Today ‘technological progress’ means LLMs convincing your boss to put you out of work, while consuming astronomical amounts of water and energy in the process. So it is easy to forget that only a decade ago the zeitgeist was one of futuristic techno-optimism. The time when Elon Musk was still the Prometheus who would save the Earth by electrifying transport while simultaneously bringing us to Mars, rather than the herald of ascendant techno-fascism. The 2010s may have been the aftermath of the financial crisis and the beginning proper of climate breakdown, but there was still hope that technology might save us.

A product of this time, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar perfectly expresses that blend of existential angst and technological optimism, showing us humanity reaching for the stars to escape catastrophic ecosystem collapse on Earth. With a unique and titanic score by Hans Zimmer, there are moments where Interstellar almost feels like a soundtrack with a movie attached, were it not for the high calibre of its imaginative plot, realistic physics and humane interpersonal dramas.

It is the conceit that hope is the product of technological capability and interpersonal connection that elevates Interstellar above the vulgar techno-utopianism promoted by the Californian Ideology. But viewed as a parable of our times, it obscures more than it elucidates, and its message of hope turns out to rest on a profoundly fatalistic base.

Interstellar starts in the near future of 2067, when a mysterious blight is slowly poisoning the atmosphere, causing increasing crop failures and threatening human survival through starvation and suffocation. For this, technology offers no cure, and so like most of humanity, former astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is engaged in a progressively more futile effort to maintain agricultural production. That is, until mysterious messages guide him to a secret NASA facility where a last ditch effort is underway to find a new home among the stars for humanity. A wormhole has appeared near Saturn, leading to another star system with potential habitable planets. And so Cooper, the last astronaut, is drafted into a plan for a small crew to transit the wormhole and link up with an earlier recon team sent to establish whether any planets on the far side might support human life.

Cooper must leave his son Tom (Timothee Chalamet, Casey Affleck) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Fry, Jessica Chastain) behind, not for a few years, but possibly for a lifetime. For the planets on the far side orbit a supermassive black hole, warping time and space around it. Interstellar is serious about its physics, both the orbital mechanics of spacecraft and the uncanny time dilation of general relativity theory, and the movie feels partly like a love letter to (and some product placement for) a NASA that may only ever have existed in our collective imagination. The increasing age difference between the away team and Earth caused by relativistic forces is central to the story, with Cooper forced to watch his children age decades in what to him are only a few hours, viewing their mounting frustration at his lack of reciprocal communication.

Cooper and Murph’s separation by space and time is the heart of Interstellar, and if its concluding message that love can transcend both risks being saccharine, the movie is more than salvaged by the respect with which it treats both the impersonal forces of physics, and the deeply personal struggles of Cooper and Murph. And by the incomparable soundtrack, of course.

With the relationship between Cooper and Murph the emotional core of the movie, the intellectual heft lies with the desperate attempt to secure a future for humanity, and the moral dilemmas inherent in the leap into space. And while adequately compelling courtesy of the usual accidents and interpersonal conflicts that beset missions like these, this is where Interstellar falls into a depressingly familiar pattern of stories featuring mysterious catastrophes that can only be overcome via a single technologically sophisticated but highly dangerous gambit, placing the burden of humanity’s survival on the shoulders of an intrepid and often reluctant few. For Interstellar it is crop failure. In Project Hail Mary it was space bacteria. Elsewhere it might be asteroids, or the Earth’s magnetosphere, or some other quasi-plausible disaster. Regardless of their precise nature, these putative apocalypses can all easily be read as allegories for climate change, which itself remains firmly taboo on the silver screen, presumably because it is too confrontational for the audience. This displacement conveniently redefines the existential threat as something that is emphatically not amenable to radical social or political transformation, but can only be overcome through a single, ‘neutral’, technological fix. To do otherwise might after all lead the audience to inadvertently imagine a world beyond capitalism. The effect of stories like Interstellar, even if achieved unintentionally, is to enclose our political horizons and obscure the fact that the technological solutions to our actually existing existential threat are already available to us.

