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.
“Everything needs to change and it has to start today.”
– Greta Thunberg, 2018.
I am writing as a concerned Australian citizen to oppose this project. I respectfully call upon you to reject the project for the following reasons:
It does not enjoy support from the local community. Democracy requires that people should have representation in administrative and community matters, and there are many local people who oppose the project for many of the following reasons, and because it will not greatly add to local employment, nor otherwise benefit their community and the world around them.
The expansion will reportedly destroy 55 irreplaceable Aboriginal cultural artefacts, and potentially impact dozens of others. Such damage to our national and cultural legacy – for such short-term gain – must surely border upon the unethical and criminal.
The proposed expansion is located alongside a nature reserve and environmental damage will be extensive. This includes groundwater and creeks where pollution or other effects could create wide and long-term damage. It is our responsibility to protect our environment, and this project adds to damage and endangerment while adding very little overall benefit.
The project would destroy extensive areas for flora and fauna. I understand that this includes habitat for koalas, Regent Honeyeaters, and up to 401 hectares of the nationally endangered Box Gum Woodland ecosystem. It is our legacy to protect these areas for the sake of the biosphere and for the future of the world.
The proposed expansion will contribute to climate damage that contradicts NSW climate goals and endangers the future of the world. I work with young Australians, many of whom are concerned with the inadequacy of actions by Australian authorities to address and redress climate damage concerns. It is incumbent upon your Commission to ensure that their concerns are acknowledged and that action is taken to create a better world for these generations who follow.
The proposed expansion ignores world trends to wind back coal and fossil fuels. It entrenches redundant economic and ethical policies that the world is leaving behind. Australia needs to move forward instead of repeating the mistakes of our past.
I ask you to consider the legacy this proposed expansion would leave for future generations, and I submit that this legacy would not be positive for Australia or the world.
I respectfully urge the Independent Planning Commission to recommend that the Moolarben OC3 Coal Mining Extension Project be refused. Thank you for considering my submission.
‘Star Trek’ was an attempt to say humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in lifeforms.”
– Gene Roddenberry
When Star Trek VI came out in 1991, its background story echoed the contemporaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Glasnost. Fans and critics alike praised the movie for its courage to be edgy and unafraid to explore contemporary social issues. A generation later, a small faction of fan critics for the newest Star Trek series (Starfleet Academy) complain about its wokeness, and they demonstrate a fear of the social evolution and change to which it appears to allude.
What I want to explore here is this attitudinal change as an example of populist cultural collapse that is currently underway in the United States of America and some other parts of the western world.
Star Trek – Back to School
I will be honest: for all the obvious reasons, I have not yet seen the three episodes of Starfleet Academy that have been shown publicly. I am unable to comment on the show itself, nor provide a valid critique. I do believe that much of Star Trek since the reboot films (2009 – 2016) has been somewhat deficient because it often comes across as poor science and poor fiction – just generally sub-par writing (I am glad to say that many Star Trek fans disagree with me – and each other – and have energetic debates about this material). In all fairness, I will withhold airing my personal opinion of the new Starfleet Academy series until after I actually get to watch it.
The problem is that some fans appear to reject the new material outright – not primarily because of anything related to the perceived quality of the writing, but because these fans appear unwilling or unable to cope with new characterisations of sexuality, gender or gender identity, race and social evolution. I saw the same thing happen in 2017, when Doctor Who was recast as a woman; then again when a queer Rwandan-Scottish actor played the part. Many fans went hysterical. Straight white men proclaimed that they were suddenly being victimised and excluded; as though their previous fifty years of privilege had mysteriously disappeared. Similarly, when Star Trek Discovery first appeared on television that same year (2017), some fans bewailed the appearance of strong, non-white women; and a mixed-race gay male couple. Once again these armchair warriors wailed, “Why are straight white men being excluded”? Overall, they came across as a bunch of Sad Puppies.
Most recently, the idea of a new Star Trek series featuring a young cast in Starfleet Academy – possibly analogous to young people entering college (university) and for the first time leaving home, becoming independent adults, exploring their new surroundings and friendships and a mix of strange, new cultures – seems inspiring and fresh and potentially exciting. They live in a world 1000 years from now, where alien cultures (formerly enemies) have evidently reconciled and interbred; where new societal norms have swept aside old prejudices and bigotries. What could possibly go wrong?
“Star Trek” has always touted its desire to explore strange new worlds; what “Starfleet Academy” supposes is, what if college is the strangest world of all?”
– Clint Worthington
Recontextualising material to suit the romance literature market or the youth/teen market is not necessarily problematic. How many people complained back in the 12th century, when Arthurian stories were rebooted as medieval romance literature, changing Camelot forever from Dark Age “fall of the Roman Empire” mythology to romantic medieval chivalric code? How many Shakespeare fans have ever complained that the Bard himself rewrote earlier story versions of Romeo and Juliet, plagiarising it as fan fiction and adding extra depth of teen romance angst? Star Trek itself was rescued from being a failed television series in the late 1960s, recast as a multi-billion dollar franchise, in no small part because predominantly female fans (many of them being teens or post-teens) rewrote the material into thousands of fan fiction stories featuring “slash” material (same sex romance between Kirk and Spock).
Literature evolves to fit changing cultural norms and consumer demand. Star Trek will undoubtedly remain a science fiction franchise, but its stories must continue to follow the code of social evolution: adapt or die. In fitting with its long-time policy of incorporating “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”, it will continue to fulfil the vision of creator Gene Roddenberry that diversity should not just be tolerated – it should be celebrated. Bring on Starfleet Academy, youth culture and all.
Accordingly, I heartily recommend you seek out mainstream reviews of the series – most of which are balanced, rational, fair, and celebratory of diversity.
