Radical Householding towards a Post‐Capitalist World in Kin Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029‐2047

SUMMARY Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 engages in speculative economics to explore how the household as both a site of provisioning and living together and a material asset may get us to a post‐capitalist world in which capitalism is harnessed not to short‐term profits but with upholding justice and sustainability. In this article, I explore how the novel proposes to bring about a refocusing of priorities within capitalism. Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029‐2047, written at the same time as Robinson’s novel, helps us to reverse the order of the question from “How is a post‐capitalist society to be inaugurated?” to if such a societal arrangement were to be thrust on us, “How would we change our interiorities and modes of organizing to befit it?” While the first question considers capitalism as a potentially knowable and re‐directable system, the second makes humans, who are products of this system, an unknown quantity because they are opaque to themselves. The search to get a perspective on one’s opacity to oneself is as important as ushering in a new economic system as the very means to post‐capitalism.