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.
Published to commemorate the birthday of Samuel Delaney.
“The Utopian futures of Star Trek have remained determinedly heteronormative, with occasional hand-waving to mollify the fans – there are gays, but we’ve not seen them (where’s Will?); there were gays, but a plague killed them (triffic); or there were gays, but it got cured (thanks). The best we are left with is a game of Spot the Queer – a tactic borrowed from the McCarthyites – where those of us in the know decode a look, a phrase, a liking for show-tunes, into the sense that so-and-so in that program or film is secretly gay. The streets find their own uses for things, and we slash away.”
– Butler, 2009, p. 388
Speculative fiction has always promised us the future — just not to all of us. From the beginning, the genre learned how to dream big while keeping its doors firmly shut. Lucian’s lunar satire, Shelley’s stitched‑together Creature… desire was there, but only so it could be mocked, punished, or corrected. Queer longing was never the problem. The problem was the genre that insisted on disciplining it.
Lucian gave us men marrying men on the Moon, but only as a joke — a bit of cultural inversion played for laughs, not liberation. Shelley’s Creature wanted love and was punished for daring to ask. These early works didn’t open pathways; they taught speculative fiction how to bolt them shut. Queerness became something to point at, not something to inhabit.
By the time the pulp magazines arrived, the exclusions had calcified. Amazing Stories, Astounding, all those glossy futures full of straight white men conquering planets and seducing decorative women — that was the template. Queer writers hid behind initials. Women were told to use male names. Black and Indigenous futures weren’t just absent; they were unimaginable. Even as the genre evolved — Golden Age optimism, New Wave experimentation, cyberpunk rebellion — it carried its old scaffolding with it.
And it wasn’t just about who appeared on the page. Genre taught readers how they were supposed to feel. Love was straight. Bodies were binary. Intimacy was allowed only if it served the plot. Any attempt to write queer desire was dismissed as “not real science fiction,” “too political,” or “just fan fiction.” The genre became a kind of closet, and queer readers learned to survive by reading between the lines.
But silence never held completely. Queer fans slashed the canon open. Women built zines and archives. Disabled readers demanded access. Marginalized creators wrote futures that refused to be corrected. Speculative fiction became a battleground — not over what could be imagined, but over who was allowed to imagine it.
Even the Moon Wasn’t Safe
Lucian’s A True History (2nd century CE) is often called the first piece of science fiction, and it already tells us something about the genre’s instincts. It imagines men marrying men on the Moon — not as solidarity, not as possibility, but as satire. Queerness is a punchline, an inversion of Greek norms meant to amuse the reader. The Moon men aren’t subjects; they’re spectacles.
So from the very beginning, speculative fiction didn’t reach for liberation. It reached for parody. Lucian’s queerness is alien, exotic, and ridiculous — a pattern the genre would repeat for centuries. Even in its earliest form, science fiction learned to treat queer bodies as curiosities, not companions.
From lunar satire to coded survival, the genre’s relationship with queer desire began with a joke… and queer readers have been rewriting the punchline ever since.
Genre Was the Closet
Speculative fiction didn’t just forget queer desire — it trained itself to suppress it. The rules were simple: love was straight, bodies were binary, and anything outside that frame had to be alien, tragic, or villainous. If queerness showed up at all, it was only so the story could punish it.
Across the 20th century, the biggest franchises — Star Wars, Doctor Who, Babylon 5, The Twilight Zone — offered no openly queer characters. Not one. Before the 1990s, queerness was either invisible or punished for daring to be visible. Even Sulu, retroactively declared gay in Star Trek Beyond, spent decades as a character whose queerness existed only in the negative space. The genre didn’t overlook queer people. It taught itself to erase them.
As James Satter put it:
“Forty years after his first appearance, Hikaru Sulu is heterosexual only through inference; he remains discernibly queer.”
When queerness did appear, it was coded and punished. The flamboyant villain…. the seductive alien… the emotionally unstable outsider. Queer-coded characters were never the heroes; they were the threat.
The Forever War turned homosexuality into a state mandate, framed as dystopian. Stranger in a Strange Land dismissed queerness as cultural decay. The Mule in Foundation was sexually ambiguous and emotionally deviant, his queerness folded into his psychic instability. Lost in Space gave us Dr. Smith, coded as camp to signal danger (and to hint at nastier implications about boys and predators). Doctor Who offered the Master (seductive, theatrical, unhinged) and Davros, whose obsessive fixation on the Doctor echoed the genre’s fear of queer intimacy. Star Wars gave us Palpatine’s decadent menace and Hux’s repressed fury, both queer-coded. Blake’s 7 gave us Servalan, glamorous and predatory, and Travis, whose scarred obsession with Blake read like repressed desire turned violent.
