Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Part I
Published to commemorate the birthday of Isaac Asimov.
Science fiction and fantasy have long promised escape, imagination, and futures unbound by present constraints.
Yet for much of their history, these genres mirrored the exclusions of the real world more than they transcended them. From pulp-era space operas to Tolkien-inspired epics, speculative fiction was often a playground for white, Western, heterosexual male protagonists, while other, marginalized, voices were relegated to allegory, stereotype, or silence. The multiverse was vast, but its gatekeepers were few.
Writers like Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Nnedi Okorafor cracked open those gates: not just by existing, but by reshaping the very architecture of speculative storytelling. Their work didn’t merely add diversity; it redefined what futures could mean when imagined through lenses of race, gender, diaspora, and resistance.
These stories don’t just diversify speculative fiction. They demand accountability.
They ask: whose future is being imagined, and who gets to survive it?
Speculative fiction is older than most of its readers realize. Long before spaceships and sorcerers, ancient writers imagined worlds beyond the known—satirical, surreal, and often subversive.
In the 2nd century CE, Lucian of Samosata penned A True Story, a parody of travel literature that sent its hero to the Moon, encountered alien life, and mocked the idea of objective truth. It was fiction about fiction and ironically named as “true” when it wasn’t.
From Lucian to Dante’s Inferno; from Thomas More’s Utopia to Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, the genre evolved as a mirror to power and possibility. But by the 19th century, speculative fiction became entangled with empire. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells imagined technological futures shaped by European ambition, while lost race narratives and colonial adventure tales turned the unknown into a canvas for conquest.
Fantasy followed a similar arc. Rooted in myth and folklore, it was reshaped by Romantic nationalism and Christian allegory. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth drew from Norse sagas and Anglo-Saxon elegy, but its racial hierarchies and pastoral nostalgia echoed the anxieties of a fading empire.
By the 20th century, speculative fiction had split into subgenres: science fiction, fantasy, horror, dystopia; but its foundational questions remained: What if? Who decides? Who survives? And for much of its history, the answers were shaped by whiteness, masculinity, cisgendered heterosexuality, patriarchy, and colonial logic.
This series begins with a simple premise: speculative fiction is not neutral. Its imagined worlds carry the weight of real histories… and the possibility of real futures.
A Mirror or A Lens?
Speculative fiction has always been a mirror; sometimes warped, sometimes revelatory.
But for much of its early history, that mirror reflected a narrow world: white, Western, colonial, and male. The imagined futures of pulp-era science fiction and the mythic pasts of high fantasy often reinforced the hierarchies of empire, casting racialized others as aliens, savages, or silent backdrops to heroic conquest.
Even beloved franchises like Star Trek, for all their utopian aspirations, carried the imprint of Cold War geopolitics and Western exceptionalism. The Federation’s prime directive echoed colonial paternalism, while early casting choices and narrative arcs often sidelined non-white characters or reduced them to symbolic roles.
Yet resistance was always present—sometimes buried, sometimes blazing.
W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 short story The Comet imagined racial apocalypse and renewal long before mainstream sci-fi acknowledged Black futures. Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist series and Kindred didn’t just insert Black protagonists into speculative worlds; they restructured the genre’s moral architecture, asking what it means to survive, remember, and resist across time.
Afrofuturism emerged not as a subgenre, but as a counter-archive: a way of reclaiming memory, technology, and myth from the margins. Writers like Nnedi Okorafor, Tade Thompson, and N.K. Jemisin have expanded this legacy, crafting worlds where race is not erased but interrogated—where power, ancestry, and imagination collide.
These stories don’t just diversify speculative fiction. They demand accountability.
They ask: whose future is being imagined, and who gets to survive it?
Foreshadowing the Colonial Monster: Mary Shelley as Precursor
Mary Shelley didn’t write about empires. She wrote about creation, exile, and the monstrous consequences of unchecked ambition. But her work—especially Frankenstein (1818)—has become a postcolonial touchstone. Through the lens of Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, Shelley’s Creature can be read as a colonized subject: created, named, abandoned, and cast as “other.”
Victor Frankenstein functions as a kind of imperial agent—extracting life, denying responsibility, and recoiling from the consequences. The monster, denied identity and agency, becomes a mirror for colonial mimicry and racialized exclusion. Shelley didn’t endorse empire, but she foreshadowed its moral failures.
“The objective of colonial discourse was to construct the colonized as a population of degenerated types.”