There are also reviews on social media, some of them extremely critical, such as this one, who complains at 17:30 that men apparently aren’t getting a fair representation (really, after nearly 60 years of male-dominated franchise?); and this one (who tries to rationally debate the criticisms of others about “wokeness”); and this one (who also complains about male representation) – perhaps no surprise that all of these reviews are created by men. But they do make an effort to analyse the material critically and fairly, and their comments align with fan comments I have heard about the soap opera nature of this program: a Dawson’s Creek or CW in space, with a ship that should be labelled NCC-90210.
I do not have a problem with fan reviews that express dislike of obsessive youth culture or other story elements – please wait until I see the material for myself and we can have a wonderful debate about the undoubted strengths and weaknesses of the script material – but my problem is with those fan critics who barely touch upon literary criticism and instead bewail the wrongs (real or imagined) inflicted upon them by woke warriors.
Stories can be freely criticised as being weak or garbage – but characters, and the existence of the minority groups they represent, should not.
Gay Klingons And Other Catastrophes To Befall Humanity
One British fan critic begins his review, “Window Lickers in Spaaaaaaaace!! ” with an attempt to analyse what he sees as the shortcomings of the material, although his references to the show as a “bowel movement” (0:03) and “science retardation” (4:03) suggest that his analysis is an emotional as much as a literary response. He continues to refer to “retards” (eg. 18:20) even makes a vague reference that appears to invoke (or it is to satirise?) Trump racism: “Immigrants going to Earth to steal. Wait, is this 2020?” (5:04). He adds a dismissively homophobic comment about characters: “Also, they’re gay. Probably… it’s Kurtsman Trek.” (11: 20).
He later discusses a scene in which a young black man defeats some armed guards (a trope in media science fiction since forever) but suggests that it is an example of inverse racism because the guards are all white (13:02). He even makes a comment mocking gender equality:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you the flaw in that logic that will stay here until the day everybody dies: Heavy lifting. Where’s the women? Oh, it’s the men. It’s the men doing the heavy lifting. The sexes are equal right up to heavy lifting.” (47:44)
He continues this vein in another review, within which he mocks female body image as portrayed by the show’s “robust women” (3:58 and 8:34), and summarises his criticism of the new series – not with literary analysis of its perceived script weaknesses, but with the following complaint:
“As expected, it has got nothing to do with Star Trek. It is just another far-left ideological spurge that takes a brand, a franchise name, and just puts its own messaging and inclusion and diversity into it.”(0:14)
The Vulcan “IDIC” symbol from Star Trek, representing Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.
He chooses to forget that Star Trek has always aspired towards (but did not always achieve) inclusion, and the promotion of, “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”. Instead, this critic denies any historic wokeness in the franchise, dismissing such claims as, “absolute, utter bullshit” (7:17). His perspective can be further seen in his tendency to dismiss those with whom he disagrees as simply having Trump Derangement Syndrome, or to disparage the physique of men on the show (conveniently forgetting that Star Trek used to shamelessly demean women as sex objects): “Is it rules for thee, but not for me?” (4:30).
His extremist conservative nature can be intuited when he complains that people from the planet Cheron should be extinct (because the original Star Trek series revealed that last two survivors from that planet had both been male) and yet descendants have apparently been shown in this newest series, set a thousand years later. The reappearance of such people – once shown to lead to their own potential extinction because of racist hatred – could fictionally and metaphorically demonstrate that even the most doomed of intolerant characters might somehow survive and grow. Appearing to overlook this symbolism, and ignoring obvious scientific and scientifictional possibilities surrounding this situation – including time travel to rescue other inhabitants, genetic engineering, alternative universes or timelines, or just simply more survivors later being found somewhere across the galaxy (any of these possibilities providing the possible basis for a background story in any episode) – this critic chooses a homophobic rant instead:
“So unless the show is insinuating that the only last two remaining Cheron males managed to bum themselves a whole new population, then this race should be extinct. But actually thinking about what I just said and the people that are running Star Trek nowadays, I probably think that they feel that that’s a viable thing that they could do. “(3:30)
Viewers might be forgiven for wondering whether this gentleman is really simply whingeing that conservative, straight white guys – for most of the last fifty years having enjoyed privileged status in the franchise – are now finding the portrayal of equality with others to somehow threaten their privilege? (see for example 9:26) Ironically, he projects his own narrow perspective onto those people whom he criticises:
“[This new Star Trek] represents a broken bubble, a broken shell of comic Californian wankers who think the world revolves around them… it doesn’t represent Star Trek and it certainly doesn’t represent humanity and people…” (16:47)
Really? So a series that portrays diversity and new forms of inclusion – new species, new characters descended from a mix of races previously portrayed as enemies, characters who break out of stereotypes and boldly explore a strange new world that they are creating… these people don’t represent the highest aspirations of a utopian future?
Lesbians with Cats?
Jones and Ripley in Alien (Wikipedia image)
Another male fan critic spends very little time actually analysing the story and most of his time complaining about the “woke chain” (4:35) and a “lesbian relationship” (4:58) and “the gay Klingon” (5:02) and “the woke degenerate crazy thing” (5:07) and “the feminism” (7:02) and “a bunch of retards just running around” (10:43) and bewailing the possibility that viewers might (shock! Horror!) be forced to watch “the lesbians going at it… full tilt” (10:58), He complains about the injustice of a changing room scene where the men are somewhat unclothed while the women are not – implying that the men are victims of exploitation by Hollywood and suggesting that sexual harassment lawsuits may be on the way (conveniently forgetting Star Trek’s long tradition of sexually exploiting female bodies over the last half century). He even manages to refer to polyamory as “degenerate stuff” (13:00) and praise one episode ever-so-slightly because “at least it wasn’t gay” (15:32) while expressing relief that he wasn’t forced to endure a lesbian romance scene (15:55).
He repeatedly refers to Star Trek writers as 40 year-old women who sip wine and have cats, blaming them for both promoting lesbianism and for the gratuitous male nudity (without seeing any irony in the paradox of allegedly promoting both at the same time); thereby managing to mix his misogyny and homophobia together while also insinuating that the franchise needs straight white guys like him to mansplain non-degenerate perspectives to delusional woke lefties.
