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“There is a form of accelerationism that tries to offer an alternative to the failures of leftist politics to bring an end to capitalism. At its basic level, this kind of accelerationism argues that to move beyond capitalism we must push through it. Pushing through would mean no regulations; it would mean that we intensify the production of capital and fully embrace real subsumption. The point for accelerationism is that in realizing a pure capitalism, in pushing it to its extreme, we can exhaust it and move beyond capitalism. But what I suggest we actually get in the context of neoliberalism is a kind of accelerationism that wants to speed up capitalism so that life is ordered around competition: a kind of competition for competition’s sake. This kind of neoliberal accelerationism is a nightmarish intensification of capitalist relations as they currently exist”

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“That struggle/collaboration between opposites is part of vitality for (Octavia Butler) in nature just as in individuals, and when you don't have that sort of mutuality, all you're left with is something inert and dead. But the other crucial aspect of survival for Butler is that it isn't the same thing as victory or freedom. Because of her place in American society, she saw survival as entailing compromise and filled with a lot of sadness. She viewed survival as necessary even in the face of constraint and pain. Survival is always mixed up with its own opposite, suicide, a recurring threat in nearly all of her novels. Her characters often seem close to simply giving up and allowing themselves to die. So, staying alive in Butler's terms is always about allowing in a certain amount of pain, sometimes as much pain as you can tolerate, even as it makes other sorts of joys possible.”

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“The singularity or tipping point may or may not be near, but I think transhumanism ties into my notion of technologically derived ethnicities. We will fit old race paradigms onto our machine offspring and repeat dangerous games with artificial people.”

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“Does science fiction imagine human-induced ecological disaster because it is admitting defeat? I don’t think so. There are sf stories featuring flooded cities, extinct and exploited species, overpopulation, drought, toxic waste, and more, and I think writers are telling these stories (1) to remind us that we’re not there yet, and relatedly, (2) to urge us to avoid moving toward these futures by being more thoughtful about the artifacts we create.”

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