Interstellar does present varying responses to the blight, ranging from the reluctant hero willing to suffer personal hardship for family and humanity but unable to sacrifice the many so that a few might survive, to the scientists who hold fast to the technological breakthrough that might save humanity in some form, even if it does require cold moral calculus. There is however one character which represents the stubborn refusal to accept the inevitable and, quite literally, plough on in the face of adversity: Cooper’s son Tom, who inherits the family farm and holds the agricultural frontline against the encroaching blight. Tom is neither astronaut nor scientist. He is emphatically not special, but one of millions if not billions of farmers like him desperately trying to keep humanity alive. Adherence to Interstellar’s techno-optimist tendency however requires that he is portrayed as a stubborn Luddite, engaged in a futile and even harmful rearguard action as dust storms and crop failures make his situation increasingly untenable.

And yet, we are more akin to Tom than any of the other characters. No convenient wormhole will come to our rescue. No single technological breakthrough will be our salvation. We do not need a futuristic technological fix to traverse the cosmos or go to Mars. The manifold solutions we have to our predicament, technological or otherwise, are already at our disposal. What is standing in our way is not our failure to unify quantum theory with general relativity, but a system optimised for the generation of short-term profit at the expensive of all else, including the future habitability of our planet. Our solution is the collective power of many, coming together to save the world we have from the billionaires who would happily watch millions of us die to safeguard their wealth and status.

Interstellar is objectively an epic movie, admirably rooted in real scientific knowledge and with an affective father/daughter relationship at its heart. But despite its ostensible hopeful ending, its intellectual core is fatalistic and tacitly reactionary, reinforcing the narrative that we cannot collectively solve our problems here on Earth, but must wait for a heroic saviour to lead us to the stars.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will not save us. We can only save ourselves, if we collectively decide not to go gently into that good night, but to rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Notes and suggestions

• The blight may be an invention, but the collapse of agricultural production due to soil exhaustion is a real risk. We live in an age of ecological polycrisis after all, and while soil degradation doesn’t have the profile of climate change, it is no less real.
• Want to know why technology won’t save us in significantly more detail? Then why don’t listen to the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast?
• Like Tom, and admittedly the other characters in Interstellar, we are not alone in fighting for the survival of people and planet. If you feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and are unsure about what you can do, consider supporting or joining organisations such as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Other options (not mutually exclusive!) are local environmental campaign groups, green political parties, or even local (guerrilla) gardening groups. And if you are looking to slow down and work out how to stay sane in a world that feels like it is going insane, there are others who write inspiringly on how to do just that.
• Regular readers may remember that I’ve recently written about Project Hail Mary. Having now watched Interstellar for the first time, Project Hail Mary feels not only inspired by, but to some extent derivative of Interstellar, although it takes the subject into a more humorous direction.
• For an in-depth discussion of the Californian Ideology, you can listen to one of the early podcasts from General Intellect Unit.

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You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: '#AI #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions

Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

• #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
• #protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.

Warning: Contains some mild spoilers

So Young is a play about five people, one of whom is dead. Central to the play is Helen, who died of Covid but around whose absence the remaining characters continue to orbit. We are witness to a single evening when couple Davie (Andy Clark) and Liane (Lucianne McEvoy) are invited by Milo (Robert Jack), Helen’s widower, to meet Milo’s new girlfriend Greta (Yana Harris). At twenty years old, Greta dramatically fails the ‘half + 7 rule’ for forty-something Milo, and his friends are unsurprisingly unimpressed. What follows is an evening of escalating strife as tempers rise as fast as glasses of wine get downed, and each friend wrestles with grief, death, aging and loss in their own way.

The 2025 production of So Young performed at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow is superbly acted, with Liane frequently stealing the show with biting diatribes on the folly of men. All actors bring copious energy and pathos to the play, managing to navigate the fine balance between comedy and tragedy. And this is necessary, because from the first minute So Young is fighting a rearguard action against the cliched nature of its subject matter. “Older man fucks younger women instead of dealing with his emotions” is after all a tale as old as time, or at least as old as English Literature professors, as Liane points out. Can So Young offer us something new?

