The 1970s, Scarcity, and Asimov

In the US, an energy shortage preceded the energy crisis (Sobel, 1974: 7). In 1969 the rising levels of energy consumption and stagnating energy production created an energy gap. The gap widened in 1970—Nixon described the moment as an incipient ‘energy crisis.’⁴ To make matters worse, catastrophe followed in the wake of the mounting crisis: on February 13 a Greek tanker, the Delian Apollon, spilled nearly 10,000 gallons of crude in Tampa, Florida; on April 22 an oil slick in Alaska was reported; and on September 7^th the Irving Whale sank just off the coast of New Brunswick spilling 875,000 gallons of oil (Sobel, 1974: 36). In the shadow cast by rising oil prices and in response to US policy on the Middle East, on October 17, 1973 the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) revised their production and distribution of oil resources in order to influence the US, especially with regard to policy on Israel. Fuel prices in the US and around the world soared ever higher—the price of oil went from $3/b to $12/b. The US responded by lowering the speed limit and rationing gasoline.

In 1977 Time Magazine asked Asimov to imagine an ‘energy-poor society’ (Asimov, 1983: 34) that could plausibly come to exist by the end of the 20^th-century. This task marks a major shift in Asimov’s writing. Gerry Canavan differentiates between his earlier works—with all their atomic-utopian hope—and the piece he would pen for TIME, ‘The Nightmare Life Without Fuel.’ Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) for example, features an African Atomic Age Utopia that stands out from other world powers for having undeveloped fossil fuel reserves. His Foundation novels (1951, 1952, and 1953) project a galaxy that has long since moved past fossil fuels, and his time-travel novel The End of Eternity (1955) features characters shocked to learn that they must use automobiles to get around. Canavan argues that ‘Asimov’s sidelong references to oil and his repeated insistence on oil’s absence as a marker of human progress are unique to the period only insofar as he bothers to mention the existence of oil at all’ (2014: 338). Perhaps Asimov’s reputation as a thinker of energy-plenty futures landed him the Time gig.

‘The Nightmare Life Without Fuel’ is extrapolative. The essay looks twenty years into the future—to 1997 and a world without fossil-fuel reserves. The essay operates through a second person address, interpellating the reader thus: ‘you’ll have to walk to work again’ (1983: 34). It features the rise of demolition workers—a new common trade for labourers. Asimov writes, ‘The fading structures of a decaying city are the great mineral mines and hardware shops of the nation’ (1983: 34). No longer able to power the machinery required to extract resources from the earth, Americans turn to their built structures for necessary components. The life without fuel is one characterized by recycling and scavenging from the high-carbon structures of the past.

Asimov works through the practical question of what might be kept running. ‘What energy is left cannot be directed into personal comfort … and then of course energy must be conserved for agriculture’ (1983: 35). In this imagined future, car factories only produce and maintain agricultural machinery, people accept no light in the evening, and can find ways to stay warm on their own in the winters, but they cannot go hungry for long. Moreover, Asimov convincingly explains why people stopped using cars: ‘any automobile that dared show itself on a city street was overturned and burned … Cars just vanished and became part of the metal resource’ (1983: 34). Though this seems a dire bit of catastrophism, the future is not all bad. Asimov’s speaker frames the advantages of this world through what the newspapers have to say about them: ‘the air is cleaner and there seem to be fewer colds … the crime rate had dropped … policemen are back on their beats. More important, the streets are full. Legs are king in the cities of 1997, and people walk everywhere far into the night … The suburbs were born with the auto, lived with the auto, and are dying with the auto’ (1983: 34–35).

To those critical of petroculture’s environmental impacts, clean air and walking for transport seem like desirable future outcomes; while, looking back from the violently securitized present, the thought of more police on the street is not so attractive. One could surmise that the crime rate has dropped as officers have had to give up their cruisers (without the depersonalizing filter of the automobile, officers on the beat are much more likely to know the people in the community). On a national level, armies are gone as ‘no one can afford to keep those expensive, energy-gobbling monstrosities’ (1983: 36). Equating powering-down with peace, Asimov effectively presents a relatively utopian vision of the world.