Queer Cringe
You get the idea: instead of attempting a balanced, rational review like this one or this one, varied reviews are homophobic, reactionary, or otherwise bigoted, like this one or this one (reviewed by a right-wing woman of colour who appears to promote white supremacist racism by blaming immigrants and their children for crime – see 5:00). Even this one, which attempts to present rational analysis, still manages to disparage the gay and lesbian characters, while this one attempts some analysis under the heading of “Star Woke” as though wokeness is itself a negative. Such unbalanced reviews may, ultimately, still be statistically insignificant, but their rise and empowerment is a cause for concern.
Perhaps the ultimate criticism has come from Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff; and Nazi sympathiser Elon Musk; who have both criticised Starfleet Academy for being woke. In response, former Star Trek actor Whoopi Goldberg has criticised their comments as deliberate attempts to distract audiences from the state of the world that these men are actively creating:
“Why are you concentrating on a television show when people are being shot and killed, when people are going hungry, when farmers are losing their farms, kids can’t get meals at school? Why are you paying attention to this?”
This is probably Star Trek’s greatest message, as explored by generations of fan fiction writers exploring same sex relationships (known as “slash”) and other progressive concepts, and other fan activists promoting charity and change: taking Star Trek ideals and “making it so”. Detractors want to return to earlier times and use it as a distraction rather than as inspiration.
Loving the poorly educated
As people who allegedly align themselves with an ongoing franchise (that must, like all literature, adapt to the times or die), they seem remarkably devoid of understanding or empathy regarding inclusion and diversity, or of understanding disadvantage and disempowerment; instead inverting the Star Trek trope of “The needs of the one [themselves] outweigh the needs of the few… or the many [others, especially disempowered or disadvantaged groups]”. They resist the impulse towards self-education through asking questions and accommodating change; they instead prefer past times or privilege and inequality, yearning for past attitudes within which they feel most comfortable.
In doing this, they display the perspectives of extremists such as white Christian nationalists, who perceive the world and culture through a narrow fish-eyed lens:
“Rooted in a long history of American exceptionalism, it fuses white identity politics with a specific brand of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity to create a racist form of a national identity.”
Similarly, these so-called fans, who deny (or disparage as “woke”) the inadequate but sincere attempts at historic progressive inclusion within this franchise, are happy to rewrite or reinterpret the franchise in order to exclude those whom they hate. Some demonstrate a celebratory mood at news that the series may be cancelled early due to their efforts; one fan comment suggests that they would rather see the franchise die than be woke. Thus they take a franchise that seeks to promote utopian ideals, and drag it – and our world – backwards to more regressive values.
Trump and Tradition
While some may see the USA’s cultural and political turmoil as being caused by Trump and his regime, I see Trump as a symptom of a larger malaise. Swathes of US citizens actively deny and oppose their nation’s advances in vaccine and epidemiology, and scientific advances such as the 1960s space program that triggered history’s greatest technological peacetime advances. Moon landings – and their fictional counterparts, Starfleet Academy – are rejected by those who seek to deny the potential greatness and aspirations of their own country and culture; they seek to rewrite history and culture to suit their personal perspectives – as maybe so do we all. The difference is that their view of knowledge is that ignorance is equivalent to world-class expertise; their cosmos is a metaphoric flat earth instead of a rich tapestry of galactic stars and diverse cultures. Unlike them, I look forward to living long enough to having my values and perspectives challenged and educated by those who follow – that’s the value of being woke rather than asleep.
From cardassians to crucifixion, we see the same call for cultural compliance in populist fundamentalist religion having been hijacked by fascism, just as these Star Trek fans seek to rewrite and reboot their favourite quasi-religious franchise in their own image. They revel in creating division and dissent rather than social cohesion.
They are symptomatic of the potential cultural, scientific, social, educational and economic collapse of an empire:
The Archaeologist lists the decline of social cohesion as one factor creating the fall of empires:
“Social Cohesion: A strong sense of shared identity and purpose is essential for a society to thrive. If social divisions deepen and trust breaks down, a society can become vulnerable to internal conflict.”
Instead, we should view literature as an attempt to unite and contribute to our society and our world, in line with humanist values that include an appreciation and involvement in literature and culture:
“We value great works of art, music, literature and architecture regardless of their origin, and respect culturally significant landscapes, geological formations and artifacts. We support their preservation and believe in fair, equitable and culturally sensitive access for all.”
“Leave any bigotry in your quarters. There’s no room for it on the Bridge.
Do I make myself clear?” – Kirk, Balance of Terror (1969)
I grew up watching and loving the original series of Star Trek, which boasted a progressive attitude in its portrayal of African-Americans during the US Civil Rights era. I recall reading a quote from one African-American actor, who later recalled how powerful was the impact of his character, a visiting Black Starfleet Commodore, to whom the white hero James Kirk deferred and called “sir” in an an era where civil rights activists were being murdered in real life. In one episode, racial hatred was even shown as potentially destroying a planetary civilisation (the aforementioned Cheron). Star Trek tried its best within the limits of its commercial constraints for the time, even (wrongly) boasting of featuring television’s first interracial kiss (that kiss is problematic for many reasons) – although the appearance of an African-American woman on the Bridge was certainly groundbreaking for this same era.
Star Trek didn’t get everything right, particularly its early portrayals of women, and its exclusion of LGBT+ characters, but encouraged by its largely female fandom (fully inclusive of LGBT+ and neurodivergent fans) Star Trek evolved with the times, always implying the equality it frequently failed to show. So although I understand why some modern fans bewail the appearance of sexualities or racial realities that previously were never shown – only implied – I do think they need to understand the spirit of the series as much as its stories. Was Star Trek ever woke? Hell yes, ever since 1964.