The answer is an ambivalent “yes and no”. So Young very productively shifts the centrality of this story away from both the older man and the younger woman, instead putting the focus on Liane and her unresolved grief about the death of her friend. Liane is the real star of the show, and the only character with an emotional arc, going from feigned tolerance of Greta to belligerent disavowal, to cautious acceptance. Although the play cleverly alternates group settings with the pairing off of each potential dyad of characters, Liane is the motive force throughout, compelling the other characters to react to her. At its best, the result is a powerful reflection on grief and friendship.

Unfortunately, despite frequent moments of brilliance and hilarity, So Young remains caught in the narrative cul-de-sac that is the midlife crisis cliche, because of the inherent difficulty of refreshing it. Inevitably both humour and pathos must spring from observations on diminished sex drive, faltering careers, marital fissures, and above all an inability of adults to communicate except when lubricated by copious amounts of wine. So Young further handicaps itself by buying instant laughs with a steady stream of revelations from Milo and Greta (‘we’re in love, we’re engaged, we’re getting married next month, we’re moving to London’), at the expense of the otherwise serious note it is trying to hit. Milo and Greta’s relationship is unnecessarily over the top. Had Greta instead been 28 and Helen’s death a year ago, the play would arguably have worked better, creating at least a chance of portraying Milo as a sympathetic and understandable character. The widower who after a year tentatively tries to move on with a new partner, and who is aware that she is borderline too young, has more potential than the traditional man-child who hides from his emotions in the bed of a girl half his age.

It is not only Greta and Milo’s relationship, but also the characters themselves which further weaken the play. Milo’s man-child stereotype may be funny, but by its very nature it is arrested in its development and hence devoid of complex motivations or emotions, which means it isn’t really interesting. Lacking compelling interiority, the man-child is neither a compelling subject nor a useful lens through which to reflect on society more broadly, a flaw that also marred Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx & Crake. And insofar as Milo proclaims his reaosns for loving Greta, the situation gets worse. For with the narcissism typical of a toddler, all his reasons are about how Greta makes Milo feel. None are about who Greta herself is. Milo’s love is based on the complete objectivication of Greta, using her to achieve an emotional fulfillment that he is too immature to attain himself.

Where Milo’s interest in Greta is egotistic, Greta’s interest in Milo is entirely unexplained. Not that So Young requires the love interest to have any agency or motivation, but in failing to provide either, it prevents Greta from acting as the counterpoint to Liane in the way the play implies she might. Greta’s forceful retort that she is not in this relationship because of unresolved daddy issues would have been significantly more persuasive if we had been given any insight into what attracts her to Milo. Do they share a passion for travel? A love of the performing arts? A commitment to revolutionary socialism? The only thing we do know is that they do not share their respective social circles, and it is legitimate to ask what a 20-year-old would get from a partner who is otherwise completely detached from her life.

What we are missing here is context. In So Young, we have four individuals and the links between them, but not the wider social ecosystem in which they are embedded. That is not surprising, and So Young is far from unique in this. The ‘common sense’ of our times is that we are not a society, but a collection of individuals with particular relations to one another. But humans are social creatures. We aren’t atoms linked to other atoms by unchangeable bonds, but parts of complex and dynamic social ecosystems. We can only be understood through the whole web of relationships we create.

Isolation from social context is also at the root of the clichés that So Young interrogates, but ultimately cannot challenge because it accepts the premise that they have some universal truth. Again, it is hard to fault the play because our culture does regard the midlife crisis, the manchild, the poorly communicating couple, as universally recognisable archetypes and patterns. Yet our familiarity with these clichés obscures their historical and geographical contingency and how they are resultant from how contemporary society is organised. Would Davie fear old age if we revered the wisdom of our elders in the same way as the virility of our young? Would Milo have the same escapist urge if we continued to have transcendental experiences throughout our life? Would all of us communicate better if we had more quality time for our partners, family and friends?

