Infrastructural Character: Space Opera’s Energy Imaginary

This article is occasioned by popular media’s resurgent interest in the space opera, a genre that depends on imagined energy infrastructure for its very conditions of possibility. On the surface, space opera might not seem well-suited to narrating energy transitions. It is, from one vantage, the genre par excellance of infrastructural inertia, whose vision of human civilization underwritten by vast energy reserves has survived the many energy anxieties of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But precisely because the genre seems so firmly grounded in an obsolete energy imaginary, space opera warrants critical attention to the ways narrative encourages or impedes our ability to conceive new forms of energetic life. Viewed this way, I argue, space opera teaches us to read against the grain of the dominant story of technocratic triumph, to discover variant structures of feeling lurking beneath the shiny tale of managerial heroism and nostalgic desire. As I show, popular space operas from the late 1960s onward offer us important narrative resources for responding within and against the dominant politics of affect with which our own political leaders often approach energy transition. In these fictional worlds, technocrat heroes might wield powerful affect-laden tools of persuasion, advocating their energy transition agenda by celebrating energetic independence, and reveling in the transcendence of embodied constraint that science fictional technology purports to grant them. But because they are doubled by the much more marginal figure of the energy worker, these characters are also caught up in minor, emergent affective potentialities. Such narratives thus encode alternate patterns of affective response that exceed and, in some ways, undo the genre’s surface celebration of freedom from material dependency, empowerment over one’s environment, and the mania that ensures the perpetuation of extractivism.