Even stories that weren’t “about” sexuality still rehearsed the same logic. In Gattaca, Vincent must masquerade as genetically “normal” to access a future denied to him. In R.U.R., robots are punished for wanting love. In Clone Wars, clones who assert individuality or intimacy are labelled defective or unstable. These weren’t accidents. They were choices. Queerness was allowed only as threat, never as truth.
And Star Trek, the franchise that promised a better future, wasn’t immune. Q’s fixation on Picard, Trelane’s camp omnipotence, the (originally) all‑male Borg collective, Kivas Fajo’s obsessive desire to possess Data… queerness was spectacle, jealousy, danger. Even HAL 9000, in 2001, is framed as a being too refined and too sensitive… a queer-coded threat in a world of men.
Genre didn’t just exclude queer people. It built a closet and called it world‑building.
The Queer of Gothos
The Enterprise enters a “star desert” (so-described, with references to dunes, mirages, and oases) and waiting in the middle of it all is Trelane, the Squire of Gothos. He lives in an opulent oasis, kidnaps crew members, collects Earth memorabilia, and performs his own private drag show of history. He plays soldier, fashion designer, judge, spoiled aristocrat. He throws tantrums when denied applause. His fixation on Kirk is unmistakably queer-coded. Later canon calls him a juvenile Q, but honestly, he didn’t need the retcon. He was already camp.
James Doohan once wrote about Roddenberry’s wartime encounter with an effeminate sheikh: a desert rescue, romantic overtures, and the delicate dance of not offending a powerful host in an otherwise hostile environment. The parallels are hard to ignore. The Squire of Gothos reads like a stylised retelling: queerness framed as spectacle, hospitality edged with threat, desire punished for wanting too much.
Trelane doesn’t just bend reality; he plays with it. He’s a child in costume, demanding admiration, desperate for connection, and punished the moment he reaches for it. And once again, the straight-coded hero escapes, while the queer-coded host is scolded, corrected, and sent to his room.
From villains to lovers, the path remains tainted: Riker’s intersex lover Soren, in The Outcast, is forcibly “corrected” and returned to him as a shell of herself. Willow and Tara’s kiss in Buffy is followed by Tara’s death – ditto for Talia Winters following her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fling with Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5. Captain Jack Harkness flirts across timelines, but his queerness is played for spectacle, not sincerity, and his lover dies tragically. Even Dumbledore’s love is retroactive, revealed only after the story safely ends, and never allowed to live on the page or the stage.
These weren’t accidents. They were genre norms. Queer desire was framed as unnatural, disgusting, or deviant; comprising a topic avoided in polite conversation, and within franchises seeking not to alienate conservative consumers; and erased from canon.
They Let Us Love, Then Made Us Pay
Somewhere between Wyoming and the Delta Quadrant, there was always a Brokeback Asteroid waiting for us.
The pattern is old, and it’s everywhere. A queer‑coded character reaches for love, intimacy, or selfhood — and the story punishes them for it. The straight‑coded character survives, grieves, and moves on. The queer one is erased.
You already know the classics — Soren, Lenara, Tara, Ianto, Lexa — but science fiction has been rehearsing this choreography for decades.
Star Trek kept returning to the same script
Petri & Elaan (TOS): Queerness coded as primness and ineffectuality.
Charlie X (TOS): Charlie’s needy fixation on Kirk is punished with exile.
Trelane (TOS): Camp omnipotence framed as threat.
The Lorelai Signal (TAS): Heterosexuality as biological inevitability.
Data & Fajo (TNG): Queer‑coded villain punished; Data walks away untouched.
Riker & Soren (TNG): Soren is “corrected”; Riker grieves.
Riker & Brenna (TNG – “Up the Long Ladder”):
Brenna asks Riker if he likes girls. “Of course,” he says, because the script can imagine no other answer. A tiny moment that reveals everything: heterosexuality is compulsory, unquestioned, and absolute.
Crusher & Odan (TNG): Beverly recoils from queerness; the future snaps back to straight.
Jadzia & Lenara (DS9): A kiss across lifetimes, then silence.
Seven of Nine (Voyager): Deep intimacy with women reframed as “mentorship”; only straight romance made canon.