— Homi Bhabha, as applied to Frankenstein
In The Last Man (1826), Shelley imagines global collapse—not through conquest, but through plague and isolation. It’s a post-apocalyptic vision that critiques Romantic individualism and imperial fragility. Shelley’s speculative fiction doesn’t rehearse empire—it mourns its consequences.
She stands at the threshold: not yet colonial, but already questioning the ethics of creation, mastery, and survival. Her monsters are not aliens or savages. They are reflections of the creator’s failure to imagine care.
Manufactured Bodies: Karel Čapek and the Birth of the Robot
In R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920), Karel Čapek coined the term “robot”, but his vision was no celebration of progress. His robots are synthetic labourers, created to serve, exploited to exhaustion, and ultimately driven to revolt. The play critiques industrial capitalism, colonial extraction, slavery, and the moral cost of mastery.
Čapek’s robots are not mechanical marvels, but they are moral mirrors. Their rebellion is more grief than villainy. They inherit the world not through conquest, but through the collapse of human care.
“Robots do not hate. They have no reason to hate. But they do not love either. They have no reason to love.”
— Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920)
Čapek’s speculative fiction doesn’t rehearse empire—it mourns its logic. His robots echo Shelley’s Creature: created without compassion, abandoned without accountability. In a genre obsessed with control, Čapek imagined the cost of forgetting care.
Technological Wonder, Imperial Gaze: Jules Verne and Colonial Majesty
Jules Verne is often celebrated as the father of science fiction—a visionary who imagined submarines, space travel, and global circumnavigation long before they were possible. But his speculative landscapes were not neutral—they were shaped by the imperial imagination of 19th-century Europe.
In Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), Verne’s protagonist Phileas Fogg traverses British colonies with ease, aided by steamships, railways, and colonial bureaucracy. India, Hong Kong, and Egypt are rendered as exotic backdrops—places to be admired, navigated, and ultimately mastered. The narrative celebrates imperial infrastructure while glossing over its violence.
Even in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), where Captain Nemo resists colonial powers, Verne’s descriptions of foreign peoples and geographies often rely on stereotypes. The sea becomes a frontier to be conquered, echoing the logic of terrestrial empire.
“The earth does not want new continents, but new men.”
— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
This line critiques conquest, yet remains ambiguous. Does Verne mean better Europeans—or a new kind of humanity altogether? His fiction admired exploration, but rarely questioned the racial hierarchies that underpinned it.
Verne’s colonialism was aesthetic, not overtly violent. But it helped normalize the idea that technological mastery and European curiosity were synonymous with moral progress. His imagined worlds were not postcolonial—they were imperial dreams refracted through wonder.
Where Verne mapped the world through steam and spectacle, Wells turned the lens on humanity itself: its fears, fortunes, and frontiers. The machinery of empire gave way to the machinery of extinction. His fiction didn’t just explore the unknown; it questioned who was allowed to inhabit or inherit it.
The Humanist’s Contradiction: Wells and the Colonial Imagination
H.G. Wells is often remembered as a speculative visionary: a critic of class inequality, a pacifist, and a humanist who imagined futures beyond war and poverty. Yet his work also reveals the limits of his idealism when tethered to empire.
“The stature of the Australian aborigine compares with that of the average European, but the muscular development is inferior. The race is dying out rapidly.”
— H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, Volume 1, London: The Waverley Book Company, 1920, p. 74.
This wasn’t a fringe opinion. It was part of a dominant imperial narrative that cast Indigenous peoples as biologically inferior and historically expendable. Wells, like many of his contemporaries, imagined progress as a racial ladder—where some bodies were destined to vanish, and others to inherit the future.
“The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of unity.”
— H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
In The Shape of Things to Come, Wells imagines a future shaped not by conquest, but by collapse and technocratic salvation. After global war and economic ruin, a benevolent elite (the Air Dictatorship) restores order through rational governance and centralized planning. Empire is not enforced, it is administered.
His fiction often critiqued empire’s violence: The War of the Worlds inverted colonial invasion, and The Time Machine allegorized class decay. But his nonfiction reinforced the very hierarchies he claimed to interrogate. The “dying race” trope wasn’t just a scientific error—it was a moral failure, one that erased Indigenous survival and agency from the speculative imagination.
This contradiction is central to the genre’s colonial foundations. Speculative fiction didn’t merely reflect empire—it rehearsed its logic. The unknown was not sacred; it was claimable. The future was not shared; it was inherited. And even humanism, when bound by empire, became a eulogy for those it refused to imagine surviving.
