The Unimaginable

A preview of my November, 2021 Locus Magazine column

Margaret Thatcher was the least science-fictional world leader in modern history.

Her motto was “There is no alternative,” a phrase she repeated so often it became an acronym: “TINA.”

She was referring to capitalism, asserting that there is no conceivable alternative. It was a cheap, but remarkably effective, rhetorical device, treating a demand as an observation. The true meaning of TINA isn’t “No alternative is possible,” but rather, “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”

I mean, thinking of alternatives is literally my job.

TINA is part of a philosophy, “capitalist realism,” a phrase coined by Mark Fischer in the early 2000s. Fischer said that capitalist realism is best captured in the quote “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (this quote has been variously attributed to the philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the literary critic Fredric Jameson).

Žižek (or possibly Jameson) got a lot closer to the problem than Thatcher ever did. For while it’s easy to imagine something after capitalism, imagining capitalism’s sunset is far harder.

I mean, I literally did it in my first novel, Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (2003), a tale of a…