For many refugees, displacement is already a story of loss, survival, and hope. But for LGBTQ refugees, it is often a story of double persecution — fleeing danger in their home countries only to face new threats in the very places meant to protect them.
I know this reality not from reports or headlines, but from lived experience.
In 2022, I was arrested in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya alongside three other transgender women. Our only “crime” was existing openly as who we are. Life in the camp was marked by constant fear. Transphobic individuals targeted us regularly — through threats, harassment, and violence.
Despite reporting these incidents, our voices were often ignored within systems that were supposed to protect us.
We were told, directly and indirectly, to stay silent. But silence was never an option.
We chose to speak out, to organize, and to demand visibility. Our advocacy grew stronger, and so did the backlash. At one point, a Kenyan senator initiated a committee to investigate why LGBTQ refugees were in the camp. Instead of addressing the violence we faced, we were accused of “spreading homosexuality,” as if our existence was a threat.
Still, we refused to disappear.
Threats from the Senator in 2023 (photo supplied)
We organized a Pride event in the camp — a bold act of resilience and visibility. For a moment, it felt like we were reclaiming our dignity. But that moment was short-lived. Police officers arrived and dismantled our celebration, reinforcing the message that we were not welcome, even in spaces we tried to create for ourselves.
Months later, the situation escalated further. The camp manager issued a directive ordering all LGBTQ individuals to leave Kakuma or face arrest. When we requested legal documentation to leave safely, it was denied. Instead, arrests began.
We were trapped — told to leave, but denied the means to do so.
In a desperate search for safety, we made a difficult decision during a community meeting: to flee. South Sudan was the closest option, and despite the risks, we crossed the border hoping for protection.
But the challenges followed us.
Discrimination, insecurity, and lack of protection persisted.
Yet, even in the face of repeated hardship, we did not give up.
Through continued advocacy and the support of international allies, I was eventually relocated to Canada. Today, I live in safety — but my journey is far from over. My voice carries the stories of many who are still left behind.
In places like Gorom Refugee Camp in South Sudan, LGBTQ refugees continue to endure violence, exclusion, and neglect. They remain invisible in policies, unheard in systems, and unprotected in spaces meant to offer refuge. Many are still waiting for resettlement, for recognition, and for the basic dignity every human being deserves.
This is why I continue to speak out.
(Remembering LGBT+ refugees whose voice is often silenced)
International Priorities
Resettlement countries such as Canada should urgently prioritize LGBTQ refugees in refugee camps because they face layered and life-threatening vulnerabilities that go far beyond the general hardships of displacement. Unlike other refugee groups, LGBTQ individuals are often exposed to targeted violence, discrimination, and social exclusion both from within refugee communities and sometimes from local authorities, leaving them without meaningful protection or safe living conditions.
In many camps, there are limited or no specialized services such as safe housing, mental health support, protection mechanisms, or confidential reporting systems that address their specific needs. As a result, LGBTQ refugees are frequently forced to live in constant fear, isolation, and invisibility, where even accessing basic humanitarian assistance can expose them to further harm. Prioritizing their resettlement is therefore not about preference, but about protection of the most at-risk individuals within already vulnerable populations.
Countries like Canada, which have strong human rights commitments, have both the capacity and moral responsibility to ensure that LGBTQ refugees are given urgent pathways to safety, dignity, and long-term protection.
The international community must act urgently to protect LGBTQ refugees. This includes ensuring safe and inclusive asylum systems, addressing discrimination within refugee camps, and accelerating resettlement processes for those at risk.
Silence and inaction only deepen the suffering.
We are not asking for special treatment — we are asking for safety, dignity, and the right to exist.
Our resilience should not be mistaken for acceptance of injustice. We have endured, resisted, and survived. But survival is not enough.
It is time for the world to listen. It is time for change.
*Charity is an activist and refugee advocate who has previously written articles from Kakuma and Gorom.
On April 5, 1977, disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco, demanding enforcement of Section 504 and refusing to be erased from the future. One year later, across the Pacific, protesters in Melbourne blockaded a Medibank office, insisting that architectural access was not a luxury but a right.
These acts of defiance, grounded in care, community, and unapologetic presence, form the backbone of this fourth entry in the Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies series. Here, I confront the techno-fix fantasy that haunts speculative fiction and reimagine futures where disabled bodies are not corrected or cured, but centred, celebrated, and architecturally included.
“Disability is not a brave struggle or ‘courage in the face of adversity.’ Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live.”
— Neil Marcus, playwright and activist We do not occupy the future through pity. We do it through design.