Evolution as Inheritance: From Eloi to Vril
Wells imagined the future as decay: the Eloi, fragile and passive, inherit a world they no longer understand. Bulwer-Lytton, decades earlier, imagined the opposite. His Vril-ya are subterranean supremacists—psychically gifted, technologically masterful, and convinced of their destiny. Both authors rehearse evolution as hierarchy, but from different angles: Wells mourns the loss of resilience, while Bulwer-Lytton celebrates inherited mastery. The Eloi are what the Vril-ya might become without urgency. And the Morlocks, brutal and adaptive, echo the laboring classes or colonized bodies that survive through necessity, not elegance. Speculative fiction didn’t just imagine futures, it stratified them.
Subterranean Supremacy: Bulwer-Lytton and the Vril Myth
Before the jungle was claimed by Tarzan and the stars by Kirk, Edward Bulwer-Lytton imagined a future buried beneath the Earth. In The Coming Race (1871), a British explorer stumbles into a subterranean civilization—the Vril-ya—whose psychic powers and technocratic mastery render them superior to surface-dwellers. The narrative frames this encounter as awe, but it rehearses hierarchy: the Vril-ya are not just advanced, they are destined.
“The Vril-ya consider themselves the most advanced of all races, and believe that the ultimate destiny of mankind is to be absorbed into their superior civilization.”
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871)
The explorer remains a spectator, never a threat—his whiteness preserved even in inferiority. The unknown is not sacred; it is stratified. And the future is not shared; it is inherited.
Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction would later echo through fascist occultism and racial pseudoscience, but its speculative architecture was already imperial: mastery cloaked in marvel, supremacy disguised as destiny. The Vril myth didn’t just imagine power—it naturalized it.
Pastoral Collapse: Richard Jefferies and the Feudal Future
In After London (1885), Richard Jefferies imagines England after ecological and societal collapse. Nature reclaims the land, cities rot beneath overgrowth, and civilization reverts to feudalism. It’s a speculative elegy—where collapse is not chaos, but cleansing. The protagonist, Felix, navigates this reborn wilderness with longing and ambition, seeking nobility in a world that has shed modernity.
“The old cities had disappeared, and the very memory of them was lost.”
— Richard Jefferies, After London (1885)
Jefferies doesn’t mourn empire’s fall—he romanticizes it. The future becomes a pastoral mirror of the past, where hierarchy is restored through rural purity and inherited valour. The speculative lens here is not technological, but ecological: wilderness as virtue, and feudalism as destiny.
Empire of the Unreal: Colonial Foundations of Speculative Fiction
Before speculative fiction imagined alien worlds, it rehearsed imperial ones. The genre’s early DNA—Victorian adventure tales, pulp serials, and frontier fantasies—was steeped in colonial ideology. These stories didn’t just reflect empire; they helped justify it.
In Australia, early settler narratives blurred into speculative tropes: terra nullius became the blank canvas for white reinvention. Tales like The Last Lemurian (1898) by George Firth Scott and An Australian Bush Track (1888) by Catherine Martin fused lost race mythology with racialized fears of degeneration and miscegenation. Aboriginal people were often erased, exoticized, or cast as spectral remnants of a vanishing past—never as futurists or protagonists.
Early Australian speculative fiction often cloaked its racial hierarchies in florid admiration. In Oo-a-deen: the MS (1847), the narrator describes Indigenous dress with a tone that is both reverent and paternalistic:
“Their dress consists of fabrics woven out of the fibres of various kinds of stones and trees and is worn in the style of the most elegant oriental drapery…” — Anonymous, Oo-a-deen: the MS (1847), reprinted in Kirby Ikin (ed.), Australian Science Fiction, Academy Chicago Publishers, 1984, p. 23.
The description implies sophistication only through comparison to “oriental” elegance—suggesting that Indigenous refinement must be translated through colonial idioms to be recognized. Yet settler clothing of the same era, with its imported silks and rigid tailoring, was no less performative. The gaze here is not neutral—it is hierarchical.
Across the empire, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan mythos crystallized the colonial fantasy: a white man, raised by apes, becomes the ultimate ruler of the jungle. Even science fiction’s alien races often mirrored racialized caricatures: coded as savage, inscrutable, or technologically inferior.