Asimov’s essay reads more like notes towards a story than a fully elaborated thought experiment. For instance, a checklist quickly writes off energy options: ‘[c]oal is too difficult to dig up and transport to give us the energy in the amounts we need, nuclear fission is judged to be too dangerous, the technical breakthrough toward nuclear fusion that we hope for never took place, and solar batteries are too expensive to maintain on the earth’s surface in sufficient quantity’ (1983: 34). The essay is remarkable for its capacity to construct a viable storyworld in such a short format: foreign policy and social reproduction are included in his vision, but they are not as clearly thought through as energy and infrastructure. Though, during the actual crisis, Americans did not start stripping buildings for materials, the dire affect of this piece—‘[e]nergy continues to decline, and machines must be replaced by human muscle and beasts of burden’ (1983: 36)—seems to capture quite clearly the feeling of the 70s, which was the first decade in US history when the consumption of energy outpaced its domestic production (Sobel, 1974: 51).

The essay’s form and its subject matter make Asimov’s thought experiment about an energy-transitioned future an explicit one. The honed tools of Jameson’s symptomatic reading and Yaeger’s exposition of unconscious signs of energy are not required here. The explicit-ness of Asimov’s writing is built on the basis of not have enough oil; the essay’s storyworld is still oil-ontological, in Canavan’s terms. One can clearly make out that Asimov posits a set of conditions and then extrapolates two trends. I have already been elaborating the first. Its temporality is more immediate. The second takes a longer view of what an energy-poor world might eventually come to look like:

Energy continues to decline, and machines must be replaced by human muscle and beasts of burden … Where will it end? It must end in a return to the days before 1800, to the days before the fossil fuels powered a vast machine industry and technology. It must end in subsistence farming and in a world population reduced by starvation, disease and violence to less than a billion (1983: 36).

Asimov’s conclusion seems forced from the little speculative evidence he provides. It certainly fits with Canavan’s assessment of the essay as a whole as a retrofuture—a civilizational regression that imagines the only way forward is to return to a previous historical epoch. Yet, ‘The Nightmare Life Without Fuel’ does have unintended lessons to offer. Sites of extraction are ephemeral, as history has borne witness. So are pipelines.⁵ While sites of extraction pop up and close down, leaving ghost towns and depleted reservoirs behind, refineries remain where they are built.⁶ For fossil capital in full swing, they just cost too much to demolish. Yet, Asimov’s Time piece suggests a prudent way to approach the hulking infrastructure of fossil capital: with a demolition crew.

‘The Nightmare Life Without Fuel’ is easily read in terms of its relation to energy crisis, which informs both its subject and historical context, yet it is crucial to remember that energy scarcity is only scarcity in relation to certain energy demands. Now, in an era of technological development and offshoring, of just-in-time production and individuated automobility energy demand has never been higher.⁷ When energy runs on oil, oil runs everything.

The 1980s, Energy Glut, and Neuromancer

If the 1970s saw a crisis in the world supply of oil, the 1980s saw the inversion of that crisis. In ‘The Energy Crisis is over … Again’, energy policy analyst John P. Weyant writes that as of 1983 there was already ‘abundant evidence of chronic world oversupply of oil,’ and he ties this to the fact that oil consumption fell from 51 million barrels a day (mbd) in 1979 to near 41 mbd in 1983 (Weyant, 1983: 12).⁸ The crisis of the 1980s gets murkier when one also considers government policy and manufacturing. The thicket of US energy policy presented a dense problem for those looking to manage the crisis from the government side, because, as Joseph S. Nye Jr. suggests, it is ‘far easier to fund the defence budget than the strategic petroleum reserve and far easier to cooperate in NATO than in the International Energy Agency (IEA)’ (1982: 122). Meanwhile, in a 1985 paper in Energy Policy, Walter Goldstein gets at the heart of a mounting contradiction in production. He claims that ‘more industrial products were manufactured and more energy consumed in 1984 than in any previous year’ (1985: 525). Unlike the high fuel costs of energy crisis, the oil glut presents a new set of problems and produces a different set of assumptions. In this moment prices become tied to the market, rather than governments and price-setters, and volatility reigns.⁹ Moreover, the apparent abundance produces a sense of security in the energy-rich future. Rather than providing a moment for energy transition away from fossil fuels, the oil glut of the 1980s ensured an entrenchment of fossil capital, a redoubling of investments in the oil sector, and a tightening of petroleum’s grip on the shape of the future.