These are the sort of questions a play could ask, but So Young ultimately doesn’t. In this, it is not unlike Make It Happen. Both plays offer powerful critiques of the world we live in. Both plays combine dark comedy with searing insights and genuine pathos. Yet both plays remain stuck within the limited imaginative horizon of contemporaneous bourgeois discourse and are therefore both left with nowhere for their critique to go. In So Young, this is most palpably felt at the conclusion, where after many narrowly averted fallings-out our friends agree to go forward together. It is a brave and mature attempt to resolve the play’s central problem, but ultimately fails to convince because we have not been offered any reason to redeem Milo, and because beyond that, it i not transformative. So Young shows that we can potentially overcome our crises of middle age, but never wonders if what it would take to build a world where we might not suffer them in the first place.

Notes & Suggestions

• For a humorous and surprisingly insightful take on how we might reckon with the anxieties of growing up, one can do worse than giving Marvel’s Thunderbolts* a watch.
• Both Capitalist Realism and Hegemony Now! explore how neoliberal ideology constrains our imaginative horizons, and so limits what futures we might think are possible.

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Every now and then a text is published that explosively captures its zeitgeist. For early 21st century Britain (and the West beyond), Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative is such a text. The title of its first chapter (“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”) has become and remains a truism on the Left. The first part of the book’s title has become the descriptive term for the pervasive sense that there is, indeed, no alternative. That we are forever stuck in an Eternal Present of a crumbling public realm, increasing precarity and environmental disintegration, all the while being told by our capitalist overlords that this really is the best of all possible worlds.

Capitalist Realism came out in 2009, resonating with the politics that emerged from the Great Financial Crash: Occupy, student protests in the UK and elsewhere, the abortive resistance to austerity, the failed revolutions of the Arab Spring. If anything, events since then reinforce the observation that resistance is indeed futile. Reading Capitalist Realism for the first time in 2025, I was struck by how much it is of its time yet remains relevant today.

At only 81 pages, Capitalist Realism does not pretend to be an all-encompassing analysis or programmatic manifesto. It is an attempt at sense-making, at articulating something that many of us experience but are unable to express. It is this ability to give voice to the psychological impact of existing within late-stage capitalism, weaving together observations on culture, academia, precarity and bureaucracy, that give Capitalist Realism its enduring significance. There is something undeniably true in Fisher’s examples, and while nobody will identify with all of them, Fisher convincingly demonstrates how they all trace back to the way our lives are structured under Actually Existing Capitalism.

Fisher’s examples are very much inflected by his own experience as a precariously employed academic and cultural critic, but are broadly recognisable nonetheless. There is the increasing bureaucratisation of targets and form-filling, familiar to anyone who has been to hospital, only to receive a text message afterwards asking if they would recommend the experience to friends and family. There is the absence of cultural innovation and counter-culture, which feels even truer now we have been forced to watch the same three superhero movies for over a decade. There is the growing sense of despair, expressing itself as a mental health crisis in particular among the young. And above all, there is the crushing sense of powerlessness that comes from being unable to hold anyone accountable for what is happening to us. From being entangled in a web of overlapping public and private institutions that are all somehow ‘involved’ but never actually responsible. In 2009, it was the aftermath of the financial crisis that generated the feeling of collective impotence. In 2025, it is the long shadow of Grenfell, the toeslagenaffaire or the literal enshittification of the UK’s waterways.

In a way, nothing that Capitalist Realism tells us is new, and that is sort of the point. The enduring value of the book lies in three ways in which it helps us change our relationship to the cultural and political stasis in which we appear to be inextricably trapped.

First, it is just good to know that we are not alone in how we feel. Fisher accurately diagnoses how pathological individualism and social atomisation leave us feeling isolated, frustrated and impotent. Capitalist Realism functions as virtual consciousness raising or group therapy, showing us that we are not alone in how we feel. This directly leads to its second merit, which is to juxtapose our individual powerlessness with the power of collective action. Not that Capitalist Realism is an organising manual, but it does posit a revitalised left-wing project centred on both collective action and an active/creative collective culture as a possible way out of the trap of capitalist realist inertia, which at least suggests a course of action to the reader.

