David Shipko researches the relationship between historical crises of late capitalism, social processes of mystification, and speculative cultural production across literature, film, and videogames. The Denialist Unconscious, his in-progress first book project, examines the production of climate change denial within speculative novels, films, and video games. A second monograph project, tentatively titled The Solarpunk Symptom: The Automatic Fetish of Green Energy Transition, will interrogate the constitutive contradictions of solarpunk, developing a critical re-consideration of its utopianism, and exploring how its narrative, aesthetic, and affective structures mediate discourses of green energy (de)mystification. He is also conducting research on the narrative and symbolic means by which speculative texts mediate “artificial intelligence” as a process of the transformation of living labor into dead labor. He has taught literature and writing courses on topics including climate fiction and denial, cyberpunk, entropy and (endless) growth, artificial intelligence, and technological singularity. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Science Fiction Studies, and Statement Magazine, with articles forthcoming in CR: The New Centennial Review and Science Fiction Film and Television. He received his PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University in 2025.