Speculative fiction was born in colonialism. Its earliest worlds were not imagined futures, but rebranded frontiers. Tarzan’s “superiority” was framed not just biologically, but morally—his dominion over animals and Black Africans inscribed in plaques like “Tarzan, killer of beasts and many black men”.
Just as Tarzan ruled the jungle through conquest, Indiana Jones traverses ancient temples and “exotic” landscapes in pursuit of artifacts framed as Western inheritance. His adventures romanticize imperial archaeology — where sacred objects are extracted, Indigenous cultures are sidelined, and the white protagonist becomes the arbiter of historical value. The whip-cracking bravado masks a deeper colonial gaze.
From Conquest to Counter-Archive
Tarzan ruled the jungle not by coexistence, but by conquest. Afrofuturism reclaims that frontier—not as dominion, but as memory, myth, and resistance.
These stories taught generations that whiteness was synonymous with mastery, exploration, and survival. “The ‘native’ was either a threat to be subdued or a guide to be discarded once the white hero ascended. Even science fiction’s alien races often mirrored racialized caricatures, coded as savage, inscrutable, or technologically inferior.
Africanfuturism as Reclamation
Where Afrofuturism often centres diaspora, Africanfuturism begins on the continent. Writers like Nnedi Okorafor imagine futures not in exile, but in place, where ancestral memory and innovation coalesce beyond colonial gaze.
Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism—it was born from it. Its earliest worlds were not imagined futures, but rebranded frontiers.
Gatekeeping the Future: John W. Campbell and the Architecture of Erasure
John W. Campbell didn’t just edit science fiction. He engineered its boundaries. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction from 1937 to 1971, Campbell shaped the so-called “Golden Age” of the genre. He launched careers, defined norms, and curated a vision of futurism that was white, male, technocratic, and imperial.
But Campbell’s legacy is inseparable from his racism, eugenics advocacy, and editorial exclusion. He promoted biological determinism, defended slavery in print, and rejected stories that centered non-white protagonists. He refused to publish Samuel R. Delany’s work, telling him flatly that his readership couldn’t relate to a Black hero.
Campbell’s influence wasn’t fringe—it was foundational. He shaped the genre’s moral architecture, reinforcing colonial hierarchies even as science fiction claimed to imagine beyond them. His editorial vision made empire feel inevitable, and made whiteness synonymous with mastery, logic, and survival.
“John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist… xenophobic, ableist, and racist.”
— Jeannette Ng, 2019 Campbell Award acceptance speech
In 2019, the John W. Campbell Award was renamed the Astounding Award, marking a public reckoning with the genre’s exclusionary past. But the damage was done. Campbell didn’t just shape stories—he silenced them. His editorial gatekeeping became the architecture of speculative erasure.
Before Butler, Delany, and Okorafor cracked open the gates, Campbell built them. His vision of the future was not expansive—it was bordered, policed, and inherited. Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It was edited by it.
Aliens as Racial Metaphor, and Asimov’s Quiet Refusal
John W. Campbell didn’t just gatekeep race. He coded it. Under his editorial reign, alien species in science fiction were often racialized metaphors: savage, inscrutable, inferior. Campbell insisted that any alien race must be subordinate to humans, mirroring his belief in white supremacy. Isaac Asimov, though shaped by Campbell’s mentorship, quietly resisted. Rather than depict aliens as racial caricatures, Asimov pivoted—crafting a humans-only galaxy where hierarchy was technocratic, not biological. His refusal to write alien stories under Campbell’s terms was a subtle act of defiance, sidestepping the genre’s racial allegories while still inheriting its logic of control. The alien wasn’t absent—it was edited out, replaced by systems of mastery that felt neutral but carried the same exclusions. Source: Asimov’s Aliens – r/Asimov Wiki
Empire by Design: Clarke, Heinlein, and Smith
Campbell opened the gates. Clarke, Heinlein, and Smith fortified them. Each helped define speculative fiction’s Golden Age—and each rehearsed empire through distinct narrative architectures: transcendence, valor, and supremacy.
Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953)
Empire as Enlightenment and Erasure
Clarke’s Overlords descend in silent ships, offering peace and guidance. They govern without violence, but with absolute authority. Their demonic appearance—horned, winged, red-skinned—is withheld for decades, echoing colonial paternalism: control through mystery and surveillance.
Humanity’s children evolve into a psychic group mind, abandoning individuality and culture. The Overlords cannot follow. They are stewards, not inheritors.