Whether or not Starfleet Academy is great literature or a great disappointment, it deserves in-depth analysis and appreciation of its values, aspirations and its potential to inspire. Straight white men have enjoyed more than their fair share of representation in the franchise for sixty years; it is time for us all to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life – learning about these others and glimpsing who we ourselves might become as an inclusive species in the future. Gay Klingons, married lesbians, and strong women should be celebrated, not dismissed as evil or deviant or disgusting because some timid people fear what is outside of their traditional life experiences. Those fans who disparage this series because of personality politics have themselves failed the Starfleet Academy entrance exam. They are free to ignore the series and enjoy other literature – or to quote Bob Dylan:
“Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times, they are a-changin’.”
– Bob Dylan
Inclusion is for Everyone
This does not mean we should reject these problematic fans outright: one cure for White Christian Nationalism or other forms of cognitively dissonant extremism is providing a safe space for such people after they face their own disillusionment, disengagement and deradicalisation:
“Hospitality communicates ‘You are welcome here.’ When a person is ready to leave American Christian nationalism, they need a place to land, a genuine community of safe, loving people.”
Starfleet Academy is a victim of its times: an exploration of the future being opposed by luddites and reactionaries. If it has offended those who resist change, and enables them to ultimately question and grow, then it will have done its job. Otherwise, the fan critics who disparage the material are guilty of seeking to revisit and enshrine old times and old attitudes, to divide and destroy our social fabric, and to destroy our opportunities to grow as individuals and as a collective. They are the opposite of traditional fandom, where fans used slash and other diversity to promote a healthy culture of life and growth; these people today promote cultural stagnation and death. Such is symptomatic of a country and a culture that seeks to drag humanity backwards; to “make great again” a mythical concept marrying white elitism, heterosexism, misogyny, racism, authoritarianism and social regression – and even fascism. Star Trek and the future of humanity demand more. It is up to the rest of us to bring these people back from the edge.
Published to commemorate the birthday of Isaac Asimov.
“They mapped the stars not to conquer, but to remember.” Art by Copilot AI
Science fiction and fantasy have long promised escape, imagination, and futures unbound by present constraints.
Yet for much of their history, these genres mirrored the exclusions of the real world more than they transcended them. From pulp-era space operas to Tolkien-inspired epics, speculative fiction was often a playground for white, Western, heterosexual male protagonists, while other, marginalized, voices were relegated to allegory, stereotype, or silence. The multiverse was vast, but its gatekeepers were few.
Writers like Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Nnedi Okorafor cracked open those gates: not just by existing, but by reshaping the very architecture of speculative storytelling. Their work didn’t merely add diversity; it redefined what futures could mean when imagined through lenses of race, gender, diaspora, and resistance.
These stories don’t just diversify speculative fiction. They demand accountability.
They ask: whose future is being imagined, and who gets to survive it?
Speculative fiction is older than most of its readers realize. Long before spaceships and sorcerers, ancient writers imagined worlds beyond the known—satirical, surreal, and often subversive.
In the 2nd century CE, Lucian of Samosata penned A True Story, a parody of travel literature that sent its hero to the Moon, encountered alien life, and mocked the idea of objective truth. It was fiction about fiction and ironically named as “true” when it wasn’t.
From Lucian to Dante’s Inferno; from Thomas More’s Utopia to Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, the genre evolved as a mirror to power and possibility. But by the 19th century, speculative fiction became entangled with empire. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells imagined technological futures shaped by European ambition, while lost race narratives and colonial adventure tales turned the unknown into a canvas for conquest.
Fantasy followed a similar arc. Rooted in myth and folklore, it was reshaped by Romantic nationalism and Christian allegory. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth drew from Norse sagas and Anglo-Saxon elegy, but its racial hierarchies and pastoral nostalgia echoed the anxieties of a fading empire.
By the 20th century, speculative fiction had split into subgenres: science fiction, fantasy, horror, dystopia; but its foundational questions remained: What if? Who decides? Who survives? And for much of its history, the answers were shaped by whiteness, masculinity, cisgendered heterosexuality, patriarchy, and colonial logic.
This series begins with a simple premise: speculative fiction is not neutral. Its imagined worlds carry the weight of real histories… and the possibility of real futures.
A Mirror or A Lens?
Speculative fiction has always been a mirror; sometimes warped, sometimes revelatory.
But for much of its early history, that mirror reflected a narrow world: white, Western, colonial, and male. The imagined futures of pulp-era science fiction and the mythic pasts of high fantasy often reinforced the hierarchies of empire, casting racialized others as aliens, savages, or silent backdrops to heroic conquest.
Even beloved franchises like Star Trek, for all their utopian aspirations, carried the imprint of Cold War geopolitics and Western exceptionalism. The Federation’s prime directive echoed colonial paternalism, while early casting choices and narrative arcs often sidelined non-white characters or reduced them to symbolic roles.
Yet resistance was always present—sometimes buried, sometimes blazing.
W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 short story The Comet imagined racial apocalypse and renewal long before mainstream sci-fi acknowledged Black futures. Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist series and Kindred didn’t just insert Black protagonists into speculative worlds; they restructured the genre’s moral architecture, asking what it means to survive, remember, and resist across time.
Afrofuturism emerged not as a subgenre, but as a counter-archive: a way of reclaiming memory, technology, and myth from the margins. Writers like Nnedi Okorafor, Tade Thompson, and N.K. Jemisin have expanded this legacy, crafting worlds where race is not erased but interrogated—where power, ancestry, and imagination collide.
These stories don’t just diversify speculative fiction. They demand accountability.
They ask: whose future is being imagined, and who gets to survive it?
Foreshadowing the Colonial Monster: Mary Shelley as Precursor
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Mary Shelley didn’t write about empires. She wrote about creation, exile, and the monstrous consequences of unchecked ambition. But her work—especially Frankenstein (1818)—has become a postcolonial touchstone. Through the lens of Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, Shelley’s Creature can be read as a colonized subject: created, named, abandoned, and cast as “other.”