The topic of disability is neither academic nor esoteric in my life: born with disability, I quickly learned to accept it as “normal” for me – and I have managed to live a fairly unaffected life as a result. The science fiction community contains many people who are disabled in some way, and as a community we have come to embrace difference and diversity with celebration. Sadly, the literature and entertainment we enjoy does not reflect that diversity, nor that joyous celebration. This needs to change.
In speculative fiction, disability is often treated as a problem to be ignored outright; or simply solved, like a flaw awaiting correction through magic, technology, or narrative redemption. These “techno-fix” fantasies promise sleek futures where prosthetics become superpowers, pain is erased by neural implants, and access is retrofitted only after the fact. But beneath the shimmer of innovation lies a deeper erasure: the lived realities of disabled people, their communities, and their resistance to being rewritten.
Classic SF Erasures: Foundations of the Fix
Before speculative fiction imagined disabled people as victims of apocalypse, it imagined them as monsters, metaphors, or mistakes. These early science fiction texts didn’t just ignore disabled lives—they built futures where difference was punished, erased, or “corrected” through horror, science, or moral redemption.
Frankenstein (1818): The Creature’s stitched body is feared, not understood. His difference is framed as monstrosity, not identity.
The Invisible Man (1897): Griffin’s disembodiment is framed as power. Invisibility becomes escape from care, community, and accountability.
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896): Vivisection is used to “fix” animal bodies into human form. The Beast Folk are denied agency, identity, and continuity.
The Time Machine (1895): The Eloi are infantilized and passive; the Morlocks are deformed and monstrous. The future stratifies embodiment into beauty and brutality.
The Ship Who Sang (1969): Helva is born with severe disabilities and becomes a cybernetic ship. Her autonomy is framed through usefulness, not identity.
Flowers for Algernon (1959): Charlie’s intellectual disability is “cured,” then mourned. His identity is erased by enhancement.
These stories don’t imagine disabled futures. They imagine futures without disabled bodies at all. They taught generations of readers that difference must be feared, fixed, or forgotten. Even when disability is present, it is rarely lived—it is abstracted, mourned, or erased.
This section is not a condemnation. It is an archive. These texts shaped the genre’s aesthetic and its anxieties. They built the scaffolding for the techno-fix fantasies that followed. And they remind us: before we were victims, we were monsters. Before we were erased, we were redesigned.
These late-century classics didn’t erase disabled bodies outright. They abstracted them, enhanced them, or criminalized them. Disability became a flaw to be hidden, a threat to be neutralized, or a condition to be mourned. These stories refined the genre’s discomfort with disabled embodiment, building futures where survival required transformation.
The Forever War (1974): A soldier displaced in time suffers psychological trauma and alienation. PTSD is present, but framed as disconnection—not continuity.
Beggars in Spain (1991): The sleepless are genetically engineered to outperform the rest. Sleep becomes disability; rest becomes weakness. Sleepless ≠ Worthless
The Gods Themselves (1972): An alien triad includes a cognitively distinct member—essential, not flawed. Neurodivergence is present, but abstracted.
These works don’t mourn disabled lives—they sidestep them. They imagine futures where embodiment is optional, enhancement is mandatory, and access is retrofitted only after transformation. They don’t erase disability through death—they erase it through design.
Victims of the Future
In many speculative futures, disabled people are not absent; they’re present only as victims. Day of the Triffids opens with mass blindness, but offers no authentic disabled lives—just panic, pity, and collapse. Zombie apocalypses routinely treat mobility aids or neurodivergence as death sentences. The message is clear: survival belongs to the able-bodied.
These stories rarely ask what disabled communities might build, protect, or imagine. Instead, they frame disability as vulnerability—a plot device to heighten danger or justify euthanasia. The disabled body becomes shorthand for helplessness, not humanity.
Even more insidiously, disability is often rendered alien. In X-Men, mutation is metaphor—but the disabled body is either cured (Professor X regains mobility through tech) or erased (characters like Caliban are dehumanized). In Star Trek, Geordi La Forge’s visor is a technological fix, not a lived experience. These metaphors flatten disability into abstraction, stripping away culture, agency, and voice.
What’s missing is the reality: disabled people live full, complex, joyful lives. They protest, parent, create, and imagine. They are not waiting to be cured—they are demanding to be seen.
Futures That Cure to Forget
Some speculative futures don’t erase disabled people outright—they “fix” them instead. But the cure is no act of care. It’s a narrative convenience, a way to sidestep the complexity of disabled lives. In these stories, disability is a temporary obstacle, not a permanent identity. Once cured, the character is free to join the plot. Before that, they are a burden.