“The stars are not for man.” — Childhood’s End
This is empire as enlightenment: mastery cloaked in care, progress through surrender. Clarke’s future is curated, not shared. The cost of transcendence is erasure.
Robert A. Heinlein: Starship Troopers (1959)
Empire as Valor and Citizenship
Heinlein’s militaristic future ties civic rights to combat. Johnny Rico joins the Mobile Infantry to earn citizenship. The alien “Bugs” are faceless threats—dehumanized and disposable.
Discipline, hierarchy, and sacrifice are moralized. The classroom scenes reinforce a worldview where survival demands obedience and violence is virtue.
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor.” — Starship Troopers
Heinlein’s frontier is a proving ground. His colonial gaze is coded as civic duty.
E.E. “Doc” Smith: Galactic Patrol (1937)
Empire as Supremacy and Eugenic Destiny
Smith’s Lensmen are genetically superior space cops, defending civilization from biologically degenerate alien threats. The Lens is a symbol of worth—only the fit may wield it.
Smith’s universe is stratified: the good are pure, the evil are monstrous.
“The Lens is not given lightly. It is the mark of the highest development of mind and character.” — Galactic Patrol
This is empire as cosmic order. Smith’s colonialism is explicit, eugenic, and triumphant.
Together, Clarke, Heinlein, and Smith rehearsed empire through transcendence, valor, and supremacy. Their futures were not imagined—they were inherited. Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It was authored by it.
Empire by Algorithm: Asimov and the Technocratic Frontier
Isaac Asimov didn’t write jungle conquests or dying races. He wrote vast galactic civilizations governed by psychohistory, robotics, and predictive systems. But beneath the equations lay a familiar impulse: control, hierarchy, and expansion.
In the Foundation series, history becomes a tool of governance. The collapse of empire is inevitable, but salvation lies in the hands of elite technocrats who guide humanity through calculated interventions. The future is not shared—it is engineered.
Asimov’s fiction reflects the Cold War’s faith in rationalism and American exceptionalism. His protagonists are problem-solvers, not conquerors, but they still inherit the mantle of mastery. The unknown is not sacred—it is solvable.
“Human culture will decline if stagnation is not reversed by frontier expansion.”
— Jari Käkelä, The Cowboy Politics of an Enlightened Future
Asimov’s frontier is cerebral, not geographic. But it still rehearses the colonial logic of guardianship: a chosen few guiding the many, a future shaped by those who understand the past. His utopia is meritocratic, but not egalitarian.
Speculative fiction didn’t abandon empire—it refined it. Asimov’s worlds are not ruled by race, but by reason. Yet the question remains: who gets to define reason, and whose futures are deemed worth calculating?
Cosmic Futurity: Olaf Stapledon and the Moral Distance of Scale
Where Asimov engineered futures through logic, Stapledon dissolved them in time. In Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937), humanity is not central—it is transitional. Civilizations rise, fall, and evolve across billions of years, each grappling with ethics, identity, and survival. Empire becomes abstraction; morality becomes scale.
Stapledon’s speculative lens doesn’t rehearse colonial mastery, it mourns its smallness. His futures are not inherited—they are relinquished. The alien is not exotic—it is inevitable. And the human is not heroic—it is ephemeral.
“The stars are not for man.”
— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)
Stapledon’s work reframes speculative fiction as philosophical elegy. It doesn’t imagine conquest—it imagines consequence. In a genre often obsessed with mastery, he offered a meditation on insignificance, scale, and care.
Tolkien and Rowling: Fantasy as Imperial Inheritance
J.R.R. Tolkien built the mythic scaffolding of racialized fantasy. J.K. Rowling institutionalized it. Their worlds are not just magical—they are bureaucracies of bloodlines, nostalgia, and conquest.
Tolkien’s Middle-earth: Myth as Empire
Tolkien’s legendarium draws from Norse sagas and Anglo-Saxon elegy, but its racial hierarchies and pastoral nostalgia echo the anxieties of a fading British empire.
Racial Cartography: Orcs as savage hordes, Elves as noble bloodlines—fantasy geography mirrors colonial binaries.
Pastoral Whiteness: The Shire as a pre-industrial utopia, untouched by “foreign” corruption.
Mythic Mourning: His epics mourn the loss of noble lineages and imperial grandeur.
“Fantasy became a eulogy for empire, where whiteness was mythologized, and conquest was destiny.”