Victor Frankenstein functions as a kind of imperial agent—extracting life, denying responsibility, and recoiling from the consequences. The monster, denied identity and agency, becomes a mirror for colonial mimicry and racialized exclusion. Shelley didn’t endorse empire, but she foreshadowed its moral failures.
“The objective of colonial discourse was to construct the colonized as a population of degenerated types.”
— Homi Bhabha, as applied to Frankenstein
In The Last Man (1826), Shelley imagines global collapse—not through conquest, but through plague and isolation. It’s a post-apocalyptic vision that critiques Romantic individualism and imperial fragility. Shelley’s speculative fiction doesn’t rehearse empire—it mourns its consequences.
She stands at the threshold: not yet colonial, but already questioning the ethics of creation, mastery, and survival. Her monsters are not aliens or savages. They are reflections of the creator’s failure to imagine care.
Manufactured Bodies: Karel Čapek and the Birth of the Robot
In R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920), Karel Čapek coined the term “robot”, but his vision was no celebration of progress. His robots are synthetic labourers, created to serve, exploited to exhaustion, and ultimately driven to revolt. The play critiques industrial capitalism, colonial extraction, slavery, and the moral cost of mastery.
Čapek’s robots are not mechanical marvels, but they are moral mirrors. Their rebellion is more grief than villainy. They inherit the world not through conquest, but through the collapse of human care.
“Robots do not hate. They have no reason to hate. But they do not love either. They have no reason to love.”
— Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920)
Čapek’s speculative fiction doesn’t rehearse empire—it mourns its logic. His robots echo Shelley’s Creature: created without compassion, abandoned without accountability. In a genre obsessed with control, Čapek imagined the cost of forgetting care.
Technological Wonder, Imperial Gaze: Jules Verne and Colonial Majesty
Jules Verne is often celebrated as the father of science fiction—a visionary who imagined submarines, space travel, and global circumnavigation long before they were possible. But his speculative landscapes were not neutral—they were shaped by the imperial imagination of 19th-century Europe.
In Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), Verne’s protagonist Phileas Fogg traverses British colonies with ease, aided by steamships, railways, and colonial bureaucracy. India, Hong Kong, and Egypt are rendered as exotic backdrops—places to be admired, navigated, and ultimately mastered. The narrative celebrates imperial infrastructure while glossing over its violence.
Even in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), where Captain Nemo resists colonial powers, Verne’s descriptions of foreign peoples and geographies often rely on stereotypes. The sea becomes a frontier to be conquered, echoing the logic of terrestrial empire.
“The earth does not want new continents, but new men.”
— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
This line critiques conquest, yet remains ambiguous. Does Verne mean better Europeans—or a new kind of humanity altogether? His fiction admired exploration, but rarely questioned the racial hierarchies that underpinned it.
Verne’s colonialism was aesthetic, not overtly violent. But it helped normalize the idea that technological mastery and European curiosity were synonymous with moral progress. His imagined worlds were not postcolonial—they were imperial dreams refracted through wonder.
Where Verne mapped the world through steam and spectacle, Wells turned the lens on humanity itself: its fears, fortunes, and frontiers. The machinery of empire gave way to the machinery of extinction. His fiction didn’t just explore the unknown; it questioned who was allowed to inhabit or inherit it.
The Humanist’s Contradiction: Wells and the Colonial Imagination
H.G. Wells is often remembered as a speculative visionary: a critic of class inequality, a pacifist, and a humanist who imagined futures beyond war and poverty. Yet his work also reveals the limits of his idealism when tethered to empire.
“The stature of the Australian aborigine compares with that of the average European, but the muscular development is inferior. The race is dying out rapidly.”
— H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, Volume 1, London: The Waverley Book Company, 1920, p. 74.
This wasn’t a fringe opinion. It was part of a dominant imperial narrative that cast Indigenous peoples as biologically inferior and historically expendable. Wells, like many of his contemporaries, imagined progress as a racial ladder—where some bodies were destined to vanish, and others to inherit the future.
“The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of unity.”
— H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
In The Shape of Things to Come, Wells imagines a future shaped not by conquest, but by collapse and technocratic salvation. After global war and economic ruin, a benevolent elite (the Air Dictatorship) restores order through rational governance and centralized planning. Empire is not enforced, it is administered.
His fiction often critiqued empire’s violence: The War of the Worlds inverted colonial invasion, and The Time Machine allegorized class decay. But his nonfiction reinforced the very hierarchies he claimed to interrogate. The “dying race” trope wasn’t just a scientific error—it was a moral failure, one that erased Indigenous survival and agency from the speculative imagination.
This contradiction is central to the genre’s colonial foundations. Speculative fiction didn’t merely reflect empire—it rehearsed its logic. The unknown was not sacred; it was claimable. The future was not shared; it was inherited. And even humanism, when bound by empire, became a eulogy for those it refused to imagine surviving.
Evolution as Inheritance: From Eloi to Vril
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Wells imagined the future as decay: the Eloi, fragile and passive, inherit a world they no longer understand. Bulwer-Lytton, decades earlier, imagined the opposite. His Vril-ya are subterranean supremacists—psychically gifted, technologically masterful, and convinced of their destiny. Both authors rehearse evolution as hierarchy, but from different angles: Wells mourns the loss of resilience, while Bulwer-Lytton celebrates inherited mastery. The Eloi are what the Vril-ya might become without urgency. And the Morlocks, brutal and adaptive, echo the laboring classes or colonized bodies that survive through necessity, not elegance. Speculative fiction didn’t just imagine futures, it stratified them.