Trip & the Cogenitor (Enterprise): A third‑gender being dies; Trip is told off for trying to help.
Garak & Bashir (DS9): Queer‑coded longing suppressed by producers.
Doctor Who and its universe weren’t immune
The Master: Decades of queer‑coded obsession with the Doctor, always punished.
Nyssa & Tegan: Intimacy coded but never allowed to breathe.
Ace: Queer‑coded, punished for desire; queerness confirmed only in novels.
Jack & Ianto (Torchwood): Love allowed, then killed.
Clara & Me (Ashildr): Romantic‑coded bond teased, never textual.
Star Wars repeated the pattern
Asajj Ventress: Queer‑coded intensity punished with betrayal and death.
General Hux: Repressed, brittle, humiliated, discarded.
Lando (Solo): Pansexuality played as a joke; nothing allowed to be real.
Battlestar Galactica (2004)
Felix Gaeta: Queer, idealistic, executed by firing squad.
Cylon fluidity: Non‑binary‑coded bodies framed as seductive or dangerous.
The Expanse
Camina Drummer: Queer in the books; the show softens and sidelines her relationships.
Julie Mao: Desire punished; she becomes a corpse‑bride for an alien intelligence.
Fringe
Alt‑Astrid & Astrid: Queer‑coded tenderness never allowed to be textual.
Orphan Black
Cosima & Delphine: Canonical love, but Delphine is shot, resurrected, traumatised.
Tony: Introduced as a trans clone, then erased.
Sense8
Nomi & Amanita: Groundbreaking, but the show is cancelled before their story can fully unfold.
Literature’s long shadow
Baron Harkonnen (Dune): One of the most infamous queer‑coded villains in SF.
Ender’s Game: Intense boy/boy intimacy punished with isolation and violence.
Hyperion: Queer‑coded longing framed as tragic or morally compromised.
Altered Carbon: Fluid bodies treated as grotesque or disposable.
Video games, too
Mass Effect: Queer characters often killed, traumatised, or sidelined.
The Last of Us: Bill & Frank’s love framed through loss (game version).
The straight‑coded character survives.
The queer‑coded character is punished, erased, or killed.
Grief becomes a privilege reserved for heterosexuals.
These weren’t isolated incidents. They were patterns. They were genre norms. Queer desire wasn’t just punished, it was erased. And queer fans learned to mourn quietly, between the lines.
A Whole New World
Not everyone followed the script.
While mainstream science fiction kept rehearsing the same old punishments, a handful of writers cracked the genre open from the inside. They didn’t ask permission. They didn’t wait for the future to arrive. They built it themselves.
Theodore Sturgeon was one of the first to refuse the closet.
In 1953, The World Well Lost gave us two alien lovers fleeing persecution — a thinly veiled allegory for same‑sex love, written with tenderness instead of fear. Venus Plus X imagined a post‑binary society where gender dissolves into possibility. And in “Amok Time,” he slipped in an ambiguous final moment that launched decades of Kirk/Spock slash. Sturgeon didn’t code queerness as threat. He coded it as love.
James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) broke the genre’s gender rules by disguising herself as a man.
Her stories — Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, The Women Men Don’t See — didn’t just critique gender; they weaponised it. Tiptree’s queerness lived in the layers: the pseudonym, the bisexual desire, the ambivalence about embodiment. She cracked the boys’ club open by walking in through the front door wearing a mask.
Ursula K. Le Guin imagined ambisexual beings in The Left Hand of Darkness, but filtered them through the discomfort of a cisgender male envoy.
Years later, she admitted the limits of that lens — and revised her own worldbuilding in Four Ways to Forgiveness and beyond. Le Guin didn’t just build worlds; she returned to them, corrected them, and made them more honest.
Samuel R. Delany tore the scaffolding down entirely.
In Trouble on Triton and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, he wrote queer protagonists who were messy, desiring, political, and gloriously uncorrected. Delany didn’t treat queerness as metaphor. He treated it as story structure.
Octavia Butler reimagined intimacy itself.
Her protagonists — often Black, female, fluid, and impossible to categorise — refused the genre’s binaries. In Imago and Fledgling, love isn’t punished. It’s transformed.
Joanna Russ didn’t ask for inclusion. She demanded rebellion.
The Female Man didn’t politely critique masculinist genre logic — it shredded it. Russ wrote with rage, wit, and queer defiance. Her protagonists weren’t palatable. They were revolutionary.