From cybernetic implants to genetic reprogramming, speculative fiction often treats disability as a flaw to be corrected. The future becomes a sterilized utopia, where difference is erased in the name of progress. These techno-fix fantasies echo real-world ableism: the pressure to conform, the denial of access, the refusal to imagine disabled joy.
Even when framed as empowerment, the cure trope undermines authenticity. It suggests that disabled people must be transformed to be valuable. It erases culture, community, and resistance. It forgets that many disabled people do not want to be cured. They want to be included.
Victim Mentality: Apocalypse Without Us
In speculative disaster fiction, disabled people are often present only as victims—never architects of survival.
Day of the Triffids: A comet blinds most of humanity, but the story offers no authentic disabled lives: just panic, pity, and collapse. Blindness is treated as mass helplessness, not a lived identity. There’s no infrastructure of care, no adaptation, no community; no learning from their skills and lived experience. The blind are burdens to be rescued or abandoned. The message is clear: survival belongs to the sighted.
Zombie Fiction: In The Walking Dead, mobility aids and neurodivergence are liabilities. Disabled characters are rare, and when present, they’re often sacrificed early. In Blood Quantum, Indigenous immunity reframes survival—but disabled characters remain peripheral. In The Girl with All the Gifts, neurodivergence is monstrous, not human. The metaphor flattens disability into threat.
Disaster Futures: In I Am Legend, disabled bodies are absent from the ruins. In Children of Men, global infertility erases disabled futures alongside reproductive ones. In The Road, survival is brutal, solitary, and able-bodied. There’s no space for interdependence or access.
The Invisible Man?
Gattaca (1997)
Genetic “perfection” becomes the price of admission. Vincent hides his heart condition to pass as valid. Disability is not just invisible—it’s criminalized.
Altered Carbon (Netflix)
Bodies are disposable. Consciousness is uploaded and swapped. Disability is incompatible with upload culture and is erased by design. There’s no space for embodied difference when bodies are interchangeable.
(In Gattaca, difference is criminal. In Altered Carbon, it’s discarded).
The Matrix (1999)
Neo’s real-world body is frail and passive. His power comes only in the virtual world, where disability vanishes. The film never explores disabled embodiment—only escape.
Idoru (William Gibson)
Near-future Tokyo is saturated with tech, but disabled bodies are absent. The virtual replaces the physical. Futurity becomes a testbed for erasure.
“The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) Digital futures don’t erase pain. They erase presence.
Beauty and the Beast Retellings
Disability is framed as moral lesson or aesthetic flaw. The Beast’s transformation erases difference. Disabled embodiment is tolerated only until it’s cured. Retellings of Beauty and the Beast treat disability as something to overcome, not live with.
Star Wars — The Force Fixes All
Once a Jedi, Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader after catastrophic injury. His cybernetic suit keeps him alive, but also isolates him emotionally and physically. Vader’s disability is framed as punishment, not adaptation. In Star Wars, prosthetics are upgrades, not identities. Luke’s hand is replaced without comment; Grievous is monstrous. The Force heals, but it does not accommodate. There are no disabled rebels, no access architecture on Coruscant, no interdependent communities in the Resistance. Redemption comes through power, not care.
Art by Copilot AI
Cured to Be Useful
Spock (Star Trek: The Original Series) Temporarily blinded in “Operation — Annihilate!”, Spock’s condition is mourned as tragic… until it’s reversed by a biological twist. His “third eyelid” restores vision, erasing the disability and sidestepping adaptation. The episode treats blindness as catastrophe, not continuity. There’s no cultural depth, no Vulcan sensory practice; just relief that the fix arrived.
Geordi La Forge (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Blind from birth, Geordi receives a VISOR that grants him vision—but the show rarely explores his lived experience. His blindness is abstracted into tech, not embodied as culture or identity.
Christopher Pike (Discovery / Strange New Worlds)
After a radiation accident, Pike becomes paralyzed and mute. His condition is framed as tragic prophecy, not lived reality. He is mourned, not accommodated.
Keyla Detmer (Discovery)
After injury, Detmer receives a cybernetic implant. Her trauma is hinted at, but never fully explored. The tech restores function, but emotional depth is sidelined.
Reginald Barclay (TNG)
His anxiety and neurodivergence are treated as pathology. He’s “fixed” through therapy and tech, but rarely given narrative dignity.
Nog (DS9)
After losing his leg, Nog receives a prosthetic—but his PTSD is resolved through assimilation. The prosthetic restores utility, not identity.