Capitalist Realism’s real power however is in how it gives name to the source of our existential dread and cultural miasma. It is a core principle of any magic that only when we know the true name of something can we hope to exert power over or vanquish it. Fisher’s enduring legacy is that he enabled us to express what afflicts us, as a first step towards overcoming it. It is why Capitalist Realism is as relevant today as when it was written, possibly even more so.

Similar to Burnout – How to be well in a sick world, or Bullshit Jobs – A Theory, Capitalist Realism doesn’t give us all the answers. But it does help us ask some of the right questions, and its dizzying array of cultural references, relatable personal insights and political theories give ample leads for an engaged reader to pursue further. For while Fisher is careful not to suggest that we can simply will our circumstances away, he is equally clear that with commitment to a collective, active, creative effort, we have a chance to reclaim our future from capitalist realism’s Eternal Present.

Notes & Suggestions

• Mark Fisher’s enduring influence can be seen in Jeremy Gilbert and Alex William’s Hegemony Now!, as well as the #ACFM podcast hosted by Novara Media, of which Jeremy Gilbert is also a part.
• The inability of some science fiction to move beyond the present and imagine a different future forms a core part of my critique of Mass Effect and Oryx & Crake.
• Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void contains a stronger critque of how neoliberalism has hollowed out our politics, so that Bad Things keep happening, yet nobody can ever be held accountable for them.
• An essential step towards liberating us from the Curse of the Eternal Present is to join a union (if you are not in a union already). Readers in the UK can look up unions relevant to their sector via the Trades Union Congress union finder, though it only returns unions affiliated to the TUC, and other worthwhile UK unions also exist.

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There must be a point where history becomes culture. When the cultural artefacts by which we choose to remember an event overgrow it to such an extent as to obscure it. It seems this is what has happened to the Great Financial Crash of 2008. The shock, despair and anger of those times have long since dissipated, while we continue as if nothing has happened in our Eternal Present, and cultural commentary on the Crash has been safely defanged for consumption as mere entertainment.

The immediate aftermath of the Crash saw a flurry of books, movies and documentaries trying to make sense of what happened and, maybe more importantly, what didn’t happen afterwards. These were followed by plays, such as the The Lehman Trilogy. Premiering at the Edinburgh International Festival this year Make It Happen is a play in the same tradition about the meteoric rise and fall of Royal Bank of Scotland and its CEO, Fred Goodwin.

Make It Happen follows the pattern of a Greek tragedy (complete with chorus) where the protagonist’s downfall results from a combination of hubris and the transgression of divine and/or social laws. We follow Fred Goodwin – played by Sandy Grierson – as he takes over as CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland and propels it from a provincial and sedate Scottish bank to a global behemoth, only to watch it all fall apart as the overextended and overleveraged RBS becomes one of many casualties of the Great Financial Crisis, only rescued through government intervention. Notwithstanding the obvious banker tropes (sordid affairs and cocaine fueled nights out), Goodwin’s fall from grace develops subtly over the course of the play. Grierson’s Goodwin is first of all an outsider: to banking (he is an accountant), to Edinburgh (he is from Paisley) and to the milieu of Edinburgh (he has a working class upbringing). It is this outsider status that gives Goodwin the edge. Not only is he more ambitious and unconstrained by the mores of the Edinburgh gentry, but he also has a firm grasp of detail and opportunity. His first coup is the takeover of the much larger NatWest, sensing both the weakness of their balance sheet and the decadence of its management.

Victory, however, comes at a price, and as the play progresses, Goodwin slowly turns into the stereotypical banker he initially despises: arrogant, hedonistic and disinterested in details. After deciding to move RBS out to a white elephant of a campus outside of Edinburgh, Goodwin lavishes more attention on the removal of a tree marring his view than on the toxic assets that RBS accumulates. Erstwhile scrutiny and detailed instructions of his underlings give way to a singleminded mantra: make it happen. The callousness though, was always there, grounded in a social Darwinist reading of Goodwin’s hero: Adam Smith.