And then, in the early 1990s, television began to crack.
Quantum Leap played with gender fluidity through body‑hopping narratives, offering glimpses of queerness without naming it… except for one episode about a young gay man and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which terrified sponsors and delivered the show’s highest ratings.
Alien Nation used alien‑human dynamics to interrogate race, sexuality, and assimilation. Its queer‑coded subplots didn’t ask for permission; they challenged the genre’s comfort zones. Is it any wonder that this series was quickly cancelled?
They weren’t just stories. They were cracks in the wall. They showed the future didn’t have to inherit the old punishments. They suggested that queerness wasn’t a threat to the genre; it was the thing keeping it alive.
“Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be — a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us — have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”
— Samuel R. Delany
They Rewired the Genre
They didn’t just imagine futures. They rewired the genre.
While speculative fiction punished queer visibility, fans rewired the genre from below. Slash fandom didn’t just interpret canon; it rebuilt it. Zines weren’t footnotes. They were blueprints. Queer fanfic didn’t ask permission. It bulldozed its way into public spaces.
Queer women, disabled fans, and trans archivists built participatory infrastructure: archives, fan campaigns, slash repositories, and mutual aid networks that refused correction. They didn’t wait for canon to catch up. They built futures in the margins.
Fanlore, AO3, and countless zines became sites of reclamation. These weren’t just fan responses. They were editorial acts of justice. They documented what genre erased. They remembered what canon punished. They built scaffolding where speculative fiction collapsed.
They didn’t escape the closet; they rewired it. Fandom rewrote the coordinates. We occupy the future.
References:
Andrew M Butler, in Rob Latham et. al., 2009. “SFS Symposium: Sexuality in Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, Science Fiction and Sexuality (November), pp. 385-403. JSTOR, accessed 26 September 2025.
James Doohan & Peter David, 1996. Beam me up, Scotty: Star Trek’s “Scotty” – in his own words, Pocket Books, p. 162.
Michael Green, 2013. “Screenwriting Representation: Teaching Approaches to Writing Queer Characters”, Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 65, No. 1-2 (Spring/Summer), pp. 30-42. JSTOR, accessed 26 September 2025.
James Satter. 2006. “The Hidden Homosexual: Reexamining ‘Star Trek’’s Sulu.” Science Fiction Studies, Greencastle: SF-TH Inc, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 379–82. JSTOR, accessed 16 May 2023.
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.
“Life is a heartbreaking, gorgeous blip in the universe. Everything matters — and nothing does. What has always been certain: time is both forever, and achingly finite. But what a shame it would be not to live every moment.”
— Captain Nahla Ake
Official promotional art for Starfleet Academy, introducing a new generation of cadets.
Time has always felt like a trick of perspective. When you’re young, it stretches out in every direction — endless, generous, full of promise. But the older you get, the more you realise how small your portion truly is. A handful of luminous years in which to decide who you are, what you stand for, and what kind of future you’re willing to help build. And what a tragedy it would be to spend any of that precious time shrinking yourself to fit someone else’s expectations.
That’s why Starfleet Academy hit me with the force of past colliding with the present. It understands something that Star Trek has pondered for decades but rarely examined: that the future is not shaped by memory, or nostalgia, or the comfortable weight of tradition. It’s shaped by young people standing at the edge of their own limited time, daring to imagine something larger than the world they inherited. It’s shaped by the moment potential becomes momentum, when cracks in old structures widen just enough for new voices to step through.
For a franchise long defined by progressive captains restrained by luddite realities, Starfleet Academy feels like the first breath of air after a long-held silence. It brings back the rawness, the vulnerability, the restless hope that once made Star Trek revolutionary. It reminds us that the coming world is not a museum piece. It’s a living thing, and it belongs to those brave enough to claim it.
A Fan’s Perspective Across Fifty Years
I’ve been in this fandom long enough to watch it reinvent itself more times than most people realise. Half a century of conventions, fanzines, late‑night arguments, improbable friendships, and the kind of communal hope that only science fiction can sustain. And yet Starfleet Academy is the first series in decades that made me feel the way I did in those early Austrek days — when we were young, untrained, and utterly convinced that imagination could build a future worth inheriting.
Back then, we weren’t archivists or organisers or “fandom elders.” We were just kids with stapled newsletters and borrowed meeting rooms, building something because nobody had told us we couldn’t. We didn’t know the rules, so we made our own. We didn’t have a roadmap, so we drew one. And somehow, through enthusiasm and stubbornness and a kind of naïve courage, it worked.