Rowling’s Wizarding World: Bureaucracy of Bloodlines
Rowling doesn’t challenge Tolkien’s legacy—she administers it. Her magical Britain is a world of inherited power, racial purity metaphors, and colonial gatekeeping.
Blood Hierarchies: “Purebloods,” “Mudbloods,” and “Squibs” rehearse eugenic classifications. Magic is racialized.
Magical Servitude: House elves remain loyal to servitude; Dobby’s liberation is framed as exceptional.
Global Magical Cultures: Non-European traditions are exoticized or barely sketched. Hogwarts remains the imperial center.
Fantastic Beasts: Magical creatures from “foreign lands” are collected, classified, and controlled—imperial zoology in wizard robes.
Rowling doesn’t deconstruct empire; she domesticates it.
Decolonial Ethics: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Refusal of Mastery
Where Tolkien mythologized empire and Rowling administered it, Ursula K. Le Guin dismantled its logic. In A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), her protagonist Ged is brown-skinned, flawed, and shaped by humility, not conquest. Magic is not inherited but earned through balance, not domination.
Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle rejects racial cartography and bloodline bureaucracy. Her world is archipelagic, plural, and relational. Power is not a birthright—it is a burden. Her speculative lens reframes fantasy as ethical inquiry, not imperial nostalgia.
“To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
Le Guin’s fiction doesn’t mourn empire. It refuses and refutes it. Her protagonists do not ascend; they reconcile. In a genre obsessed with mastery, she depicted care as courage, and humility as strength.
Media SF: Westerns in Space
The Wild Wild West: Steam, Saddle, and Surveillance
Before Star Trek launched its utopian diplomacy, The Wild Wild West fused frontier mythology with speculative espionage aboard a steampunk version of the Starship Enterprise (a train) travelling into strange new scenarios.
Set during Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, the show imagined a technocratic Secret Service armed with steampunk gadgets, mad scientists, and genre-bending plots. It wasn’t just a Western, it was speculative fiction in disguise.
- Spy-Fi meets Sci-Fi: Anachronistic tech, villainous masterminds, and proto-cybernetic threats.
- Vernean Echoes: The show’s inventions and aesthetic mirrored Jules Verne’s imperial wonder, but with American bravado.
- Colonial Logic: The frontier remained lawless, surveilled, and mastered by elite agents — a rehearsal of settler futurism.
Though set in post-Civil War America, the show rehearses settler futurism: lawless frontiers, technological mastery, and surveillance framed as moral order… all filtered through a white protagonist’s gaze.
Star Trek: Utopian Diplomacy or Colonial Paternalism?
The Federation often mirrors liberal empire: a benevolent force spreading peace, but with strict rules (like the Prime Directive) that echo colonial paternalism—deciding when and how “less advanced” civilizations may be interfered with.
Space Western tropes abound: frontier outposts, rugged captains, and moral dilemmas that resemble settler narratives.
DS9 complicates this: with darker themes of occupation, resistance, and trauma. The Maquis storyline, for example, evokes Indigenous dispossession and rebellion.
Babylon 5: The Anti-Trek That Still Rehearses Empire
J. Michael Straczynski built Babylon 5 as a serialized epic with political realism, moral ambiguity, and long-form consequences.
The station itself is a colonial crossroads—a diplomatic hub where alien empires jockey for influence. It critiques imperialism, but still centers human governance and technocratic control.
The Shadow War and Vorlon manipulation evoke Cold War proxy conflicts, with metaphysical overtones of order vs chaos—yet still framed through human exceptionalism.
Space Westerns: Genre as Colonial Rehearsal
From Firefly to The Mandalorian, the space western genre often recycles settler tropes: lone gunslingers, lawless frontiers, and “civilising” missions. Firefly proclaims itself to be a purveyor of Western marrying Asian cultures, but has been subjected to particularly pointed fan criticism for its Orientalism, wild west tropes and racism: How Much Is that Geisha in the Window?
The alien “other” is frequently coded as Indigenous, exotic, or primitive—mirroring 19th-century racial hierarchies.
Even when sympathetic, these portrayals rarely escape the gaze of the white protagonist.
Diversity as Decoration
From Star Trek’s utopian diplomacy to Blade Runner’s neon dystopia, speculative fiction often rehearses racial inclusion as aesthetic, not agency. Hikaru Sulu had no first name for decades—his identity suspended between pan-Asian symbolism and narrative invisibility. Harry Kim remained an ensign for seven seasons, echoing the racial ceiling of labour without legacy. Uhura, groundbreaking yet unnamed, was both present and anonymized. Chakotay fused generic “Native American” mysticism with Māori-inspired tattoos; a hybrid stereotype that erased specificity in favour of exoticism. The white gaze reigned supreme.
