a very different kind of evidence and analysis, based on just the epidemiological/population thinking that Kunzru points toward). My toy theory is that this new genre came into being before the era of Covid, in the financial crash and its aftermath. Its precipitating event, then, was not the pandemic, but the slowly accelerating collapse of the master-narrative of globalization, which has created space for new and different kinds of narratives.

Our world was profoundly shaped by the narrative of market-led globalization, exemplified by Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. When writing early drafts of Underground Empire with Abe, I re-read Friedman’s book. From a technical perspective, it sucked. Friedman famously wrote it in 90 days: my joke used to be that it was a 90 day amphetamine binge, where he was trying to do for the world economy what Hunter S. Thompson had done for Las Vegas. If you think of it that way, it becomes much easier to read. The stream-of-consciousness formlessness, tortured syntax and garbled cliches verge into unintentional gonzo poetry: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the globalization began to take hold …

Jokes aside, on some level, the narrative technique worked (this might, or might not, help explain why the book sold truckloads). Friedman’s apparently disconnected anecdotes and jarring geographical lurches actually mirror his underlying argument, whether deliberately or accidentally. All these different incidents, stories, places are contingent manifestations of the global marketplace. Form inadvertently mirrors content: it doesn’t matter that Friedman can’t convey depth or ambiguity to save his life, or that all the details are compressed into a bland pancaked smear. That, after all, is the story he is telling. In a flat world, it makes little difference whether you are in Dublin, Dubai or Dubuque, whether you are Indian, Italian or American, whether you make semiconductors or movies. All apparent variety collapses into the universalizing logic of global market competition.

Or, put differently, all the variety that couldn’t be squashed into this two-dimensional Flatland could be ignored. For a couple of decades, many influential people - pundits, Davos attendees, the rest of ‘em – affirmed Friedman’s gospel. Global markets would not only produce plenty but underpin peace: why would you ever go to war against the countries that sold to and bought from you? You didn’t need to pay attention to the systems of the world, the underlying institutions and complex networks of interdependent relations that wove everything together. The markets would manage all of this complexity, and do it far better than you, or your government, possibly could. Hadn’t Hayek said so, and hadn’t he won a Nobel Prize for it?

This grand narrative began to fall apart when the financial crisis hit. Markets, it turned out, didn’t solve complex political and social problems, so much as they made them invisible to policy elites. As the holes in the story widened and began to join each other, other kinds of narrative emerged, which paid close attention to the problems and the systems that might solve them.

That is the place where The Ministry for the Future fits. It is both a novel and a work of practical political economy. Robinson’s book builds on Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, which explained how durable inequality emerged and Adam Tooze’s Crashed, which demonstrated how global markets, far from sustaining themselves, depended profoundly on political authority. If the Fed hadn’t extended swap-lines to the world when private finance started failing, the economic crash would have been far more profound and far longer lasting. Geopolitics came back in as the bland fictions of market-created peace began to falter. Covid may have helped focus people’s attention on The Ministry for the Future and its like, but again, it was a book about political economy, building on previous books which, like it, tackled the complex problems that had been swept out of sight during the grand era of market globalization.

The hidden systems of the world that had come into view during the financial crisis, became ever more visibly important as shock after shock kept hitting the consensus narrative that Friedman and others had helped create: Trump; the return of open contention between great powers; the visible consequences of climate change. The pandemic is just the most recent of these shocks to the system.

This origin story is still compatible with Kunzru’s fundamental argument. The apocalyptic systems thriller grafts political economy’s interest in systems onto the techno-thriller’s interest in action. Bruce Sterling once defined the techno-thriller as “a science fiction novel with the president in it.” The techno-thriller is a novel of political agency – there is a massive systemic threat, but there is someone who can address it. But that also points to the tension. Books that explain vast systems are mostly about how people don’t make the choices – the system constrains them, or turns their decisions towards unexpected results. Techno-thrillers, on the contrary reassure us that someone is in charge, and able to take decisive action when the crisis hits.

Take the book that The Ministry for the Future most closely resembles in its unconventional narrative techniques. Francis Spufford’s 2010 novel Red Plenty, which used the 1960s Soviet experiment in economic planning to mirror the derangements of market capitalism. As one of the characters in Red Plenty says, in a somewhat ironic commentary on the text he is unknowingly embroiled in, stories about System are difficult to reconcile with the conventional assumptions of the novel.

an economy told a kind of story, though not the sort you would find in a novel. In this story, many of the major characters would never even meet, yet they would act on each other’s lives just as surely as if they jostled for space inside a single house, through the long chains by which value moved about. Tiny decisions in one place could have cascading, giant effects elsewhere; conversely, what most absorbed the conscious attention of the characters – what broke their hearts, what they thought ordered or justified their lives – might have no effect whatsoever, dying away as if it had never happened at all. Yet impersonal forces could have drastically personal consequences, in this story, altering the whole basis on which people hoped and loved and worked. It would be a strange story to hear. At first it would seem to be a buzzing confusion, extending arbitrarily in directions that seemed to have nothing to do with each other. But little by little, if you were patient, its peculiar laws would become plain. In the end it would all make sense. Yes, thought Emil, it would all make sense in the end.

There isn’t much room for agency, just for the hope that the system’s logic will providentially work as if it conducted towards the ends that humans have or ought to have. Emil’s faith that it will all somehow make sense in the end is Spufford’s own deliberate metacommentary – Emil’s economic theory is the same kind of Tale that joins the little events of people’s lives with the grand changes in the world around them in John Crowley’s Little, Big. Arguably, just such a faith in fairytales lies behind Hayek’s influential assumption that a spontaneous market order will conduct toward the good.