An Adam Smith who, played by Brian Cox like a self-conscious ghost of Christmas past, makes an appearance when Goodwin finds himself stressed or frustrated. Smith acts as the foil to Goodwin’s hardcore neoliberalism, reacting with puzzlement, denial and outrage to Goodwin’s repeated invocations of Smith as the justification for his dog-eat-dog capitalism. The scenes where an exasperated Smith queries if Goodwin has actually read The Wealth of Nations or ‘his other book’ (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) are solid, if at times predictable, comedy, carried by the two excellent actors and their interaction. Yet for all the dramaturgical fireworks, these scenes expose the fundamental limitations of a liberal analysis and critique of the causes of the Great Financial Crash.

By centring Goodwin as the hubristic yet misguided banker, Make it Happen implies that the causes of the 2008 Crash are to be found in greedy bankers and a misunderstanding of Smithian economics. The repeated exhortations by Smith to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments feel addressed as much at the audience as at Goodwin. ‘If only we had read Smith properly,’ the play seems to say, ‘none of this would have happened.’ Presumably though, economists (and bankers) do know how to read, and yet not only do we hear precious little about Smith’s hostile views on monopolies, there is a veritable industry devoted to maintaining the hegemony of the economic model Goodwin so fervently beliefs in. This includes an actual institute named after Adam Smith which has the express purpose of furthering the neoliberal economic model that, if Make it Happen were to be believed, Adam Smith himself would be appalled by.

Make it Happen follows the common liberal mistake that ideas drive history, and hence that progress is achieved by replacing erroneous ideas with better ones. We saw this same weakness in Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists. Yet as the fellows at the Adam Smith Institute would probably be the first to admit, it is having power to disseminate your ideas and make them hegemonic that really matters. The rest is just moralising.

Moralising can still make for an evening’s entertainment, but morality without power denies us the catharsis tragedy promises. As the real Adam Smith said (in his other book): “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” Goodwin is no modern Pentheus or Agamemnon – he may have lost his job and knighthood, but retains a comfortable retirement package. Meanwhile, over 300,000 people have died in the UK alone as a result of the austerity imposed to repay the ballouts of the banks. The exasperated lament by the play’s Gordon Brown that those who caused the crash should have been dragged away in handcuffs can count on a sympathetic hearing by the audience. But our collective knowledge that this didn’t happen only underscores our impotence, and voids the play of accusatory power. If after nearly twenty years it is still the financial sector laughing all the way to the bank, then really the joke is on all of us.

Notes & suggestions

• We all need a bank, but Ethical Consumer has recommendations for those who would rather that their money didn’t support finance’s most destructive and parasitical behaviours. Alternatively, consider a credit union.
• On the theory of how ideas serve power, rather than the other way around, see Hegemony Now!
• The What’s Left of Philosophy podcast have an episode where they discuss Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and its centrality to Adam Smith’s thoughts.

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Contains spoilers

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published his now infamous The End of History and the Last Man, commonly understood to proclaim that with the victory of liberal market democracies, history had run its course and we could all kick back and relax in the knowledge that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. A lot of history has happened since then, and continues to happen. Yet our collective cultural imaginary remains singularly foreshortened, giving rise to the oft-cited observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the spirit of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, we might say that Fukuyama’s book would have been better titled ‘The End of the Future’.

The hegemony of the present and the absence of a plausible alternative future is particularly noticeable in much science fiction. I’m with Ursuala K. le Guin in that good science fiction tells us something about the present, but sadly much of it simply is the present, with added spaceships. Mass Effect, originally released in 2007 but re-released as a remaster in 2021, is a prime example of the latter type of science fiction. I decided to replay it partly for nostalgia, and partly because I never played the third installment of the trilogy.

