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Sherryl Vint

Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she founded the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge, and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is the managing editor for the journal Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science in Popular Culture.

Essays

Entropy as Neoliberal Governance in Ubik

Ubik illuminates what is at stake for the human reimagined as human capital through these transitions, an alienation that expands beyond Joe’s struggles with his apartment door to encompass the deformation of the boundaries of reality itself as he investigates in a world whose ontological foundation has become fluid—commodities are regressing into earlier instantiations of their core use value, and the plot never entirely confirms for us whether it is Joe or his employer who exists in the state of cryonic suspended animation after bodily death that the novel names half-life.