Watching Starfleet Academy, I felt that spark again: that sense of a new world cracking open at the edges. The show honours the past, yes, but it refuses to be trapped by it. It acknowledges the legacy it inherits without being beholden to it. It understands something that every long‑term fan eventually learns: the world we want does not arrive fully formed. It is shaped (sometimes gently, sometimes violently) by those brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries they were given.
And that is why this series matters. It doesn’t just remind me of where Star Trek has been. It reminds me of where it can still go.
Youth, Diversity, and Imagination
Publicity Picture (c) Paramount
Starfleet Academy isn’t simply a new entry in the franchise; it’s a generational pivot. Not a reboot, not a nostalgia project, but a deliberate reorientation toward the people who will inherit the future rather than the ones who have already shaped it. For the first time in a long while, Star Trek remembers that youth is not a demographic, it’s a force. A destabilising, hopeful, necessary force.
These cadets are not polished paragons. They are messy, frightened, idealistic, contradictory, and hungry for meaning… which is to say, they are real. They are becoming, not performing. And that alone feels revolutionary in a franchise that has often preferred its characters fully formed and morally certain.
Diversity, here, is not a casting choice or a marketing line. It is the architecture of the story. These characters carry their cultures, their traumas, their languages, their histories; not as metaphors, not as allegories, but as lived realities that shape how they move through the world. Their differences are not obstacles to be smoothed away; they are the raw material from which community is built.
And perhaps most importantly, the show finally breaks free from the gravitational pull of Earth (and of American liberalism masquerading as universalism). Its imagination is planetary, interplanetary, genuinely plural. It dares to suggest that the Federation’s centre of gravity does not have to be San Francisco, or even Earth at all. That alone feels like a quiet revolution.
“We don’t just explore space. We explore the potential of what we can become together.”
— Captain Nahla Ake
This is Trek remembering what it once promised: that the future belongs to all of us, not just the familiar few.
Each Cadet Has a Different Future
L-R: Kerrice Brooks, Romeo Carere, Karim Diané, Sandro Rosta, George Hawkins and Bella Shepard in season 1 , episode 5 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Brooke Palmer/Paramount+
Every cadet in Starfleet Academy feels like a different repretentation of humanity, not in the abstract, philosophical way Trek sometimes leans on, but in the small, intimate, deeply human ways that actually shape who we become. They aren’t symbols or archetypes or moral lessons dressed up as characters. They are young people standing at the threshold of their own lives, carrying their histories, their wounds, their hopes, and their contradictions with them. And in them, I recognise the young people I’ve taught for so many years — that bold curiosity edged with innocence, that strength threaded with vulnerability, that yearning for adulthood still softened by the last traces of youth.
Caleb is youthful rebellion in its most necessary form, not the destructive kind, but the kind born from wanting the world to make sense, from believing that justice should not be negotiable, from caring too much to stay quiet. He pushes back because he believes things can be better. He questions because he refuses to accept the lazy answers. He is messy, idealistic, stubborn, and full of heart… and honestly, that’s the kind of rebellion Trek has needed for a very long time.
SAM is Trek finally growing up about artificial intelligence. For decades, the franchise has treated AI as a problem waiting to happen: V’Ger, Nomad, the Borg, the Doctor’s legal battles, Data’s endless struggle for personhood. SAM is none of that. She is not a threat, not a metaphor, not a cautionary tale. She is a classmate, a friend, a fellow citizen. Her story isn’t about proving her humanity, it’s about living it. In SAM, Trek finally steps out of its own shadow and imagines a future where AI is part of the community rather than a danger to it.
Jay-Den is quiet resilience made visible. He is not coded and subtextual, not symbolic, not a “very special episode.” He simply exists: layered, confident, vulnerable, whole. He is the kind of queer representation Trek has promised for decades but only now seems ready to offer without flinching or apologising. His presence is not a statement; it is a reality.
Nahla is what happens when the Federation stops assuming Earth is the centre of everything. She does not default to human norms. She does not treat Federation values as universal truths. She brings her own cultural gravity, her own history, her own sense of what the future should look like. In doing so, she expands the moral vocabulary of the show simply by being herself.
The Doctor is written as a person, not a metaphor. Earlier Treks often used alienness as a stand‑in for race or culture, sometimes beautifully, sometimes awkwardly. But here, the Doctor is not a lesson. He is a character: funny, conflicted, curious, occasionally infuriating, and always growing. It took him eight hundred years to grow up, but he did — and that alone feels like a quiet evolution for the franchise.