Unlike Asimov’s bleak, retrospective outlook, sf authors write from a different set of conditions in the 1980s. To read William Gibson’s debut novel Neuromancer today one can get the sense that he was largely describing the same present as Goldstein, Nye, and Weyant. In both the novel and the real world energy-washed industries pump out commodities, the development of electronics complexifies, and world population climbs. Let me describe the situation in Gibson’s novel.

Banished from cyberspace, Gibson’s protagonist Case begins the novel psychically caught between its two cityscapes, a state of exile that aligns in illuminating ways with Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodern alienation in the modern city:

A year later and [Case] still dreamed of cyber space, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void … The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there. (Gibson, 1984: 5)

On one hand, this passage explores Chiba City through a drug addled stupor that stumbles down the twists and turns of the layered forms of so many film-noir depictions of the city, framed by the now classic opening line description, ‘The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel’ (Gibson, 1984: 3). On the other, the promise of cyberspace—a mappable system of logic, which offers the possibility of finding purchase on the present.¹⁰ Case’s eventual return to cyberspace and the challenges he faces there act out a sort of wish fulfilment—with the right techniques and technologies, an individual agent could not only determine where they are, but how to act in the face of that knowledge. Gibson’s novel addresses the same historical problematic as Jameson’s postmodernism essay: the complexity of history and the unmappable present in late capitalism for the still-modern subject. Gibson’s cyberpunk science fiction encounters the same problematic Jameson’s theory identifies, even if it does so with the bleary, red eyes behind a strung-out console jockey’s ambitions.

To start thinking about the energy imaginary of Neuromancer, one might recall the modes of transport that characters use in the novel. In Chiba City, they travel mostly by foot. In the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Area, otherwise known simply as ‘The Sprawl,’ they rely on trains to whip them from Boston to New York. Then, in Istanbul, Case and Molly ride a self-driving, speaking car. ‘The Mercedes’ talks to them, describing their location and the sights (1984: 87, 90, and 91). Gibson extrapolates a vision of the future of automobility that, from the vantage of the present, seems like it must rely on extensively mapped terrain with a vast overlay of information—consumer GPS in the 80s. Later, they employ a shuttle to launch them into space and the Marcus Garvey and the Babylon Rocker to transport them to the space station Freeside. Throughout the book, they ride planes from continent to continent—Japan to the USA, the USA to Turkey. The train and even the car could conceivably be electric, but the jets and the spaceships would seem to require some form of fuel. The point in reading a text for its fuel signifiers should not be to determine whether the fiction has given up fossil fuels, rather one might use the survey of transportation to begin an inquiry into how energy gets taken for granted and what this revelation says about their cultural imaginary. Indeed, the point here is that the energy unconscious is, indeed, unconscious.

What if, following Herbert Sussman’s argument about Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990), one was to read Neuromancer not as a science-fiction novel but as a novel of alternative-history? What if, taking a cue from Gibson and Sterling’s reinvention of Charles Babbage’s steam-powered Analytic Engine—with its ‘thousands of clockwork gears and yards of punched paper’ (Sussman, 1994: 1)—one were to locate the point of divergence in Neuromancer not in a science-fictional novum of cyberspace but in the invention of an energy regime capable of fuelling such a demanding electronic endeavour? Put otherwise, what happens when one considers Gibson’s first novel as an alternative history where, in Sussman’s words, ‘what we accept as inevitable is only contingent’ (1994: 2)? The reading that accepts a world of consoles, cyberspace, jacking in, the net, and so on without asking how these components come to be powered misses a crucial development: the fictional world of Gibson’s cyberpunk runs, as readers later learn, on hydrogen power and, perhaps, on nuclear power. The more obvious lesson that attends the generic difference between Neuromancer and The Difference Engine is that cyberpunk names a bottom-up narrative set in a techno-cultural milieu, whereas steampunk names one set within a particular energy regime. As a cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer reveals its energy regime only in a mediated fashion, only in glimpses of distant power plants, only in the briefest mention of hydrogen fuel cells.