Robinson admires Red Plenty: see the “Spufford Engines” that run the economy in his science fiction novel, 2312  and his insistence in 2012 that “Red Plenty is a Novel.” When he says that it “strengthens our sense of the form to have [Red Plenty] included in it,” he might have been defending the novel about climate change that he himself was to write a decade later. But he wants to preserve a space for agency too: for personal forces having drastically impersonal consequences. And as Kunzru suggests, there is a utopian dimension to the apocalyptic systems thriller’s assumption that human agency can be consequential, even in a world of system. It is really hard to reconcile inexorable inhuman systems and human agency! Some of the bits of The Ministry for the Future that try to do this are the bits that most resemble the RAND Corporation exercises in futurism. Others depart in all sorts of other interesting directions. But reconciling these clashing imperatives is the problem that Robinson wants to solve.

More generally, this is the problem that the entire new genre that Kunzru identifies wants to solve. I’ve joked elsewhere that science fiction is a set of evolved narrative strategies for managing the As You Know, Bob problem. The nascent apocalyptic systems thriller genre can be understood as a set of rapidly evolving narrative strategies for reconciling the massive systemic problems that we face with the hope that human agency can somehow meet them.

And this is where non-fiction can steal from the apocalyptic systems thriller, just as the apocalyptic systems thriller has stolen from it. Serious problem based non-fiction notoriously faces its own equivalent to As You Know Bob, the Last Chapter Problem. After spending multiple chapters describing the intractability of the challenges we face, the last chapter has to explain how they aren’t so intractable after all; how, in fact, with a few simple steps we can face them and resolve them! Most non-fiction books fail to do this convincingly. But with more attention both to narrative technique - and to welding together agency and structure, freedom and necessity in their underlying argument - they might not fail so badly. To this end, the bang and dazzle of the apocalyptic systems thriller provides one useful set of tools. The obverse of Kunzru’s argument is that the epistemological authority of the non-fiction trade book sometimes needs the anchor of chases and explosions. Or a little more mundanely – it needs to trace the relationship between agency and system through the whole of the narrative, rather than suddenly and awkwardly reversing toward it at the end.

There are other narrative techniques for doing this. Tooze’s Crashed has rightly gotten a lot of praise, but has not been praised nearly enough for the confluence between narrative technique and underlying theory of agency and the world. The book keeps the reader hooked, not simply because Tooze’s prose is excellent, but because the narrative structure aptly conveys the terror and excitement of a situation where no-one is quite sure what is going on, but everyone is struggling to guide it in the one direction or the other. This maps onto the underlying systems of the world that he describes – vast, complex, intersecting in highly uncertain ways, but still susceptible to the push and shove of brute force solutions from the central actors in the system.

For obvious reasons, I am not the person to provide an impartial assessment of whether Underground Empire succeeds or fails in reconciling form and content. But I can talk about our intentions. The book steals its narrative form very deliberately from the techno-thriller – suggesting that the different systems of the world have become connected as the United States struggled to exert its power in a globalized economy. This did have unfortunate consequences for at least one reader. The Financial Times reviewer said that the book was the “stuff of thrillers”, gladdening my heart, but it also suggested that we thought that U.S. power had come about through a “elaborate and secret plot.” We actually said just the opposite, stressing repeatedly how the system had emerged through accidents, mistakes and haphazard improvisations. In this instance, the narrative form of agency overwhelmed the argument about systems (though really, don’t the best paranoid thrillers get their best effects from the underlying fear that no-one, in fact, is in charge)? But other readers got it.

The broader point is this. The influence of the apocalyptic systems thriller should not stop at the boundaries of fiction. Non-fiction writers too should borrow from its techniques, and return the favor. They face similar problems and can adopt similar solutions. Indeed, I would reframe Kunzru (I think he might agree), to argue that the apocalyptic systems thriller is a genre that spans and ought span both fiction and non-fiction. That is why novels that partake of the narrative techniques of both, like The Ministry for the Future, are at its heart. And as non-fiction writers too begin to borrow its narrative approaches more systematically, some too can become bridging figures, helping a two way movement of techniques and ideas.

After all, we’re all in the same game. We want to write books that take both systems and agency seriously. More urgently, we need to write such books and read them too.

We are discovering, far later than we should have that we live in a world that is very definitely not flat. In this world, we cannot just trust the complexities of interdependence to the distributed intelligence of the marketplace, which is very good at solving some problems (Hayek got a lot right), but terrible at solving others. We need more collective agency, and novelists and non-fiction writers can both help.

As Ada Palmer and Jo Walton explain, fiction writers should be thinking about how we can write books that help us understand how to collectively become protagonists. Non-fiction writers should be explaining the systems and problems in ways that don’t deny agency or just tack it on at the end, but work it through. They should ruthlessly steal some of their narrative techniques from fiction, while novelists should steal some of their understanding of the systems from non-fiction. And as cross-fertilization continues, more and different forms of theft will become possible.

Again, I think that this kind of cross-influence is what Kunzru is pointing towards, even if he describes it differently as a novelist thinking about the consequences for fiction. If not, I as a non-fiction writer, am hereby stealing his great arguments and repurposing them for my own uses. I do think those uses point in the same direction as his. And perhaps, in turn, fiction writers can grab my and Abe’s and others’ ideas and turn them to their own purposes. Such back-and-forth is part of what we need right, as we figure out how to intervene in a world whose vastness and multitude of problems dwarf not just our collective means to solve them, but our imaginative capacity to even think about how to build such means.

[Full disclosure: Stan Robinson and Francis Spufford are both friends, but describing them as such in the main text felt awkward. I haven’t consulted them: neither are at all to blame for any misuses I’ve made of their books and ideas. Still, I’ll be doing a public interview with Francis next week (come see!) and have written the introduction for a re-issue of Stan’s wonderful novel, Icehenge (go buy!), on which there will be more in the next few months.]