Dr. Miranda Jones (TOS)
A blind telepath who wears a sensor web to perceive her environment. Her blindness is hidden, treated as shameful, and revealed only as a plot twist. She is powerful, but only once her disability is concealed.
Riva (TNG)
A deaf diplomat who communicates through a chorus of telepathic interpreters. When they are killed, he reveals he knows sign language, but only after a crisis. His disability is accommodated, but framed as exceptional.
Techno-Fix = Inclusion
In these futures, disabled characters are included only after enhancement. The fix becomes the condition for narrative value.
Disability = Plot Device
These characters are rarely allowed to live with disability. Instead, they are cured, upgraded, or mourned. Their bodies serve the story—not themselves.
Care ≠ Cure
What’s missing is interdependence, community, and disabled joy. These futures imagine access only through transformation—not through care.
Erased by Design
Dominique “Dom” Ward (War of the Worlds, 2019–2022)
A wheelchair user and moral anchor in Season 1, Dom survives the alien apocalypse with quiet resilience. But in Season 2, he vanishes without explanation. Even after the timeline resets, he remains absent.
Captain Christopher Pike (Star Trek)
After a radiation accident, Pike becomes paralyzed and mute. In the original series, he’s confined to a blinking wheelchair until his disability is effectively ‘erased’ in his mind. In Discovery, his fate is reframed as anticipated gothic horror. Disability becomes tragedy, not continuity.
Norton Drake (War of the Worlds, 1988–1989)
A wheelchair-using computer expert and core member of the Blackwood Project. Norton is competent, witty, and unenhanced. But when the show was retooled for Season 2, he was written out entirely. No death, no farewell—just disappearance. His erasure was editorial, not narrative.
Colin Laney (Idoru, William Gibson)
Laney’s neurological condition gives him pattern recognition abilities, but his embodiment is abstracted into digital skill. He’s useful, but not explored. His body is present, but his identity is erased.
Max (Dark Angel)
Max suffers seizures due to genetic engineering—but they’re treated as flaws in an otherwise perfect body. Her condition is a plot inconvenience, not a lived reality. Disability is erased through enhancement.
Davros, creator of the Daleks, is one of the few visibly disabled characters in Doctor Who — and he’s a genocidal megalomaniac. His mobility aid and speech device are framed as grotesque extensions of his evil. The show rarely counters this with disabled heroes, communities, or care. Disability is villain-coded, not lived. Even in a universe of time travel and regeneration, disabled futures are feared, not lived.
Alita (Alita: Battle Angel)
Awakened in a cyborg body, Alita’s disabled past is never explored—only her enhanced present. Prosthetics become superpowers, not access. Her body is visible, but her disability is erased.
Raven Reyes (The 100)
After a spinal injury, Raven walks with pain and limited mobility. But the show quickly sidelines her disability, focusing on her technical genius. Her pain is referenced, but rarely centered.
Hiccup (How to Train Your Dragon)
After losing his leg, Hiccup receives a prosthetic and continues adventuring. While the film avoids pity, it also avoids depth. His disability is never explored culturally or emotionally—it’s a design feature, not a lived experience.
Survival ≠ Inclusion
These characters live—but their futures are framed through discomfort, silence, or abstraction. They are not erased by death, but by design.
Disability = Narrative Tension
Their conditions heighten emotional stakes, but rarely invite cultural depth or community. They are present, but not centered.
Function Over Feeling
Their bodies serve the plot, but their perspectives are muted. What’s missing is agency, dialogue, and disabled joy.
“You entered a normal man. You leave blind — blind — BLIND.”
— Isaac Asimov, The Secret Sense (1941) Enhancement without care is not inclusion. It is exile.
The New Wave of Diversity — Disability as Culture, Not Cure
A new wave of speculative fiction is emerging: one that refuses the fix. These stories centre disabled embodiment not as a flaw, but as a foundation. They imagine futures built on ramps, interpreters, and seismic sight, not biological upgrades. They do not mourn disabled lives. They celebrate them.
Care = Continuity. These characters survive through community, adaptation, and presence.
Disability = Culture. Their identities are not obstacles. They are sources of insight, resilience, and joy.
Access ≠ Enhancement. These futures do not retrofit inclusion through technology—they design it through care.
This is not diversity performed as obligation. These authors build futures where disabled joy is not exceptional—it is expected.
Zane Obispo (The Storm Runner, J.C. Cervantes) A Mayan fantasy hero with a limp… He’s not a burden. He’s the protagonist.
