PhD alum Jordan Carroll Receives Hugo Award

Jordan S. Carroll’s most recent book, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, received the Hugo Award at the Seattle Worldcon 2025 Convention. This prestigious award recognizes literary and critical work in the genre of science fiction. Jordan received his PhD in English from UC Davis (2016) and has since gone on to publish several books as well as articles in notable publications such as American Literature, Post*45, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

In a recent interview with Jordan, he shared his reaction to receiving the Hugo Award, events that shaped his most recent work, and his experience as a PhD alum.

How did you first react when you learned that Speculative Whiteness had been nominated for a Hugo Award?

I was surprised. I had seen my book reviewed and discussed on Hugo Award blogs, but I thought it was a longshot that I would actually be nominated. When I found out that I won, I was in a state of complete disbelief. Even when I was going up to the stage to give my acceptance speech, I half thought I had somehow misunderstood and someone else had won. I kept waiting for someone to tell me to leave.

What role do you think awards like the Hugo Book Award play in shaping the field of speculative fiction—for readers, writers, and critics alike?

The Hugo Awards are the most prominent fan awards for science fiction, so they not only reflect what some of the most dedicated readers think about the field, but they also help many people find what book to read next. Awards are also places where literary communities hold debates about what it is that they value. That is why right-wing groups like the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies attempted to sweep the Hugos several years back. They wanted to impose their own reactionary vision of what science fiction should be—and they were ultimately rejected by the fandom.

How would you describe the central argument of Speculative Whiteness, and was there a particular text, moment, or question that first compelled you to write the book?

Speculative Whiteness argues that fascists have tried to claim the future as the sole prerogative of white men. They believe that science fiction is inherently white, and they assert that speculative imagination is limited to a white elite. The far right also holds that whiteness is itself something speculative: it is a potential that can only be realized in a high-tech ethnostate. Ultimately, debates about fascism in science fiction are debates about who has the right to imagine or inhabit the future. I was writing a talk on N. K. Jemisin’s encounter with the far-right blogger Vox Day as part of what was intended to be a larger project on geek culture, and I noticed that he was talking about time-preference or the capacity to delay gratification in the same way as the neo-reactionary blogger Nick Land. That’s when I started to realize that all of these fascists have a shared discourse and set of references about time and the future.

Did your research lead you somewhere unexpected—an idea or archive that changed your approach?

I knew that the far right had created their own images of the future from memes to science fiction novels, but I was surprised by the amount of cultural criticism they had generated. Also when I first started working on the project I didn’t fully appreciate how long fascism and science fiction had been intertwined. I realized that fascism was a tendency within the genre that had always been there.

What project(s) are you currently working on? 

I just finished co-editing Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice with Anindita Banerjee, Sherryl Vint, and David M. Higgins, and that is forthcoming from MIT Press. I also started writing fiction a little over a year ago. I have landed two short stories, and I’d like to write a novel someday.

Could you share a bit about your PhD experience at UC Davis? Were there particular mentors, courses, or intellectual communities that shaped your thinking about race and speculative fiction?

Many of my ideas about speculation in this project derive from Colin Milburn’s graduate seminar on “Speculative Globalities.” As my dissertation advisor and a careful reader of the book manuscript, Colin had a big influence overall on the project, and one of the things I learned from him was to consider science fiction within a broader field of speculative discourses on the future that includes seemingly realist genres such as projections, proposals, and risk assessments. This allowed me to see that even fascists who were not explicitly talking about genre fiction were often in some sense engaged in creating speculative narratives about the future. Conversations with everyone at the UC Davis ModLab were also crucial during the project’s early days. Mark Jerng’s book Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction was an important critical text for the book, and he offered very useful feedback on the introduction. He provided me with the concept of modal imagination as well as the suggestion to pull in Stuart Hall. But in some ways the genesis of the project came from Beth Freeman, who inspired me to work on temporality. She was a good friend, mentor, and ally.

Is there any advice you might offer to current graduate students in the program?

Don’t be afraid to let people know about your work. It’s not presumptuous to make sure that people see your writing. Also, we are living in a golden age of public scholarship. It has been gratifying to see my work taken up by science fiction fandom and actually influence the conversation within that community in a way that I never thought was possible. There are all kinds of venues for reaching the public outside of the academy from public-facing websites to podcasts, and the barriers to entry are probably lower than you think. UC Davis English graduate Doug Metzger’s immensely popular Literature and History podcast offers a useful model in this regard.

What do you most hope readers will take away from Speculative Whiteness?

Science fiction isn’t automatically leftist or progressive. We have to fight against the fascist tendencies within our culture to ensure that we uphold a vision in which tomorrow belongs to everyone.