And then there are the Betazoid cadets, who break Trek out of Earth’s orbit, both literally and culturally. They do not treat Earth as the moral centre of the universe. They do not orbit human assumptions. Their presence shifts the Federation’s cultural centre, and the show is stronger for it.
Together — human, alien, hybrid — they form a mosaic of futures. Not one dominant narrative. Not one “right” way to be. A constellation of possibilities, each one incomplete without the others. This is Trek finally living up to IDIC: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Not as a slogan, not as a merchandising symbol, but as a lived reality.
“We aren’t just here to learn how to fly ships. We’re here to learn how to be the people the ships were built for.”
— Caleb Mir
Karim Diané in season 1, episode 4 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Brooke Palmer/Paramount+
Worldbuilding (Offworld Included)
One of the quiet revolutions in Starfleet Academy is the way it shifts the centre of gravity away from Earth, not just geographically, but philosophically. For decades, Star Trek has treated Earth, and particularly San Francisco, as the unquestioned heart of the Federation. It was the sun around which everything else orbited. But the real world that we live in has long since outgrown the idea that one culture, one hemisphere, or one history should define the world ahead for everyone.
Starfleet Academy finally reflects that truth. It recentres the Federation away from the US‑shaped assumptions it once took for granted and towards Betazed.
In doing this, the series metaphorically opens the Federation to voices that have too often been pushed to the margins: the displaced, the colonised, the children of conflict, the ones who grew up on the fault lines of history rather than in its comfortable centres. These cadets may come from worlds shaped by famine, war, climate collapse, political upheaval, and cultural erasure, and they carry those histories with them. Not as trauma porn, not as allegory, but as lived experience that informs how they see the Federation and what they expect from it.
This is a Federation that includes refugees who know what it means to lose a home, rebels who know what it costs to fight for one, and young people who have never had the luxury of assuming the universe will bend toward justice on its own. And honestly, that feels far more truthful to the world I’ve lived in, taught in, and been activist within — than the polished utopianism of earlier Trek.
It also feels more global. Not “global” in the corporate sense, but in the sense of the Global South: voices shaped by marginalisation, resilience, community survival, and the stubborn refusal to disappear. Voices that understand tomorrow not as a promise, but as a prize to claim.
And yes, there’s even a hint of something I recognise from home: that distinctly Australian refusal to take authority too seriously. A bit of larrikin energy slips through the cracks… the raised eyebrow, the quiet rebellion, the unspoken “yeah, nah” when someone in power makes a ridiculous claim. It’s subtle, but it’s there, and it gives the show a texture Trek has never quite managed before.
“We are the bridge between the ruins of the past and the Federation of the future. Don’t let the bridge collapse.”
— Lura Thok
Coming from a world outside the traditional centres of Federation power, that line lands differently. Starfleet Academy does something Trek has needed for a long time: it imagines a Federation that is not a monument to Earth’s ideals, but a living, contested, pluralist project shaped by many histories, many cultures, and many tomorrows.
Why This Matters in 2026
We are living through a moment where the ground keeps shifting beneath our feet. Institutions that once felt immovable now wobble under the weight of political polarisation, economic precarity, and a climate crisis that no longer belongs to the future tense. Certainties we grew up with — social, cultural, even scientific — have begun to fray. And young people today are navigating all of this while trying to build lives in a world that feels increasingly unstable.
Starfleet Academy doesn’t ignore that reality. It mirrors it.
This is a series shaped by the anxieties and solidarities of a generation raised on bushfires, pandemics, refugee crises, escalating wars, and the slow unravelling of systems that were supposed to protect them. A generation that has learned — often painfully — that what comes next is not guaranteed. And yet, despite all of that, they continue to imagine one anyway. They continue to build communities across borders, identities, and histories. They continue to believe that cooperation is not naïve, but necessary.
As someone who has spent decades teaching young people, I recognise that determination. I’m reminded of one student whose parents encouraged him to look at the stars through a telescope. He would teach impromptu astronomy sessions for classmates and teachers, pointing out nebulae and planets with the quiet confidence of someone who already understood his place in the universe. When his mother died of cancer, I attended her funeral as a mark of respect. He found me afterwards and remarked that on the night she passed, he had gone outside and looked up at the stars. I have never forgotten that. I always hoped I could be even half the teacher to him that his mother had been. I’ve seen the same determination in classrooms, in youth groups, in the quiet resilience of students who have already lived through more upheaval than many adults ever will. They are not cynical. They are not apathetic. They are exhausted, yes, but they are also astonishingly brave. They know the world is on fire, and they still choose to care.
