A few days ago, I was disappointed to read a curious review of my book.
In his review of my book Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction: Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Posthumanism in the journal Science Fiction Studies (July 2025), Miguel Sebastián-Martín makes many disparaging claims that are factually incorrect. He says that the cover was AI-generated. No, it was designed by a human graphic artist of the publishing house, with modifying support from an AI software tool. He criticizes the alleged sexism of the word “seminal,” claiming that it appears in “one of the monograph’s blurbs.” This is false. Neither I nor the publisher uses that word anywhere as an adjective for my book. It appears in another review of the book in the Journal of Popular Culture and a comment by someone else on Amazon.
The book is intended, among other goals, to have pedagogical value to young people and students as a Nachschlagewerk (reference work). Regarding my supposed ambition to develop a new “science fiction theory,” it is mainly the assertion that we are now “living in a science fiction” and the raising of the question of what is the appropriate epistemology of “inside” and “outside” when faced with a world where “everything is simulation” (Baudrillard) as explored, for example, in my interpretation of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (pp.61-64).
The Introduction (pp.9-22) to the book was written as a doctoral dissertation exposé. It is a modest, low-to-the-ground, detailed, very academic, step-by-step argumentation. If it were anything else, it would not have been approved by the thesis supervisors. I cannot find one sentence in the Introduction where I make any grandiose claim that I will provide a groundbreaking or pioneering perspective in science fiction thinking.
Sebastián-Martín criticizes the fact that I have only five pages (pp.112-116) in a 350-page book where I engage with canonical works of science fiction studies. My reply to that is that broader commentary on that academic field is not within the scope of this book. He claims that I reject the work of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay. The opposite is true. I praise the high value of Csicsery-Ronay’s contributions. Istvan has been a mentor to me. Regarding Darko Suvin, contrary to Sebastián-Martín’s claim, I revere his work. I point out that there is a limit to the value of focusing on science fiction as Bertolt Brechtian “cognitive estrangement.” I criticize Freedman, but I am entitled to do that. Freedman criticized the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway. Much of my work is based on Haraway, so I defend Haraway against Freedman’s opposition to her work.
I self-critically reflect on how I sometimes tend to use films and TV series for illustration (p.27). To call this tendency of mine “unwitting,” as Sebastián-Martín does, is inaccurate.
The author of the review claims that I do not explain my “critique” of Marxism. I am indeed in some ways a Marxist. Throughout the text, I align myself with André Gorz (pp.82-83), Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (pp.184-185), Yanis Varoufakis (pp.84-85), McKenzie Wark (pp.177-179), Istvan Mészáros (p.180), Erich Fromm (p.181), and especially the Situationist Guy Debord (pp.163-172, 188-189) – all Marxists.
My criticism of “orthodox Marxism” is explained in many places, for example, in my comments on Baudrillard’s Mirror of Production (pp. 93,97,194) and Cornelius Castoriadis’ The Imaginary Institution of Society (pp.93-95). Baudrillard and Castoriadis were both thinkers who seriously “worked through” Marxism. Specifically, I criticize the enduring reliance on Marxism in science fiction studies and propose Baudrillard and N. Katherine Hayles as alternative starting points. The points on which I depart from Suvin and Freedman and the points on which I depart from “Marxism” are the same thing, not two separate areas.
The author of the review dismisses as supposedly ridiculous my suggestion that it is not so wise anymore for radical leftists like us to oppose capitalism entirely. But Slavoj Žižek takes this position now. Lucien Goldmann advocated decades ago that socialism should include a free market dimension. The pre-1991 Yugoslav model of socialism emphasized bottom-up decentralization, self-management, and free enterprises.
The author of the review does not like that I was asked by the German culture minister in 2020 to give the European Union advice on how they might build or finance alternative social media platforms that do not serve the interests of surveillance and algorithmic capitalism. This is, for him, “bland and naïve.” OK, if he thinks that, fine. What I advocate throughout the book is the “future design research” project of imagining a better pragmatic-utopian world via “science fiction thinking” about Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality in entirely alternative ways that have nothing to do with how big corporation capitalism deploys those advanced technologies today. I sometimes call this project “Technological Anarchism.” I write about “decoding digital culture” and propose engaging in the artistic-political and neo-Situationist practice of “Creative Coding.”
The overall claim of the author of the review is that my book lacks a strong or coherent argument. But, ironically, he is guilty of precisely that which he attributes to and projects onto me. There is not one sentence in his review where he engages or debates with any of the ideas in my book. There is no argument presented. He merely insults and takes potshots.
Consider that five positive reviews of the book have appeared. And there are more on the way, to appear in the next weeks and months. In contrast to the other reviewers, the author of this review found nothing of value in my book. Does that say something about the book or about this review writer?