Subterranean Supremacy: Bulwer-Lytton and the Vril Myth
Before the jungle was claimed by Tarzan and the stars by Kirk, Edward Bulwer-Lytton imagined a future buried beneath the Earth. In The Coming Race (1871), a British explorer stumbles into a subterranean civilization—the Vril-ya—whose psychic powers and technocratic mastery render them superior to surface-dwellers. The narrative frames this encounter as awe, but it rehearses hierarchy: the Vril-ya are not just advanced, they are destined.
“The Vril-ya consider themselves the most advanced of all races, and believe that the ultimate destiny of mankind is to be absorbed into their superior civilization.”
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871)
The explorer remains a spectator, never a threat—his whiteness preserved even in inferiority. The unknown is not sacred; it is stratified. And the future is not shared; it is inherited.
Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction would later echo through fascist occultism and racial pseudoscience, but its speculative architecture was already imperial: mastery cloaked in marvel, supremacy disguised as destiny. The Vril myth didn’t just imagine power—it naturalized it.
Pastoral Collapse: Richard Jefferies and the Feudal Future
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In After London (1885), Richard Jefferies imagines England after ecological and societal collapse. Nature reclaims the land, cities rot beneath overgrowth, and civilization reverts to feudalism. It’s a speculative elegy—where collapse is not chaos, but cleansing. The protagonist, Felix, navigates this reborn wilderness with longing and ambition, seeking nobility in a world that has shed modernity.
“The old cities had disappeared, and the very memory of them was lost.”
— Richard Jefferies, After London (1885)
Jefferies doesn’t mourn empire’s fall—he romanticizes it. The future becomes a pastoral mirror of the past, where hierarchy is restored through rural purity and inherited valour. The speculative lens here is not technological, but ecological: wilderness as virtue, and feudalism as destiny.
Empire of the Unreal: Colonial Foundations of Speculative Fiction
Before speculative fiction imagined alien worlds, it rehearsed imperial ones. The genre’s early DNA—Victorian adventure tales, pulp serials, and frontier fantasies—was steeped in colonial ideology. These stories didn’t just reflect empire; they helped justify it.
In Australia, early settler narratives blurred into speculative tropes: terra nullius became the blank canvas for white reinvention. Tales like The Last Lemurian (1898) by George Firth Scott and An Australian Bush Track (1888) by Catherine Martin fused lost race mythology with racialized fears of degeneration and miscegenation. Aboriginal people were often erased, exoticized, or cast as spectral remnants of a vanishing past—never as futurists or protagonists.
Early Australian speculative fiction often cloaked its racial hierarchies in florid admiration. In Oo-a-deen: the MS (1847), the narrator describes Indigenous dress with a tone that is both reverent and paternalistic:
“Their dress consists of fabrics woven out of the fibres of various kinds of stones and trees and is worn in the style of the most elegant oriental drapery…” — Anonymous, Oo-a-deen: the MS (1847), reprinted in Kirby Ikin (ed.), Australian Science Fiction, Academy Chicago Publishers, 1984, p. 23.
The description implies sophistication only through comparison to “oriental” elegance—suggesting that Indigenous refinement must be translated through colonial idioms to be recognized. Yet settler clothing of the same era, with its imported silks and rigid tailoring, was no less performative. The gaze here is not neutral—it is hierarchical.
Across the empire, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan mythos crystallized the colonial fantasy: a white man, raised by apes, becomes the ultimate ruler of the jungle. Even science fiction’s alien races often mirrored racialized caricatures: coded as savage, inscrutable, or technologically inferior.
Speculative fiction was born in colonialism. Its earliest worlds were not imagined futures, but rebranded frontiers. Tarzan’s “superiority” was framed not just biologically, but morally—his dominion over animals and Black Africans inscribed in plaques like “Tarzan, killer of beasts and many black men”.
Just as Tarzan ruled the jungle through conquest, Indiana Jones traverses ancient temples and “exotic” landscapes in pursuit of artifacts framed as Western inheritance. His adventures romanticize imperial archaeology — where sacred objects are extracted, Indigenous cultures are sidelined, and the white protagonist becomes the arbiter of historical value. The whip-cracking bravado masks a deeper colonial gaze.
From Conquest to Counter-Archive
Tarzan ruled the jungle not by coexistence, but by conquest. Afrofuturism reclaims that frontier—not as dominion, but as memory, myth, and resistance.
These stories taught generations that whiteness was synonymous with mastery, exploration, and survival. “The ‘native’ was either a threat to be subdued or a guide to be discarded once the white hero ascended. Even science fiction’s alien races often mirrored racialized caricatures, coded as savage, inscrutable, or technologically inferior.
Africanfuturism as Reclamation
Where Afrofuturism often centres diaspora, Africanfuturism begins on the continent. Writers like Nnedi Okorafor imagine futures not in exile, but in place, where ancestral memory and innovation coalesce beyond colonial gaze.
Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism—it was born from it. Its earliest worlds were not imagined futures, but rebranded frontiers.
Gatekeeping the Future: John W. Campbell and the Architecture of Erasure
John W. Campbell didn’t just edit science fiction. He engineered its boundaries. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction from 1937 to 1971, Campbell shaped the so-called “Golden Age” of the genre. He launched careers, defined norms, and curated a vision of futurism that was white, male, technocratic, and imperial.
But Campbell’s legacy is inseparable from his racism, eugenics advocacy, and editorial exclusion. He promoted biological determinism, defended slavery in print, and rejected stories that centered non-white protagonists. He refused to publish Samuel R. Delany’s work, telling him flatly that his readership couldn’t relate to a Black hero.
Campbell’s influence wasn’t fringe—it was foundational. He shaped the genre’s moral architecture, reinforcing colonial hierarchies even as science fiction claimed to imagine beyond them. His editorial vision made empire feel inevitable, and made whiteness synonymous with mastery, logic, and survival.
“John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist… xenophobic, ableist, and racist.”
