Applying Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism” and Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee’s “necrocapitalism” to the study of sf, this article reads the post-apocalyptic French comic Le Transperceneige (1982) and its film adaptation Snowpiercer (2014) as critiques of necrofuturist visions of the future. Necrofuturism posits a future that is doomed to continue modern capitalism’s unsustainable and immoral practices even as those practices become more and more destructive and self-defeating; films such as Snowpiercer interrupt this well-rehearsed vision of a world of universal death to open the mind to new possibilities for alternative futures. Key to Snowpiercer’s critique of necrofuturism is its depiction of necrocapitalism as a deliberately constructed thing, rather than a law of nature, reminding us that someone chose to build this world of unhappiness and prompting us to recognize that other sorts of worlds might be built instead.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gerry-canavan/27/
Published version. This article first appeared in Paradoxa no. 26 which was published in 2014. For further information concerning Paradoxa and its publications, please see www.paradoxa.com. © 2014 Delta Productions. Permalink. Used with permission.