Emily Gresham (War of the Worlds, 2019–2022) Blind from birth… Her disability is central, not symbolic.
Toph Beifong (Avatar: The Last Airbender) Blind and brilliant… She’s not a burden—she’s a legend.
August Pullman (Wonder, R.J. Palacio) Born with a craniofacial condition… He’s a builder of community.
“You can’t blend in when you were born to stand out.”
— R.J. Palacio, Wonder (2012)
Chien-Shiung Wu (speculative retelling) In this reimagined future… Her disability shapes her science, not her silence.
Yasira Shien (The Outside, Ada Hoffmann) Autistic and defiant… Her neurodivergence is not a flaw—it’s a source of cosmic insight.
Jack (The Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon) Autistic and proud… He resists the cure and claims neurodivergence as culture, not pathology.
“If they cure me, will I still be me?”
— Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark (2002)
Murderbot (The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells) Social anxiety and trauma are not flaws… They’re the lens through which Murderbot navigates care, autonomy, and survival.
Ana (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Meg Elison) Her chronic illness and reproductive trauma are not erased… They’re archived as survival.
Sancia Grado (Foundryside, Robert Jackson Bennett) Her neurological condition and prosthetic limb are central to her hacking brilliance… She’s not upgraded—she’s unrepentantly embodied.
The Midwife (Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher) She walks with pain, wisdom, and quiet rage… Her disability is not weakness—it’s legacy.
“My advice to other disabled people would be: concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well…
Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.”
— Stephen Hawking
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.
Author’s Note: This isn’t an old man’s ramble. It’s an attempt to make sense of sixty‑five years of learning, unlearning, and imagining better futures. If there’s any wisdom here, it’s only because so many others handed it to me first.
“What’s past is prologue.” — The Tempest
Sixty‑five years is long enough to see patterns repeat and long enough to recognise when they finally break. I don’t think of this birthday as a milestone. It’s a checkpoint, a moment to look at the world I inherited, the work I’ve done, and the future that still needs building.
As I mark another orbit around the Sun, I’m reminded that our journey begins when we first act on the world, and ends only when we can no longer contribute to it.
I was born into a narrow set of expectations: straight stories, straight lines, straight heroes. Those narratives shaped the world around me, even when they had no room for people like me. Humanism taught me to question who those stories served. Queerness taught me to recognise the gaps. Science fiction taught me that the future is not fixed; it’s constructed. Activism helped me translate my ideals into reality. Those threads have shaped every orbit of my life.
Across every orbit, I’ve learned that the future isn’t something we inherit, it’s something we author. And creativity isn’t passive — it’s a decision to step into the future and start shaping it with your own hands.
I didn’t inherit a legacy so much as a set of constraints. The stories available to me as a young person were rigid, moralising, and exclusionary. They told me who mattered and who didn’t. They told me what a life should look like. They told me what futures were possible. I learned early that those stories were incomplete. I didn’t reject them outright; I examined them, kept what was useful, and discarded what wasn’t. That process — assessing, revising, rebuilding — became the foundation of my work.
My first steps toward creative authorship came in stages: raising money for charity at twelve, rejecting homophobic Christianity at twenty‑seven, deepening my activism and community work across the decades that followed, and interrogating the cult of consumerist capitalism in my sixties. Each step was a refusal, a quiet revolution against the stories that tried to shape me.
Those choices enabled me to outgrow the religion I was raised in and find humanism as the position that gave voice and form to my ethics and efforts. The so‑called “Golden Rule” appears across religions and philosophies, a genuinely humanist idea that unites us despite creed or culture. I find comfort in the African concept of Ubuntu — “I am because we are” — a philosophy of shared humanity as old as our origins on that continent.
History is full of people who challenged the systems that harmed them — from medieval critics of religious extremism to modern voices questioning the inequalities produced by consumerist capitalism. As I grow older, I find myself asking whether the stories we’ve been trained to uphold still serve us. That isn’t radical; it’s simply the same humanist instinct that has guided every step of my life.
Life Stories
Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project on Display in the Exhibition Building, Melbourne. Photo (c) 1999 Geoff Allshorn.
The stories I’ve written across my life weren’t planned. They emerged from necessity. During the AIDS crisis, activism wasn’t optional. It was survival. We built care networks because the world refused to care for us. Those years taught me that community is not an abstract value; it is a practice. Queer activism reinforced that lesson. We made ourselves visible in systems designed to erase us. We built archives, families, and movements that refused to disappear. Human rights work expanded that frame again, showing me how dignity is contested globally and how easily it can be denied.