Neuromancer offers hints that some kind of energy transition has taken place. On the way to Istanbul, Molly and Case both look out the train’s window, ‘“It was like this when we headed to Chiba,” Molly said, staring out the train window at the blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon warning airplanes away from a fusion plant’ (1984: 85). Some technological development has taken place, similar to the one that Gerry Canavan attributes to the Asimov of the 40s and 50s who imagined developments in nuclear power would proceed without issue. But the ‘blasted industrial landscape’ they pass by indicates that there is more to the story here than unblemished scientific progress. The narrator says, ‘The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused nightmares of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete’ (1984: 85). Here, the past and present overlap. This sentence describes a scene and then implies Case saw it played out in his youth—a nightmare vision he sought to repress. The pitch of the shifted highway and the failed reclamation of it by the grass indicate an arrested state. Though the scene reveals little more about the nuclear question, it does offer information about transport in the Sprawl—the highways are not in use and have either been destroyed or left unmaintained to crumble.¹¹ The narrator passes one final piece of information to the reader: ‘[t]he train began to decelerate ten kilometres from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on the broken slag and the rusting shell of refineries’ (1984: 85).¹² Case and Molly pass through a landscape uncannily reminiscent of Philadelphia, where since 1870 oil and gas refineries have lined the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers.¹³ The ‘broken slag’ and ‘rusting shells of refineries’ evoke a sense that fossil fuels, whether or not they are extracted and refined elsewhere, might not be at the core of US social and economic activity in this story world, which raises the question; what is powering this world?¹⁴

In an interview, William Gibson has indicated that part of the thought experiment of Neuromancer was to imagine a future that was not American (Wallace-Wells, 2011). The United States is non-existent in the novel, having become little more than a network of corporate entities, while Japan is obviously a key hegemonic player on the world stage. It is interesting, then, that Case and Molly travel to Turkey. Tony Myers argues that in Gibson’s novel, ‘Turkey occupies the position of other in capitalism’s cultural imaginary’ (2001: 892). He quotes the novel describing Turkey as ‘a sluggish country’ and situates this sluggishness as a part of its use of ‘antiquated technologies’ (2001: 892). But, what if the novel describes Turkey in these terms because it has not yet fully transitioned away from fossil fuels? When Case and Molly arrive in Istanbul, the narrator says, ‘The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century’s dripping gasoline’ (2001: 88). More to the point compare how the two mentions of hydrogen cells in the novel replay this comparison: first, in Turkey, ‘[Case] watched a dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell conversion, as it disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers…’ (1984: 84) and then in Freeside, ‘Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell exhaust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks’ (1984: 140).¹⁵ I take Myers’s point, yet I would extend it. The disdain that the characters show towards Turkey in Neuromancer is not unlike the hypocritical attitude of North Americans in recent years to the news that major Chinese cities have more smoggy days per year than clear ones (even though the province of Ontario in Canada only stopped burning coal in the last few years).¹⁶ Here, I find an iteration of Michael Ziser’s provocation about fossil capital’s global face recast in the novel to mean something sinister. Ziser writes:

During the same period that the production of oil was taking on a foreign and primitive cast, its consumption in the United States was becoming the site of an alternately ecstatic and apocalyptic jouissance accelerated in the postwar period by huge national investments in the interstate highway system and by the accompanying white flight to car-dependent suburbs. (2011: 322)

Ziser makes petroleum’s double character apparent: in the US oil drives exuberance and ‘apocalyptic jouissance,’ while abroad it generates machinations and cabals. Neuromancer deploys a similar logic, although it implies a different, West-justifying reason for its attitude towards the Middle East. In the novel, Turkey is described as backwards not because of how it uses oil, but because it still uses it at all. The Sprawl, though massively energy consuming, is not fossil-fuel powered—recall that ‘Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power’ (1984: 203) even though even the metaphoric slippage that corporate power implies must also be premised on technological breakthroughs in both hydrogen cell manufacture and nuclear fission. Neuromancer reflects the fossil relations of its post-OPEC, oil glut moment in a distorted mirror that works to justify the high-energy life of North Americans even as it looks across the pacific to the rise of Japan.¹⁷

What is clear is that, with or without fossil fuels, the world of Neuromancer is energy-rich and must be dependent on a complex energy generation and distribution system. This becomes apparent when one moves from considering transport to think through the data-transfers on which cyberspace is based in the novel. When Case and Molly return to the Sprawl, the narrator says:

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your stimulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta… (1984: 43)