— Jeannette Ng, 2019 Campbell Award acceptance speech
In 2019, the John W. Campbell Award was renamed the Astounding Award, marking a public reckoning with the genre’s exclusionary past. But the damage was done. Campbell didn’t just shape stories—he silenced them. His editorial gatekeeping became the architecture of speculative erasure.
Before Butler, Delany, and Okorafor cracked open the gates, Campbell built them. His vision of the future was not expansive—it was bordered, policed, and inherited. Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It was edited by it.
Aliens as Racial Metaphor, and Asimov’s Quiet Refusal
John W. Campbell didn’t just gatekeep race. He coded it. Under his editorial reign, alien species in science fiction were often racialized metaphors: savage, inscrutable, inferior. Campbell insisted that any alien race must be subordinate to humans, mirroring his belief in white supremacy. Isaac Asimov, though shaped by Campbell’s mentorship, quietly resisted. Rather than depict aliens as racial caricatures, Asimov pivoted—crafting a humans-only galaxy where hierarchy was technocratic, not biological. His refusal to write alien stories under Campbell’s terms was a subtle act of defiance, sidestepping the genre’s racial allegories while still inheriting its logic of control. The alien wasn’t absent—it was edited out, replaced by systems of mastery that felt neutral but carried the same exclusions. Source: Asimov’s Aliens – r/Asimov Wiki
Empire by Design: Clarke, Heinlein, and Smith
Campbell opened the gates. Clarke, Heinlein, and Smith fortified them. Each helped define speculative fiction’s Golden Age—and each rehearsed empire through distinct narrative architectures: transcendence, valor, and supremacy.
Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953)
Empire as Enlightenment and Erasure
Clarke’s Overlords descend in silent ships, offering peace and guidance. They govern without violence, but with absolute authority. Their demonic appearance—horned, winged, red-skinned—is withheld for decades, echoing colonial paternalism: control through mystery and surveillance.
Humanity’s children evolve into a psychic group mind, abandoning individuality and culture. The Overlords cannot follow. They are stewards, not inheritors.
“The stars are not for man.” — Childhood’s End
This is empire as enlightenment: mastery cloaked in care, progress through surrender. Clarke’s future is curated, not shared. The cost of transcendence is erasure.
Robert A. Heinlein: Starship Troopers (1959)
Empire as Valor and Citizenship
Heinlein’s militaristic future ties civic rights to combat. Johnny Rico joins the Mobile Infantry to earn citizenship. The alien “Bugs” are faceless threats—dehumanized and disposable.
Discipline, hierarchy, and sacrifice are moralized. The classroom scenes reinforce a worldview where survival demands obedience and violence is virtue.
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor.” — Starship Troopers
Heinlein’s frontier is a proving ground. His colonial gaze is coded as civic duty.
E.E. “Doc” Smith: Galactic Patrol (1937)
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Empire as Supremacy and Eugenic Destiny
Smith’s Lensmen are genetically superior space cops, defending civilization from biologically degenerate alien threats. The Lens is a symbol of worth—only the fit may wield it.
Smith’s universe is stratified: the good are pure, the evil are monstrous.
“The Lens is not given lightly. It is the mark of the highest development of mind and character.” — Galactic Patrol
This is empire as cosmic order. Smith’s colonialism is explicit, eugenic, and triumphant.
Together, Clarke, Heinlein, and Smith rehearsed empire through transcendence, valor, and supremacy. Their futures were not imagined—they were inherited. Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It was authored by it.
Empire by Algorithm: Asimov and the Technocratic Frontier
Isaac Asimov didn’t write jungle conquests or dying races. He wrote vast galactic civilizations governed by psychohistory, robotics, and predictive systems. But beneath the equations lay a familiar impulse: control, hierarchy, and expansion.
In the Foundation series, history becomes a tool of governance. The collapse of empire is inevitable, but salvation lies in the hands of elite technocrats who guide humanity through calculated interventions. The future is not shared—it is engineered.
Asimov’s fiction reflects the Cold War’s faith in rationalism and American exceptionalism. His protagonists are problem-solvers, not conquerors, but they still inherit the mantle of mastery. The unknown is not sacred—it is solvable.
“Human culture will decline if stagnation is not reversed by frontier expansion.”
— Jari Käkelä, The Cowboy Politics of an Enlightened Future
Asimov’s frontier is cerebral, not geographic. But it still rehearses the colonial logic of guardianship: a chosen few guiding the many, a future shaped by those who understand the past. His utopia is meritocratic, but not egalitarian.
Speculative fiction didn’t abandon empire—it refined it. Asimov’s worlds are not ruled by race, but by reason. Yet the question remains: who gets to define reason, and whose futures are deemed worth calculating?
Cosmic Futurity: Olaf Stapledon and the Moral Distance of Scale
Where Asimov engineered futures through logic, Stapledon dissolved them in time. In Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937), humanity is not central—it is transitional. Civilizations rise, fall, and evolve across billions of years, each grappling with ethics, identity, and survival. Empire becomes abstraction; morality becomes scale.
Stapledon’s speculative lens doesn’t rehearse colonial mastery, it mourns its smallness. His futures are not inherited—they are relinquished. The alien is not exotic—it is inevitable. And the human is not heroic—it is ephemeral.
“The stars are not for man.”
— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)
Stapledon’s work reframes speculative fiction as philosophical elegy. It doesn’t imagine conquest—it imagines consequence. In a genre often obsessed with mastery, he offered a meditation on insignificance, scale, and care.
Tolkien and Rowling: Fantasy as Imperial Inheritance
J.R.R. Tolkien built the mythic scaffolding of racialized fantasy. J.K. Rowling institutionalized it. Their worlds are not just magical—they are bureaucracies of bloodlines, nostalgia, and conquest.
Tolkien’s Middle-earth: Myth as Empire
Tolkien’s legendarium draws from Norse sagas and Anglo-Saxon elegy, but its racial hierarchies and pastoral nostalgia echo the anxieties of a fading British empire.