Starfleet Academy honours that courage. It doesn’t offer escapism; it offers recognition. It says: we see you, we see the world you’ve inherited, and we believe you deserve better than this. It imagines a future shaped not by fear or dominance, but by shared possibility; a future built by people who understand that survival and solidarity are intertwined.
And that matters in 2026. It matters because we are surrounded by narratives of collapse, and we need stories that remind us collapse is not the only trajectory available. It matters because young people deserve to see themselves not as the inheritors of disaster, but as the architects of something new. It matters because hope, in times like these, is not a luxury. It is a form of resistance.
This isn’t just entertainment, it’s a cultural tsunami: a reminder that the galaxy ahead is still worth fighting for.
Screengrab from season 1, episode 2 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Paramount+
Outgrowing Past Limitations
The series honours The Next Generation … of course it does. TNG was a watershed moment, a cultural anchor, a moral compass for an entire generation. But it was also a product of its time: earnest, optimistic, and shaped by a distinctly American, middle‑class worldview that often mistook its own assumptions for universal truths. It offered diplomacy, but not always diversity. It offered clarity, but sometimes at the cost of complexity. It imagined a better world, but often through the lens of those who had already benefited from the old one.
Starfleet Academy doesn’t reject that legacy; it grows beyond it.
Where TNG presented a Federation that was confident, centralised, and morally certain, Starfleet Academy presents one that is decentralised, contested, and still learning. Where TNG often flattened cultural difference into allegory, Starfleet Academy allows cultures to speak in their own voices, not as metaphors, but as lived realities. Where TNG leaned on the calm authority of seasoned officers, Starfleet Academy leans into the raw, unfiltered honesty of youth.
And that shift matters. It matters because the world has changed. The centre of gravity — culturally, politically, demographically — has moved. The future will not be shaped by the same voices that shaped the past, and Trek finally seems willing to acknowledge that. It is no longer enough to imagine a Federation that looks like a polished extension of late‑20th‑century boomer liberalism. The Federation must be broader, messier, more plural, more global, and more honest about the histories it carries.
As someone who has watched this franchise evolve across half a century, I can say this with some authority: growth is not betrayal. Growth is the point. The Federation was never meant to be a finished utopia; it was meant to be a project: a living, breathing, imperfect attempt at building something better than what came before. Like any long-lasting project, it must be willing to revise itself.
Starfleet Academy does that revision work with a kind of quiet patience found in any good teaching moment: gentle where it needs to be, firm where it must be, and never once apologising for growing beyond what came before. It carries the optimism of earlier Trek, but without the patronising hand on the shoulder. It holds onto hope, but tempers it with the humility that comes from listening to voices long ignored. It keeps the dream alive, yes, but it finally admits that dreaming has a cost, and that the next generation will be the ones who pay it if we refuse to change.
This is Trek evolving; not away from its past, but toward its utopia.
Backlash, and Why the Criticism Misses the Point
Of course there’s backlash. There always is when something new threatens the comfort of old hierarchies. I’ve lived through enough cycles of fandom outrage to recognise the pattern: the same voices who once railed against women on the bridge, against Black captains, against queer characters (real or fictitious), against any shift that dared to widen the frame. The vocabulary changes, but the fear underneath it never does.
The complaints about Starfleet Academy — the mutterings about “wokeness,” the hand‑wringing about “politics,” the insistence that Trek has somehow lost its way — are not new. They echo the same resistance that once fought racial integration, gender equality, and queer visibility in the real world. They are the cultural equivalent of someone insisting the map is wrong because it no longer centres on their house.
And when I look at the cadets in this series, I see something deeply familiar. Over the years, the young people I’ve taught have reflected this same constellation of identities: openly queer and questioning, neurodivergent in ways the world is only just beginning to understand, living with disability, navigating migration, displacement, or intergenerational trauma, speaking in many languages, carrying many histories. They are not hypothetical. They are not symbolic. They are the real world — challenged, brilliant, resilient, and gloriously uncontained.
And they need to see themselves represented. Not as side characters, not as allegories, but as central to the story of their own lives ahead. Just as importantly, the rest of us need to see them too, in order to recognise the breadth of who they are, to understand the worlds they carry, and to accept that the future will be shaped by people who do not fit the narrow templates of the past.