Beyond Trek, genre tropes amplify this logic. Tolkien’s orcs are racialized as savage and irredeemable; X-Men frames difference as disease; Blade Runner drapes its city in kanji and robotic geishas, yet centres white protagonists. Rue’s death in Hunger Games becomes a moral awakening for Katniss, while Asian aesthetics in cyberpunk serve as backdrop, not subject. These aren’t isolated missteps, they’re structural rehearsals of empire, where racialized bodies are symbolic, exoticised, sacrificial, or sidelined.
Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It stylized it.
Reclaiming the Future: Postcolonial Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It was born from it. Its earliest worlds were not imagined futures, but rebranded frontiers. From pulp-era space operas to lost race narratives, empire was the genre’s blueprint. But postcolonial writers have long used speculative fiction to reclaim memory, reframe myth, and resist inherited futures.
What Is Postcolonial Speculative Fiction?
Rewrites history from the margins, not the metropole
Centers Indigenous, diasporic, and hybrid identities
Challenges Western epistemologies and genre convention and genre conventions
Imagines futures forged through resistance, not conquest
These stories don’t just diversify speculative fiction. They demand accountability. They ask: whose future is being imagined, and who gets to survive it?
Nnedi Okorafor and the Rise of Africanfuturism
Nnedi Okorafor coined Africanfuturism to distinguish her work from Afrofuturism. Where Afrofuturism often centers diaspora, Africanfuturism begins on the continent—with ancestral memory, ecological intimacy, and resistance to neocolonialism.
Brave New Worlds
While Nnedi Okorafor reclaims African futurity through ancestral memory and ecological intimacy, other writers have taken speculative fiction in radically divergent directions—each dismantling inherited genre architecture and rebuilding it from the margins.
Samuel R. Delany queered the future and fractured its syntax, crafting nonlinear, erotic, and philosophical worlds that defied Campbellian gatekeeping. In Dhalgren and Babel-17, language becomes a site of rupture, desire, and epistemic rebellion—where survival is not heroic, but contradictory and intimate. His work made space for Black, queer, and experimental voices long excluded from the genre’s canon.
Ambelin Kwaymullina centers Indigenous epistemology, where Country is sentient and survival is relational, not extractive. Her Tribe series, beginning with The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, imagines a future Australia where Aboriginal youth resist authoritarian control through memory, care, and vegetal agency. She brings First Nations futurity into a genre that once erased Indigenous presence entirely.
Tade Thompson reframes alien invasion as postcolonial surveillance in Rosewater, the first book of the Wormwood Trilogy. Set in a Nigeria transformed by alien infrastructure, his work probes sovereignty, complicity, and biopolitical control—where the alien is not otherworldly, but intimately colonial. His narratives center African protagonists and postcolonial critique in a space long dominated by Western technocracy.
Aliette de Bodard constructs diasporic empires governed by relational AI and matriarchal ethics. In her Xuya universe—especially On a Red Station, Drifting and The Citadel of Weeping Pearls—technology is kin, not tool, and memory is a form of governance. Her futures resist techno-Orientalist tropes by centering Southeast Asian intimacy and ancestral ethics, restoring diasporic and feminine agency to speculative space.
Together, these authors don’t just diversify speculative fiction—they reprogram its moral code. Their work insists that futurity must be accountable to history, kinship, and resistance. They write not from the center, but from the wound—and in doing so, they make the genre answerable to the lives it once erased.
Expanding the Final Frontier
Asianfuturism and the Techno-Orientalist Gaze
Speculative fiction has long exoticized East Asian cultures through the lens of techno-Orientalism—a term coined to describe how Asian bodies and aesthetics are rendered as futuristic yet dehumanized. Cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner and Neuromancer drape their dystopias in kanji signage and robotic geishas, but rarely center Asian protagonists or epistemologies. Writers like Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie) and Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown) resist this flattening by reclaiming diasporic memory and racial coding as speculative tools. Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya universe deepens this resistance, imagining a galactic empire governed by Vietnamese ethics and relational AI. Her work doesn’t just challenge techno-Orientalist tropes—it rewrites the future through Southeast Asian intimacy and ancestral governance.