My wider human rights activism helped me make a tangible difference: saving lives, rewriting laws, shifting community attitudes. My thirty‑three year involvement with Amnesty International Australia instilled in me the belief that “it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness”. In a world where wars escalate and human rights are being wound back, darkness is encroaching further into our lives. We can lock down into our isolated, insulated little bunkers and ignore the suffering of others, or we can step out into discomfort and join the fight.
Science fiction informed my journey — more than just recognising Captain Kirk’s moral imperative in his dying words, “Have I made a difference?” Science fiction gave me a language for possibility and a framework for imagining alternatives. Fandom, especially, taught me how to construct new architecture and how to rebuild it when it failed. It taught me that futures are not inherited; they are authored.
Now, at sixty‑five, I can see the connections more clearly. The work of activism, humanism, and futurism is the same work: identifying who is excluded, understanding why, and building structures that refuse that exclusion. The future I want is not a single narrative. It is a network of many. Africanfuturist, Indigenous futurist, Asian futurist, queer and trans futurist. Each one expands the map. Each one challenges the idea that there is only one centre or one path forward. Young futurists aren’t waiting for permission; they’re already remixing the world into something new.
I don’t have a long‑term partner or dependent biological children, but I’ve never lacked family. I have students whose lives intersect with mine, friends who walk beside me, activist colleagues who share my passions, and refugees I’ve supported as they rebuild their futures. Astronauts are courageous, activists are resilient, but refugees are the strongest people I know. Their lives remind me that strength is not loud or heroic; it is the quiet, daily work of rebuilding a future after everything familiar has been taken away. These relationships have taught me that family is not defined by blood or lineage. The human family is the one to which we all belong: a network of care, responsibility, and shared becoming. They remind me that the future belongs to those who rebuild it, not those who cling to the past.
The Meaning of Liff
Incomplete artwork from Kelvin Roberts – the Orion Nebula
Douglas Adams and John Lloyd wrote The Meaning of Liff as a playful reminder that meaning is something we invent — we give names to the unnamed, we define the overlooked, we create significance where none was provided. That idea has always resonated with me. I’m mindful of Brian Cox’s reminder that consciousness is the universe becoming aware of itself. It reframes the old question about the meaning of life: meaning isn’t discovered; it’s authored. If humanity disappears, the universe loses the only consciousness we know — and the only maker of meaning we know it contains. There’s something electrifying about realising we’re the universe’s way of drafting its own next chapter.
As I reach sixty‑five (an age that less than one percent of humanity attains) I think of the many friends, heroes, role models, and mentors who have already gone. In my twenties, I literally held the hands of young friends as they died during the AIDS epidemic. In more recent decades, I’ve watched older science fiction friends depart: the people who taught me to look to the future, to imagine alternatives, to build what didn’t yet exist.
And in the present, I sometimes hear of refugee friends dying — a reminder that loss is not only a memory of the past but a reality unfolding now, and that the comfortable world around us still turns away from the suffering of most of humanity.
I mourn my heroes and mentors too: AIDS and human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, authors, astronauts, scientists, refugees. Their lives shaped mine. Their courage, curiosity, and defiance helped me understand that meaning is not bestowed from above; it is created through action, imagination, and solidarity. As we lose our heroes and role models, we inherit an obligation to become those very things for others.
That idea reinforces my belief that our task is not to search for meaning, but to create it.
The Journey From Here
Twenty years ago, I survived two rounds of significant heart surgery. I am alive because two other people donated their heart valves when they died. My life continues their legacy — and this is particularly significant given that neither I nor my surgeon expected me to survive for twenty years. That survival carries an obligation: to make my life count, to honour the meaning their lives made possible.
I don’t feel finished. I don’t feel settled. I am absolutely not retired. I feel engaged. The next orbit is not about legacy; it’s about authorship: the ongoing work of shaping a future where everyone belongs.
I’m still learning. Still unlearning. Still building. Still becoming. And for the first time, I can see the shape of the work ahead — not as a burden, but as an invitation.
The future of our world — and particularly the Western world — feels increasingly precarious. Political divisions deepen, international conflicts unsettle long‑held assumptions about global stability, and social cohesion strains under the weight of competing identities and fears. It’s a moment defined by uncertainty, where headlines seem to offer little more than reminders of how fragile peace and unity can be. And yet, in the midst of this turbulence, I found an unexpected source of clarity: a single, understated episode of a Hollywood television series that dared to imagine a gentler, wiser, more cooperative humanity. That quiet vision of what we might become stood in stark contrast to the chaos of our present, and it has inspired me.
