MLA 2023: Presenting on the California in Science Fiction panel

For anyone who's at MLA, likes Science Fiction, and starting your conference day early, join us Friday morning for the California in Science Fiction panel. I'll be presenting my paper "Silicon San Francisco: The Technology Industry and Urban Space in Alex Garland’s Devs." (8:30 a.m., Moscone West - 3014).

Abstract

While numerous Silicon Valley fictions are set in the San Francisco Bay Area, few feature the city itself as prominently as Devs, the 2020 limited series written and directed by Alex Garland. The core of the show’s speculative, near-future premise—a quantum computer that can simulate the events of any location at any time, past, present, or future—is housed in a grandiose, gold-leaf lined chamber on the campus of the fictional technology company, Amaya. But as is the case with Cupertino’s spaceship-like Apple Park or Mountain View’s Googleplex, the otherworldliness of technology companies’ spaces frequently contrasts with the terrestrial, quotidian spaces of the cities, neighborhoods, and homes they impact. In Garland’s series, the consequences and harms effects of Amaya’s work, and the harms inflicted by the company on the protagonist, Lily, are depicted in streets and spaces of San Francisco.

This paper examines how Devs uses these locations to represent the deep entanglement between technology companies and their local communities. A tech company shuttle bus, similar to those San Franciscans protested in the mid-2010s, carries Lily and her boyfriend to the Amaya campus; Battery Godfrey, an old defensive fortification overlooking the Golden Gate, is the site of a clandestine meeting; the porch of Lily’s Mission District home is a favorite haunt for a houseless man, a reminder of the area’s tremendous wealth disparity. Devs prompts us to recognize the ways in which technology companies’ power is felt in the urban spaces they abut.