A Glorious Mythology of Loss: Speculative Finance in Alan Moore's Jerusalem

Abstract

SP E C U L A T I V E F I C T I O N S O F T E N R E F U S E T O A C C E P T T H E I N E V I T A B I L I T Y O F the world-as-we-know-it in order to explore cognitive estrangements—story elements that are broadly imaginative yet grounded in the complexity of real-world conditions—that aspire toward alternative visions of social, political, and economic life (Suvin 2016). Not all speculative fictions, of course, invoke utopian possibilities: some serve as propaganda for technoscientific modernity, others revel in shallow escapism, and still others engage in fantasies of empire and racial supremacy (Rieder 2008). At its best, however, speculative fiction refuses to take the existing conditions of the world for granted, and this refusal enables it to challenge the ideological hegemony of capitalist realism as well as to counter the poisonous forms of abstraction that drive neoliberal accumulation and dispossession (Fisher 2009). Because speculative fictions often avoid taking naturalized economic worldviews at face value, they sometimes have a unique capacity to expose