| Abstract: | Remarkable at the time of their original publication in the 1990s for their representation of contemporary anxieties and desires over emerging technology - particularly networked digital communications, surveillance and archiving systems - the novels and short stories of Michael Marshall Smith remain so today in their prescience. In the '90s, Marshall Smith's publisher, HarperCollins, used the strap-line 'MMS: Where do you want to go tomorrow?' – a play on Microsoft's second corporate branding campaign, launched in 1994 with the slogan 'Where do you want to go today?' - on paperback editions of his books, emphasising both their speculative and prophetic aspects. In many ways, the 'tomorrows' envisioned by Marshall Smith have arrived in the 21st century, with the rise of what media theorist Henry Jenkins has called 'convergence culture', the 'collision' of old and new media (2008), and the emergence of 'communicative capitalism', the political philosopher Jodi Dean's term for the neoliberal use of networked communication technologies to create the fantasy of 'participation' for users – 'materialized through technological fetishism' (51) – while simultaneously 'depolitizing' them (2006).
In this study, drawing on the work of Jenkins, Dean and others, I revisit Marshall Smith's nineties oeuvre, reading it both as a product of its contemporary techno-cultural environment, and in the context of that environment today, many aspects of which Marshall Smith anticipated. I engage too with later works, written under the pseudonyms Michael Marshall and Michael Rutger, which perform a generic shift from science fiction to crime/thriller and, correspondingly, a focus on realism over speculation, epistemology over ontology. I argue that this shift – and a similar move into horror and urban fantasy, respectively, with the novella The Servants (2007) and novel Hannah Green and her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence (2017) written under his own name– are, at least in part, motivated by the arrival of the very 'tomorrows' the author had already imagined. Works Cited
Dean, Jodi, 'Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics' in Cultural Politics Vol 1, Issue 1, pp.51-74, London: Berg, 2006. Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2008. Marshall Smith, Michael, The Servants. Northborough, MA, US: Earthling Publications, 2007.
- Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. London: HarperVoyage, 2017. |
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