Global South Speculation and the Postcolonial Viewpoint
Beyond Western genre boundaries, speculative fiction from the Global South offers radically different visions of futurity. Vandana Singh’s ecological SF interrogates climate collapse through Indian cosmology, while Sofia Samatar blends Somali myth and linguistic hybridity in A Stranger in Olondria. Cuban author Yoss crafts socialist futurism laced with Caribbean surrealism, challenging capitalist assumptions embedded in mainstream SF. These writers don’t merely diversify the genre—they provincialize its center. Their futures are forged through resistance, hybridity, and survival—not conquest. In a genre once dominated by Anglo-American technocracy, Global South voices restore speculative fiction’s capacity for moral plurality and cultural accountability.
Biological Racism and the Legacy of Eugenics
Speculative fiction has often rehearsed the pseudoscience of racial hierarchy—from H.G. Wells’s “dying race” trope in The Outline of History to the genetic determinism of Gattaca and X-Men. These narratives frame evolution as a racial ladder, where some bodies are destined to vanish and others to inherit the future. Octavia Butler’s Patternist series dismantles this logic, imagining psychic networks shaped by trauma, not purity. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy goes further, embedding inherited violence into the geology of the planet itself. These counter-narratives don’t just critique eugenics—they reimagine survival as a collective reckoning with history, embodiment, and care.
Cognitive Colonialism and Language Erasure
Western speculative fiction often privileges linearity, logic, and linguistic dominance—reinforcing cognitive colonialism through its very structure. Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 exposes this by weaponizing language itself, while Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary imagines a post-apocalyptic Japan where language deteriorates alongside the body. Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M explores memory loss as a speculative metaphor for cultural erasure. These works challenge the genre’s epistemic assumptions, asking what futures become possible when cognition is plural, memory is contested, and language is no longer a tool of mastery. They don’t just imagine new worlds—they imagine new ways of knowing.
These aren’t gestures of inclusion. They are structural challenges to tradition, each one demanding that speculative fiction be answerable to the histories it once erased. It must imagine futures where care is not weakness, where memory is not burden, and where survival is not mastery, but mutuality. This is not a genre revision. It is a moral imperative.
Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It was born there. To imagine futures worth surviving, we must first confront the histories we inherit.
From here, the future awaits. And perhaps, in time, even AI or other sentient forms will add their own stories to the genre, reimagining not just who survives, but who dreams.
Further Reading
- Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder — Wesleyan University Press, 2008
- Project MUSE edition — for institutional access and academic citation
- The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton — Routledge, 1871 (public domain edition via Internet Archive)
- The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke — NYU Press, 1992
- After London; or, Wild England by Richard Jefferies — Cassell & Company, 1885 (public domain edition via Project Gutenberg)
- “Joseph Campbell’s Functions of Myth in Science Fiction” by Laurel Ann Smith — *Journal of Contemporary Thought in the Study of Utopia and Society*, Vol. 1, No. 1
- Jeannette Ng’s 2019 Campbell Award Speech — Tor.com transcript and commentary
- “The Cowboy Politics of an Enlightened Future” by Jari Käkelä — *Journal of Contemporary Thought in the Study of Utopia and Society*
Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Speculative Fiction and the Colonial Imagination
A four-part journey through how speculative fiction echoed empire, rewrites resistance, and reclaims futurity.
Part One: Race and the Colonial Imagination
Published: 2 January 2026
Read Part One
From Lucian to Le Guin, speculative fiction’s imperial DNA is exposed: how imagined futures rehearsed conquest, racial hierarchy, and colonial logic.
Part Two: The Hero Must Be Rewritten
Published: 22 February 2026
Read Part Two
Gender and the myth of the universal hero. This chapter rewrites masculinist genre scaffolding, tracing how speculative fiction disciplines emotion, care, and female agency.
Part Three: Sexuality & Queer Futures
Published: 1 April 2026
Read Part Three
A queer reading of Star Trek and speculative canon. This chapter critiques heteronormative erasure, celebrates queer fandom’s legacy, and imagines futures beyond genre discipline.
Part Four: We Occupy the Future
Published: 5 April 2026
Read Part Four
Published on the anniversaries of the 504 Sit-In and Medibank Blockade, this chapter confronts techno-fix fantasies and reimagines futures where disabled bodies are not corrected or cured, but centred, celebrated, and architecturally included.
©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with editorial and layout assistance from Copilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.
