Introduction. In his introduction to Red Planets (2009), Mark Bould observes that works of science fiction "rarely address the economic dimensions of social totality" (4). Instead, in his view, sf provides us with negative spaces that are "often primarily, if unwittingly, bound by the structures, potentials and limits of capital" (4). While Bould's argument has its own distinctive twists and turns, it borrows substantially from the ideas of Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson, wherein sf is figured as a critical lens on reality. If the capitalist economy is defamiliarized and/or conspicuously absent in sf writing, we may nevertheless discern within it the traces of this elusive, protean system in which we are all immersed. Bould's claims do not account for the explicit use of economic language and the thematization of economic processes in more recent sf by writers such as Kim
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