In Mass Effect you play as Commander Shepard*, the first human to become a ‘SPECTRE’: special operatives acting for the Galactic Council (think Iain M. Banks’ Special Circumstances, but far less cool). You get this promotion as the result of another SPECTRE having gone rogue and destroying a human settlement. The plot of the game is to hunt your rogue colleague down, but in doing so you discover that he is working at the behest of ‘Reapers’: intelligent machines from beyond the edge of the galaxy. For reasons known only to themselves, the Reapers occasionally cull sentient organic life. It is your job, and that of the merry band of allies you make along the way, to prevent this.

Mass Effect’s gameplay is very of its time. You build your company of heroes and level them up, although space marine regulations dictate you can only ever take two of them on a mission simultaneously. These missions are of the ‘go to place and shoot enemies / retrieve object / push button / have dialogue’ variety. The main story is a linear path, but there are lots of sidequests available. There is the obligatory romance option, which makes conversation with any NPC the game deems a potential love interest extremely awkward, and the obligatory morality system that requires you to guess the consequences of the the cryptic conversation options the game provides you with. Some elements of Mass Effect didn’t survive into future iterations. Nobody will miss the planetside missions where you drive a tank that controls as easily as a drunk ping-pong ball in a washing machine. The game also spams a bizarre amount of loot at you, so that by the end of the story, my Commander Shepard had managed to become a multimillionaire through a lucrative sideline as an arms dealer.

Even on replaying, the conceit of Mass Effect’s story still feels interesting. It takes the somewhat worn trope of the Ancients, but this time, the player discovers that what they assumed were the relics of a past civilization are actually an elaborate trap created to contain successive evolutions of organic life. And while the game’s ultimate baddies are synthetic lifeforms bent on exterminating all organic life, elsewhere the game takes a more nuanced approach to synethic/organic conflict. When introduced to a companion whose species (the Quarians) has been driven off their homeworld by a robot revolt, the player can point out that this might not have happened had the Quarians’ response to their robots asking if they had a soul not been to instantly try to genocide them all.

It is thus extra disappointing that Mass Effect doesn’t know what to do with this interesting premise and fails to escape the gravitational pull of reactionary neoliberalism at both the level of the story arc and of the worldbuilding.

Mass Effect’s problem at the story level is that it is constrained both by what the game is – a first-person shooter – and its need to put a human at the centre of the story. It therefore needs to contrive a situation where the existential threat is not adequately handled by any of the galactic community’s more established institutions, and where the solution to the problem is necessarily the use of force. Granted, it would otherwise make for a dull game, but this narrative cul-de-sac leads Mass Effect to construct its story out of the most banal and reactionary tropes: politicians are incompetent, security services too constrained, intelligence services backstabbing, and criminals rampant. The only honourable institution in this morass of incompetence and corruption is, of course, the military (specifically the Marines), which therefore can be trusted to always make the right calls and shoot the right people. In theory a player could play the ‘bad’ Shepard and subvert this narrative, but that wouldn’t change the institutional logic that the game is built on.

This outcome is perhaps not surprising given the world that the story is embedded in. The game is so focused on its cool spaceships, diverse planets and plethora of barely distinguishable armaments, that it had no attention to spare to consider what multi-species galactic community might plausibly look like. The result is an utterly mundane world where any potentially interesting concepts fail to develop in the hostile environment of actually existing space neoliberalism. As the newcomer on the galactic stage, humanity is confronted by a range of, mostly conveniently humaniod, other species. The game tries to introduce variety by telling us that species X is violent and aggressive, species Y is short lived but very scientific, and species Z is long-lived and matriarchal. We are also told that many of these species have possessed faster-than-light capability for centuries and been in contact with one another for a similar length of time. And then, after lining up all this alien variety, we discover that the best the universe could come up with is an intergalactic market economy, complete with poverty, MegaCorps, corruption, unrepresentative democracy, and, for some reason, a lot of sleazy nightclubs. Neoliberalism clearly must be the ultimate governmental form, given that across centuries and lightyears, every single alien species landed on it. Is your species strongly communal? Doesn’t matter, you can just adopt a mercantile client race. Are you a long-lived uni