The Slow Rebellion: Postmodern SF As Temporal Capitalist Critique
Voica Armstrong (she/her) (2027) | English
Voica is a SURF L&S scholarship recipient and a third-year English major hoping to double major in Political Economy or Legal Studies. For her SURF project this summer, she is examining how postmodern science fiction challenges the fast-paced and fragmented experience of time shaped by modern capitalism. By analyzing six science fiction novels within their social and economic contexts, Voica explores how the genre imagines alternative ways of experiencing time and offers new perspectives on contemporary issues such as efficiency, technology, and AI.
What made you choose this research project? How did your interest in your research topic emerge?
I’ve always loved science fiction. As a kid, my parents would sit me down and show me episodes of Star Trek, the Matrix trilogy, and even La Jetée. Later in life, I became immersed in the stories of Ted Chiang, Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick. Above all, what fascinated me was the ability these authors and storytellers had to capture alternate realities; worlds that were so similar to, but so different from, our own life. As a student at UC Berkeley, I began learning more about the genre. I took a class in Fall 2025 on Ursula K. Le. Guin, where I first read her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home. At the time, I was also taking a political economy class titled Global Poverty Practice, which focused on the ways hegemonic nations, urged by modern neoliberal capitalism, imposed rigid economic infrastructures onto countries in the Global South. I became interested in the intersection of these two topics, and particularly how the nonlinear form of science fiction may propose alternatives to societal collective experiences of time shaped by postmodern neoliberal capitalism. In Spring 2026, I began an independent study that investigated this question, running in parallel to a seminar I was taking on science fiction. Through these commitments, I read more secondary material, which gave me the theoretical grounding to explore this question, and will hopefully help guide my work this summer.
What is your project about (in simple terms)? How does it relate to issues or ideas you have been studying in your coursework?
My project explores nonlinear narrative forms in postmodern science fiction, and how they may have evolved as a critique against experiences of societal time. In particular, I will be examining six novels, each of which define a decade beginning in the 1970s: The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delaney, Use of Weapons by Ian Banks, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, and Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present by Yanis Varoufakis.
My project will investigate how the accelerating, progress-driven temporality of neoliberal capitalism, while socially constructed, disciplines how people live and what futures they can imagine. I argue that this logic of mutual shaping, proposed by sociologist Judy Wajcman, also applies to temporal narrative choices that both respond to and contest how socio-politically, economically, and technologically embedded readers experience the rhythm of life. Science fiction in particular, as explored by scholars Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin, serves as narrative forms that speculate on possible futures to interrogate the relationship between technological change and human nature. Thus, by reading formal narrative choices as critical responses to specific socially constructed versions of societal time, this project connects the study of the SF genre and literary analysis to scholarship on political-economic time.
What are you most excited about this summer? Will your research entail travel, access to special collections, or experiments?
Although my project doesn’t involve travel or archival research, it involves a journey of a different sort! I will be immersed in studying time as a collective construct, as a biological limit, as a phenomenological subject, as a political object, and as narrative form. I am most excited about the opportunity to work in small group cohorts over the summer. Literature research is often a very solitary process, but one of the major benefits to SURF is its counterbalance: its structure helps keep you accountable for the work that you’re doing, whether through individual meetings with mentors, group meetings with your cohort, or meeting the final project/presentation deadlines. I’m genuinely honored to get to work closely with a group of likeminded, motivated students, and have a space to share observations, tips, and challenge each other intellectually through this process.
What do you hope to learn from this experience? What would success look like for you? What challenges do you anticipate confronting?
What I most hope to learn from this experience is how to move through dense theoretical work with greater confidence. While I’ve encountered critical theory throughout my undergraduate studies, approaching it within a self-directed research project feels more daunting. I will need to master a new conceptual vocabulary and develop my own methodological instincts, which seems like a disturbingly open-ended enterprise. Although a literature-based project often culminates in a substantial essay or thesis, that isn’t my primary aim for the summer. I am using the SURF experience to cover the prerequisite theoretical ground for understanding, on the one hand, the factors that shape our collective time experience, and, on the other hand, how collective time experiences relate to postmodern narrative forms. I will be applying this theoretical framework to help me achieve a grounded understanding of the six novels I’ve selected as exemplars for what I see as a central trends in postmodern SF, as a first step in developing an honors thesis.
What do you hope comes out of this research? What impact do you hope your research will have?
After graduating from UC Berkeley, I plan to pursue graduate study, with the long-term goal of becoming a professor of English literature. Participating in SURF is an important step in that direction because it provides a space to begin developing this project as a graduate-level research agenda; particularly, I’m interested in how this work might open onto larger questions within the study of science fiction. I’m drawn to the ways the genre engages time and technology as forces that shape how stories are told and understood. If this project can contribute, even in a small way, to ongoing conversations in that area, it will have done what I hoped it might.