This description, unlike so much of the novel, does not rely on the metaphoric to convey the intensity of data transfer in the information age. Instead, it deploys real figures, telling the reader in imperative second person to map the data spatially across time. Here the figurative language, ‘go nova’ and ‘Cool it down,’ describes the visceral experience one might have when dialling in a meaningful visualization—something not unfamiliar to those working on data now, either in the tech industry or as researchers. As Jameson puts it in a later essay, ‘[t]he distinction of Neuromancer thus lies in the form itself, as an instrument which registers current realities normally beyond the capacity of the realistic eye to see, which projects dimensions of daily life we cannot consciously experience’ (Jameson 2015: 237).

Yet, this description of data visualization needs to be placed in the technological context of 1984. The very idea that gigabytes of data could be transferred in the blip of a second made for a startling proposition in the early days of computing, before the internet was a part of everyday life. In terms of the sheer quantity of data usage, a vast gulf separates Gibson’s science-fictional internet from that of the present day. Facebook, the social media giant, provides a good example of the kind of data bandwidth used in current computing. A blog post about Facebook’s data warehouse claims, ‘At Facebook, we have unique storage scalability challenges when it comes to our data warehouse. Our warehouse stores upwards of 300 PB of Hive data, with an incoming daily rate of about 600 TB’ (Vagata and Wilfong). Wait. I know what a terabyte (TB) is, but I had to look up petabyte (PB). A good ol’ gigabyte (GB) is one-thousand megabytes; a TB is roughly one-million megabytes; and a PB is one-billion megabytes. To illustrate: Netflix, the video streaming service, set to display in HD uses 2.4 GB per hour (‘Netflix’) which is equivalent to 650 MB per second for a single Netflix user. If 10 million people were watching Netflix at a given time (about ten percent of total subscribers) the data transfer from Netflix servers to all these users would be at a rate of about 6 PB per second. In Gibson’s terms, that is 6.5 billion megabytes, which does not even account for other social media websites, streaming services, standard browsing of the internet, cat GIFs, auto-tuned political debates, or the NYSE which has its own mega-high-bandwidth infrastructure.¹⁸ Today, a visualization of the same region would involve a scale closer to PB per megapixel (a million pixels). But the point here is not to adjust Gibson’s vision to our own reality; instead it is to realize that data requires and is today’s dominant form of electricity usage.¹⁹ To make this seem a little more manageable, I can reduce the scale. The average Google search involves a comparable amount of energy as boiling a kettle of water (around 3 kj).²⁰ So, if the kind of data transfers Gibson imagines in the above paragraph would require vast amounts of real-world energy, then the capacity of a novel, let alone an infographic, to figure the energy levels currently consumed by cloud computing remains unfathomable. Neuromancer projects a future where cybernetics, in Matteo Pasquinelli’s words, ‘transforms the economy into an ecology of feedback loops,’ controlling social unrest through a marriage of ‘the Turing machine with the thermodynamic engine’ (2017: 318, cf. 315). The discrepancy in data storage and energy use between Gibson’s novel and the present can be read as the result of a more elegant relation between computation and social relations there. For in the real world, as Pasquinelli argues, capitalism has instead expanded its fossil-fuel use and generates rapidly-accreting databases, ‘feeding itself on the industrial and energetic surplus that it was supposed to measure and control’ (318). What Neuromancer so nimbly yet unconsciously grasps is that fossil capital and cybernetics are two parts of a larger whole, though with information ascendant and consistent in its siphoning increasing substantial amounts of energy. Here the retrograde character of Asimov’s essay becomes abundantly clear: it can process what might happen in a future without fuel, but cannot imagine, in the way that Neuromancer does, a cyberfossil capital future. Because it cannot project that science-fictional image, it is thus unable to ask what the nightmare life without computers might look like. For instance, without climate data and weather models, how might humans know a typical storm from an atypical one? The impasse that Neuromancer so vividly anticipates is one in which the tools of ecological destruction may also be the ones that make humans capable of imagining (and enacting) an energy transition.

