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"Conspiracy Fiction."
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The Secret Agent
Secret terror cells, political conspiracy, police bungling, state-sponsored bomb plots… This is London, 1896. Inspired by Joseph Conrad's classic novel, The Secret Agent is theatre O's heartbreaking and hilarious chronicle of passion, betrayal and terrorism. Set at a time of social upheaval and growing disparity between rich and poor, at the heart of this tale is a woman fighting to protect her young brother from exploitationand violence. In their trademark highly imaginative style, described by The New York Times as, \"vivid, enlightening, inventive and compelling\", music halland early cinema collide in theatre O's return to the stage after five years away.
eBook
Derailed
After surviving a terrifying assault during her last investigation, Maria Kallio traded in her badge for a comfortable desk job. But when the head of social affairs for the Finnish Athletics Federation is murdered, the victim of an apparent poisoning, Maria is drawn back into a race against more than murder. A series of crimes has unfolded, and to Maria's trained eyes, they look like the makings of a conspiracy. As Maria follows the track to a doping scandal, a money-laundering scheme, domestic abuse, and explosive death threats leveled against a sports reporter, she collects the pieces of a baffling puzzle. Now, to run down the killer and save the next victim, all she has to do is make them fit. So far only one thing is for certain: Maria Kallio is rediscovering the thrill of the chase.
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A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins of QAnon on 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board and its initial reception as a potential LARP, we analyze it as an instance of participatory online play that fosters deep engagement above all. Drawing on concepts from play and performance studies, we theorize the dynamics by which QAnon developed into an influential conspiracy narrative as instances of “conspiracy fictioning.” In particular, we revive the notion of hyperstition to make sense of how such conspiracy fictionings work to recursively “bootstrap” their own alternate realities into existence. By thus exploring the participatory and playful engagement mechanisms that drive today’s conspiracy movements, we aim to elucidate the epistemological and socio-political dynamics that mark the growing entanglement of play and politics, fact and fiction in society.
Journal Article
Black mad wheel
The Danes--the band known as the \"Darlings of Detroit\"--are washed up and desperate for inspiration, eager to once again have a number one hit. That is, until an agent from the US Army approaches them. Will they travel to an African desert and track down the source of a mysterious and malevolent sound? Under the guidance of their front man, Philip Tonka, the Danes embark on a harrowing journey through the scorching desert--a trip that takes Tonka into the heart of an ominous and twisted conspiracy. Meanwhile, in a nondescript Midwestern hospital, a nurse named Ellen tends to a patient recovering from a near-fatal accident. The circumstances that led to his injuries are mysterious--and his body heals at a remarkable rate. Ellen will do the impossible for this enigmatic patient, who reveals more about his accident with each passing day. -- Amazon.com.
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Reflections on the Popularity of ‘Conspiracy Mentalities’
In this text from a lecture made in 2006, Serge Moscovici (1925–2014) seeks to update his earlier work on the ‘conspiracy mentality’ (Moscovici, 1987) by considering the relationships between social representations and conspiracy mentality. Innovation in this field, Moscovici argues, will require a thorough description and understanding of what conspiracy theories are, what rhetoric they use and what functions they fulfill. Specifically, Moscovici considers conspiracies as a form of counterfactual history implying a more desirable world (in which the conspiracy did not take place) and suggests that social representations theory should tackle this phenomenon. He explicitly links conspiracy theories to works of fiction and suggests that common principles might explain their popularity. Historically, he argues, conspiracism was born twice: first, in the middle ages, when their primary function was to exclude and destroy what was considered as heresy; and second, after the French Revolution, to delegitimize the Enlightenment, which was attributed to a small coterie of reactiories rather than to the will of the people. Moscovici then considers four aspects (‘thematas’) of conspiracy mentality: 1) the prohibition of knowledge; 2) the duality between the majority (the masses, prohibited to know) and ‘enlightened’ minorities; 3) the search for a common origin, an ‘Ur-phenomenon’ that connects historical events and provides a continuity to history (he notes that such a tendency is also present in social psychological theorizing); and 4) the valorization of tradition as a bulwark against modernity. Some of Moscovici’s insights in this talk have since been borne out by contemporary research on the psychology of conspiracy theories, but many others still remain fasciting potential avenues for future research.
Journal Article
Shattering Reality: Monsters from the Multiverse
Kaijū media frequently features dangerous scientific experiments as a central theme, invented by scientists who are falsely convinced that they both completely understand and control their advanced technology. In the past few decades, this has included the introduction of high-energy physics (HEP) experiments—especially mammoth particle accelerators—that, among other destructive results, allow for the entrance of equally large and dangerous creatures into our world from parallel dimensions. Public concerns voiced about the safety of the creation of two groundbreaking energy accelerators—the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe—in the early 21st century are tied to related science fiction media that capitalize on such fears (including Godzilla vs. Megaguirus [2000], Pacific Rim [2013], The Cloverfield Paradox [2018], The Kaiju Preservation Society [2022]). Particular attention is paid to the Netflix original series Stranger Things (2016–) as a detailed case study. This study concludes with an analysis of scientists’ attempts to embrace the popularity of Stranger Things in their communication with the general public, and suggests that ongoing issues with conspiracy theories have been fueled in part by such attempts, coupled with long-standing issues with the HEP community and their peculiar scientific naming conventions.
Journal Article
Red right hand
When viral video of an explosive terrorist attack on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge reveals that a Federal witness long thought dead is still alive, the organization he'd agreed to testify against will stop at nothing to put him in the ground. FBI Special Agent Charlie Thompson is determined to protect him, but her hands are tied; the FBI's sole priority is catching the terrorists before they strike again. So Charlie calls the only person on the planet who can keep her witness safe: Michael Hendricks. Once a covert operative for the U.S. military, Hendricks makes a living hitting hitmen... or did, until the very organization hunting Charlie's witness caught wind and targeted the people he loves.
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John Fowles, Oscar Wilde, and the Conspiracy of Fiction
John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus , in which a mysterious and far-reaching \"godgame\" subjects the novel's protagonist to a series of deceptions that toy with his desires and punish his vanity, is a prime example of what one could call the \"conspiratorial style\" in fiction. Buried within the unfolding plot of Fowles's novel seem to be telling references to another text about the dangerous appeal of elaborate but unsubstantiated theories, Oscar Wilde's \"The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,\" a story about one man's fatal obsession over discovering the true identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets. The Magus parallels Wilde's cautionary tale not only in its focus on the evocative power of the artistic muse but also in how it explores the distorting effects of desire and the lure of solving what may well be unsolvable.
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