It’s here that the old Starfleet motto (the one about reaching the stars through hardship) lands with new meaning. The struggle isn’t just about exploration; it’s about inclusion. It’s about who gets to pioneer what comes next, and who gets to be visible in it.
Starfleet Academy isn’t political in the partisan sense. It’s political in the human sense. It reflects the world as it is becoming, not the world some people wish it had remained. It acknowledges that the future will not be shaped by a single culture, a single worldview, or a single demographic that once assumed itself to be the default.
And that is precisely why some people find it threatening.
There’s even a touch of Australian bluntness in my reaction to it all: if your worldview can be undone by the existence of a few teenagers from different planets learning to work together, maybe the problem isn’t the show.
The backlash is not a sign of failure. It is proof that the series is doing something new and necessary. It is pushing the franchise into spaces it should have entered long ago. It is widening the frame, shifting the centre, and refusing to apologise for imagining a Federation that actually looks like the galaxy it claims to represent.
And if that unsettles a few people, well… good. Growth should unsettle us. That’s how we know it’s working. I’m reminded of my early teaching days, when I was warned about a “disruptive” teenager who supposedly couldn’t sit still or focus. In my very first lesson with his class, I slipped on a pair of reading glasses to begin the work. He stared at me, surprised, and quietly asked if I needed them. I told him yes, that sometimes they help me see things more clearly.
Without a word, he reached into his bag, took out his own glasses, and put them on. He read quietly for the rest of the lesson. Other teachers later admitted they hadn’t even known he needed them. All he’d ever needed was permission to see his world differently, and to realise that another way of being was possible.
And that’s the point. Once you’ve learned to see differently, you can’t unsee it. The same is true for the critics of Starfleet Academy. Their discomfort isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong; it’s a sign that something in their world is shifting, and they, too, will need to learn to see it differently.
Exploring Strange, New Worlds
Starfleet Academy is the first Trek series to imagine a utopia that is not anchored in American cultural dominance, but shaped by a genuinely global — even interplanetary — imagination. It is youthful, diverse, emotionally resonant, and unafraid to challenge the structures it inherits. Perhaps this explains some of the backlash from those clinging to imagined halcyon pasts rather than embracing a global future.
“Ad astra per aspera — through struggle, the stars.”
— Captain Nahla Ake
It’s impossible not to feel the sting of déjà vu. Starfleet Academy, cancelled after its second season, ostensibly because of ratings — just like the original Star Trek once was. We know how that story ended. What was dismissed and cut short became the foundation of a cultural phenomenon that reshaped science fiction and inspired generations. And imagine if Star Trek: The Next Generation had been cancelled after Season 2. The world would have missed out on a series that grew and evolved into a franchise-leading storyline.
After fifty years in this fandom, I recognise that same fragile, luminous potential here. Starfleet Academy has returned youth, courage, and optimism back to the franchise. To end it now is to extinguish something still growing, still becoming.
And we can’t ignore the courage of the creators who dared to make this series. They stepped into the unknown with the same spirit that has always defined Star Trek — the willingness to explore strange new worlds, to take risks, to imagine boldly even when the path ahead was uncertain. They echoed the courage of Gene Roddenberry and Lucille Ball in creating the original series, and changing the world ahead.
“The life of the village against the life of the stars. We are the village. We have tiny moments that get swallowed by big ones, and the only thing we know for sure is that one day, we will all be gone. We know but… we keep going. Maybe that’s what makes it matter.”
— Tarima Sadal
This is why this cancellation cannot be allowed to proceed. Stories like this — stories about youth, courage, diversity, imagination, and the stubborn hope that we can be better together — are the stories that keep the village alive while we reach for the stars. Cutting them short isn’t just a programming or financial decision; it’s a failure of imagination; an act of corporate cowardice; a betrayal of the futurism that Star Trek promotes.
This cancellation should be withdrawn. Not as a favour to protesting fans, but because the future deserves this story. Starfleet Academy should not be finished; it needs to boldly go where no TV show has gone before. If Star Trek has taught us anything over the last six decades, it’s that the future is something we build — and protect — together.
And that’s exactly why this cancellation must be reversed. We do not abandon the future simply because the present lacks courage. The stars are still waiting, and so are the cadets who were meant to reach them.
Note: Paramount promotional images used under fair dealing for review purposes.