The Cultural Logic of Late Fossil Capital

In the first chapter of Postmodernism, Jameson uses technology as a placeholder for the mode of production. He describes the fetish character attendant on capitalist development as ‘an alienated power … which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms and seems to constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our collective as well as our individual praxis’ (1991: 35). Jameson means human labour here, that which seems to vanish in the neon glow of the postmodern moment, but what if one were to reread this passage in terms of the vanishing of energy from the equation? One could read Jameson’s words as a description of path dependency, a term that identifies techno-scientific advances with an exponentially growing dependency on the technologies developed and the amount of energy required to sustain them. This conceptual connection, from human labour to abstract energy, bridges both imagined futures discussed above. In Asimov’s nightmare, fossilized urban remains and infrastructural skeletons provide resources for a desperate humanity. In Gibson’s the wealth of fossil fuels in the real world contributes to the mirage of an energy-rich vision of the future, still bound to the technological dependencies and energy suck of late fossil capital. Asimov writes explicitly about oil and futurity, Gibson does so circumstantially—Neuromancer cannot help but think energy in an imagined world that uses so much of it. So, in the face of my separation of them as explicitly and implicitly energy-focused, both texts bear traces of Yaeger and Macdonald’s energy unconscious and both constitute the ‘massive dystopian horizon’ for collective social life and ecological flourishing or dying of the Earth. Even alongside Asimov’s and Gibson’s texts, Jameson’s pronouncements only hint at the formative role energy regimes play in relation to the mode of production. The possibility of detecting, and it is only a possibility, the massive electrical currents of late fossil capital lies in a dialectical reading of science fiction’s energy unconscious.

For Marx, the development of machines occurs as the result of the development of capital—a development considered in stages by Ernst Mandel in Late Capitalism:

The fundamental revolutions in power technology—the technology of the production of motive machines by machines—thus appears as the determinate moment in revolutions of technology as a whole. Machine production of steam-driven motors since 1848; machine production of electric and combustion motors since the 90s of the 19^th century; machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses since the 40s of the 20^th century—these are the three general revolutions in technology engendered by the capitalist mode of production since the ‘original’ industrial revolution of the later 18^th century. (Mandel, 1972: 118)

Mandel and Jameson both figure the role of fossil fuels in the development of capital. Jameson goes so far as to say that his tripartite schema—realism, modernism, postmodernism—maps on to Mandel’s three stages. Yet postmodernism, as a distinct moment in capital’s dominant cultural logic, comes before the recognition of the energy-ecology deadlock in late fossil capital.

Andreas Malm characterizes Mandel’s long waves of capital’s development, following his later, five-part schema from Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A Marxist Interpretation (Mandel, 1995): first water-powered industry (1780–1848), then steam-powered industry and transport (1848–1896), and then the electrification of industry, transport, and households (1895–1945). The fourth and fifth waves are of particular interest here. The fourth wave (1945–1992) is characterized by the motorization of transport and other parts of the economy with automobiles, aircraft, refineries, petrochemicals, oil, and gas; and the fifth wave (1992–?) is characterized by the computerization of the economy with computers, software, telecom equipment, and microprocessors (Malm, 2018). Gibson’s novel fits between the fourth and fifth waves, and I would argue that it is precisely because of its absolute contemporaneity that it can be seen as a novel of late fossil capital. However: I am not only interested in correctly locating the real ground of Neuromancer’s energy unconscious; and have sought to illuminate the deadlock of the world that fossil capital builds and the impression the latter has on how sf can imagine the future.

Fossil capital’s long waves rise with the charged boom of development and fall with the resounding crash of crisis. From 1973 on oil is increasingly the source of economic, social, and environmental volatility, but it also shores up capital and provides a means for continued profitability. For a time, the exponential rise in the use of fossil fuels could actually explain the delay in the fall of the rate of profit, but today it cannot. To be sure, fossil fuels are still culturally and economically dominant, not to mention environmentally catastrophic, but with the twin recognition that the Holocene is over and that fossil capital is the driver of that end, humanity sits on the cusp of a different condition of ends than the one opened up in the 1970s and that Jameson and Gibson so attentively tracked. I am not trying to argue that cyberpunk, or Gibson’s novel for that matter, provide the form capable of grasping the cultural logic of a new global formation, but that at this ‘unexpected biospheric dusk’ (Malm, Fossil Capital 290) Neuromancer provides dialectical thinking with something worth considering: the future imagined from within fossil capital pushes at the limits of what kind of energy transition is truly possible.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.