At its core, that quiet television moment resonated because it echoed something deeply humanistic — the belief that people, when given the chance, can grow toward empathy, cooperation, and understanding. Humanism has always asked us to imagine a world shaped not by fear or dominance, but by shared dignity and curiosity. Our arts and culture have traditionally been the vessels for that imagination: they challenge us, inspire us, and remind us of the better angels of our nature. Whether through literature, film, music, or the stories we tell around kitchen tables, culture has the power to lift our gaze beyond the immediate turmoil and invite us to picture a future where humanity chooses wisdom over conflict. That Hollywood TV episode did exactly that, offering a fragile but compelling glimpse of who we might yet become.
A World Pulled Toward Conflict and Colonialism
When we step back from the ideals that humanism and culture invite us to imagine, we’re confronted with a world that often seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Wars and regional conflicts continue to unsettle entire populations, reminding us how quickly fear can override cooperation. Even within nations long considered stable, political unrest has become a defining feature of public life. Nowhere is this more visible than in the United States, where deep ideological divides have reshaped communities and strained the social fabric. Some movements promote a worldview that elevates one nation, one identity, or one interpretation of history above all others — a mindset that wrongly suggests superiority rather than shared humanity. This posture, rooted in certainty and exclusion, stands in stark contrast to the betterment of all.
The United States has long projected two contradictory images into the world: a nation deeply entangled in global conflicts, and a nation that simultaneously imagines itself as a beacon of progress and possibility. Few cultural works embody this tension more clearly than the US franchise, Star Trek. Born in the midst of the Cold War and shaped by American anxieties and aspirations, the franchise offered a vision of a future defined by exploration, diplomacy, and scientific curiosity. Yet even this optimism carries the imprint of the culture that created it. The utopianism of Star Trek is often filtered through a distinctly American lens — one that has historically reflected its own limitations, from orientalist tropes to racial and gender imbalances among its central characters.
Even its attempts at inclusivity sometimes reflected the limits of its cultural vantage point. Characters presented as “diverse” were often African‑American or Asian‑American rather than people rooted in their own distinct cultures and histories, meaning that representation was still filtered through a US lens. This mattered because it subtly reinforced the idea that American identity was the default from which all other identities were interpreted. In doing so, the franchise unintentionally flattened global perspectives, offering diversity without fully embracing the richness of the world beyond its borders.
Since 1945, the United States has engaged in roughly a dozen major wars and more than a hundred military conflicts, a pattern that underscores how deeply its identity has been shaped by both idealism and interventionism. Likewise, the fictitious Starfleet has struggled to balance its militarism with its potential for peace, complete with a Prime Directive that is intended to prevent militarism and imperialism, but instead often ignores human rights abuse.
This is why recognising these limitations is so important. When a narrative claims universality while quietly centring one nation’s worldview, it shapes how audiences imagine the future — and who they imagine within it. Stories that unintentionally reproduce narrow cultural assumptions risk shrinking the possibilities of tomorrow to the boundaries of today. By acknowledging where these narratives fall short, we open space for futures that are genuinely global, genuinely inclusive, and genuinely reflective of the full spectrum of human experience.
The Future Arrives
This is why the moment in “Starfleet Academy” (episode 2: “Beta Test”) feels so striking. In the Betazoid resolution — where the Federation agrees to shift its institutional focus away from Earth and toward Betazed — the franchise quietly steps beyond its long‑standing US‑centric, Eurocentric, and Northern‑Hemisphere framing. It was still a flawed representation (the Betazoid world is still white, US-cultured, and patriarchal) but the symbolism of this handover is deep and meaningful. In a single gesture, the story acknowledges that the future of humanity cannot be anchored in one nation, one culture, or one hemisphere. It implicitly, symbolically opens the door to the global Southern Hemisphere, to Africa, Asia, South America, and the Pacific, to perspectives and identities that have historically been peripheral in the Star Trek universe.
In this episode, something shifts. Instead of exporting a narrow American self‑image as the destiny of the world, Star Trek tentatively gestures toward a broader, more pluralistic future — one that finally begins to imagine humanity as a genuinely global project.
I have noted the intensity of criticism directed at this latest iteration of Star Trek — complaints that the franchise has become “too diverse,” “too inclusive,” or “too political,” as though expanding the range of human experience on screen somehow threatens the legitimacy of those who once saw themselves as the default. These reactions echo a broader cultural anxiety: a fear among some groups that equality is only acceptable when it preserves their own centrality. Movements that resist diversity often frame themselves as defending tradition, but history shows that such positions rarely endure. Those who once defended slavery, racial segregation, or rigid gender hierarchies also believed they were protecting a natural order. Over time, those beliefs were rejected, not because change was easy, but because the moral arc of society gradually widened to include more people, more voices, and more truths.
