Dystopian Figurations of the Neoliberal Workplace

Two relatively new sf works provide sustained examinations of the ethos of the neoliberal workplace in the age of biotechnology: the American television show Severance (2022—) and Claire North’s novel 84K (2018). Just as biotechnology elides the boundaries of the human, technological, and economic domains, both works are distinguished by their multiple layers of reality that fail to remain distinct, instead impinging upon each other—and ultimately upon the reality of the reader/audience. Blurring boundaries in multiple ways, these works elide distinctions between the biological and economic domains, between human bodies and the sometimes inhumane uses to which neoliberalism subjects them, and between genre boundaries in ways that break the dystopian frame. In systematically dismantling the implicit distinctions between the fictional world and the “real” world these texts foreground their metaphorical functions. The imaginary of the text slides into the present moment of the reader, highlighting its relevance to current cultural constructions.