In that sense, the backlash against inclusive storytelling feels less like a meaningful cultural stance and more like the fading echo of a worldview struggling to keep its footing. History is filled with beliefs that once seemed immovable — from segregation or heterosexism to rigid gender hierarchies — yet each eventually receded as society grew beyond them. The resistance to diversity will follow the same trajectory. These old perspectives persist for a time, but they gradually lose their force as the world expands around them, becoming relics of an era too narrow for the century ahead.
The youth of today — much like the cadets in Starfleet Academy — are growing up in a world where diversity is not a threat but a fact, and where cooperation across cultures is not an aspiration but a necessity. The Betazoid resolution in episode 2 captures this shift beautifully: a symbolic move away from a single cultural centre toward a future shaped by many voices. It is a reminder that the next generation is already imagining a world more expansive than the one they inherited, and that their vision, not the fears of those clinging to old hierarchies, will shape the future.
A Generation Ready to Imagine Something Larger
When this episode showed their arrival at San Francisco – to the tune of Scott Mackenzie’s old hippie classic “San Francisco” – I feared that the episode would once again reflect US-centric notions of liberalism and humanity. The episode concluded with an inspiring transcendence: the old hippie notion of inter-generational change was brought about by the youth of Starfleet and Betazed working together.
This shift matters because it brings us back to the heart of humanism: the belief that humanity’s future is not predetermined by the fears of the present, but shaped by our capacity to grow beyond them. When Starfleet Academy dares to move its symbolic center away from Earth — and by extension away from the cultural dominance that has defined so much of Western storytelling — it gestures toward a future in which no single nation or worldview claims ownership of humanity’s destiny. That is a profoundly humanistic act. It suggests that progress is not the property of one culture, but the shared work of many.
And this is where the generational parallel becomes impossible to ignore. The young characters in the series, like the young people in our world, are not burdened by the same anxieties that fuel backlash against diversity. They are growing up in a globalised environment where difference is normal, where collaboration across cultures is expected, and where identity is understood as expansive rather than fixed. Their instinct is not to retreat into hierarchy but to reach outward. The Betazoid resolution captures this beautifully: a moment where the future is no longer imagined through the narrow lens of a single hemisphere, but through the collective imagination of many worlds. It mirrors the way today’s youth are already redefining what community, equality, and belonging mean.
This is why the criticisms of newer Star Trek — the complaints about “wokeness” or the discomfort with diverse characters — feel increasingly out of step with the world that is emerging. Such reactions echo older systems of exclusion that once seemed immovable but ultimately collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Just as societies eventually rejected slavery, segregation, and rigid gender hierarchies, so too will the resistance to inclusion fade. These worldviews persist for a time, but they do not endure. They cannot. They are too small for the world we are becoming.
What endures instead is the quiet, steady expansion of the human story. The recognition that no single culture, nation, or ideology can speak for all of us. The understanding that the future will be shaped not by those who cling to old hierarchies, but by those who imagine something larger. In this sense, the hopeful moment in Starfleet Academy is more than a narrative choice — it is a cultural signal. It reflects a world where young people are already building connections across borders, already challenging inherited assumptions, already envisioning futures that are more inclusive, more global, and more humane than anything that came before.
I look forward to a future for the franchise that draws from the full richness of humanity rather than a narrow cultural lens. This would be Star Trek at its finest — finally living out its own ideal of “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations” in both story and spirit. Even more than that, I look forward to the real world that such a future implies: a world where our shared imagination is shaped by many voices, many perspectives, and many voices working together to build something larger than any one of us.
And perhaps that is the real lesson: even in a time of conflict, division, and uncertainty, the seeds of a broader, more generous future are already being planted. The youth of today — like the cadets of tomorrow — are not waiting for permission to imagine a better world. They are already doing it, quietly and confidently, in ways that transcend the boundaries of the past. In that small moment when the youth of Starfleet stood alongside the youth of Betazed, I realised I had seen the future — the same future that emerges whenever young Israelis and Palestinians reach for understanding, when young Russians and Ukrainians dream of rebuilding instead of destroying, when the children of Yemen or Sudan or Congo imagine peace in place of war. Not in the stars alone, but in the courage of a new generation willing to imagine differently.