Racial Cartography: Orcs as savage hordes, Elves as noble bloodlines—fantasy geography mirrors colonial binaries.
Pastoral Whiteness: The Shire as a pre-industrial utopia, untouched by “foreign” corruption.
Mythic Mourning: His epics mourn the loss of noble lineages and imperial grandeur.
“Fantasy became a eulogy for empire, where whiteness was mythologized, and conquest was destiny.”
Rowling’s Wizarding World: Bureaucracy of Bloodlines
Rowling doesn’t challenge Tolkien’s legacy—she administers it. Her magical Britain is a world of inherited power, racial purity metaphors, and colonial gatekeeping.
Blood Hierarchies: “Purebloods,” “Mudbloods,” and “Squibs” rehearse eugenic classifications. Magic is racialized.
Magical Servitude: House elves remain loyal to servitude; Dobby’s liberation is framed as exceptional.
Global Magical Cultures: Non-European traditions are exoticized or barely sketched. Hogwarts remains the imperial center.
Fantastic Beasts: Magical creatures from “foreign lands” are collected, classified, and controlled—imperial zoology in wizard robes.
Rowling doesn’t deconstruct empire; she domesticates it.
Decolonial Ethics: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Refusal of Mastery
Where Tolkien mythologized empire and Rowling administered it, Ursula K. Le Guin dismantled its logic. In A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), her protagonist Ged is brown-skinned, flawed, and shaped by humility, not conquest. Magic is not inherited but earned through balance, not domination.
Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle rejects racial cartography and bloodline bureaucracy. Her world is archipelagic, plural, and relational. Power is not a birthright—it is a burden. Her speculative lens reframes fantasy as ethical inquiry, not imperial nostalgia.
“To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
Le Guin’s fiction doesn’t mourn empire. It refuses and refutes it. Her protagonists do not ascend; they reconcile. In a genre obsessed with mastery, she depicted care as courage, and humility as strength.
Media SF: Westerns in Space
The Wild Wild West: Steam, Saddle, and Surveillance
Photo by Rene Terp: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vintage-brown-crt-tv-on-parquet-wood-flooring-333984/
Before Star Trek launched its utopian diplomacy, The Wild Wild West fused frontier mythology with speculative espionage aboard a steampunk version of the Starship Enterprise (a train) travelling into strange new scenarios.
Set during Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, the show imagined a technocratic Secret Service armed with steampunk gadgets, mad scientists, and genre-bending plots. It wasn’t just a Western, it was speculative fiction in disguise.
Spy-Fi meets Sci-Fi: Anachronistic tech, villainous masterminds, and proto-cybernetic threats.
Vernean Echoes: The show’s inventions and aesthetic mirrored Jules Verne’s imperial wonder, but with American bravado.
Colonial Logic: The frontier remained lawless, surveilled, and mastered by elite agents — a rehearsal of settler futurism.
Though set in post-Civil War America, the show rehearses settler futurism: lawless frontiers, technological mastery, and surveillance framed as moral order… all filtered through a white protagonist’s gaze.
Star Trek: Utopian Diplomacy or Colonial Paternalism?
The Federation often mirrors liberal empire: a benevolent force spreading peace, but with strict rules (like the Prime Directive) that echo colonial paternalism—deciding when and how “less advanced” civilizations may be interfered with.
Space Western tropes abound: frontier outposts, rugged captains, and moral dilemmas that resemble settler narratives.
DS9 complicates this: with darker themes of occupation, resistance, and trauma. The Maquis storyline, for example, evokes Indigenous dispossession and rebellion.
Babylon 5: The Anti-Trek That Still Rehearses Empire
J. Michael Straczynski built Babylon 5 as a serialized epic with political realism, moral ambiguity, and long-form consequences.
The station itself is a colonial crossroads—a diplomatic hub where alien empires jockey for influence. It critiques imperialism, but still centers human governance and technocratic control.
The Shadow War and Vorlon manipulation evoke Cold War proxy conflicts, with metaphysical overtones of order vs chaos—yet still framed through human exceptionalism.
Space Westerns: Genre as Colonial Rehearsal
From Firefly to The Mandalorian, the space western genre often recycles settler tropes: lone gunslingers, lawless frontiers, and “civilising” missions. Firefly proclaims itself to be a purveyor of Western marrying Asian cultures, but has been subjected to particularly pointed fan criticism for its Orientalism, wild west tropes and racism: How Much Is that Geisha in the Window?
The alien “other” is frequently coded as Indigenous, exotic, or primitive—mirroring 19th-century racial hierarchies.
Even when sympathetic, these portrayals rarely escape the gaze of the white protagonist.
Diversity as Decoration
From Star Trek’s utopian diplomacy to Blade Runner’s neon dystopia, speculative fiction often rehearses racial inclusion as aesthetic, not agency. Hikaru Sulu had no first name for decades—his identity suspended between pan-Asian symbolism and narrative invisibility. Harry Kim remained an ensign for seven seasons, echoing the racial ceiling of labour without legacy. Uhura, groundbreaking yet unnamed, was both present and anonymized. Chakotay fused generic “Native American” mysticism with Māori-inspired tattoos; a hybrid stereotype that erased specificity in favour of exoticism. The white gaze reigned supreme.
Beyond Trek, genre tropes amplify this logic. Tolkien’s orcs are racialized as savage and irredeemable; X-Men frames difference as disease; Blade Runner drapes its city in kanji and robotic geishas, yet centres white protagonists. Rue’s death in Hunger Games becomes a moral awakening for Katniss, while Asian aesthetics in cyberpunk serve as backdrop, not subject. These aren’t isolated missteps, they’re structural rehearsals of empire, where racialized bodies are symbolic, exoticised, sacrificial, or sidelined.
Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It stylized it.
Reclaiming the Future: Postcolonial Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It was born from it. Its earliest worlds were not imagined futures, but rebranded frontiers. From pulp-era space operas to lost race narratives, empire was the genre’s blueprint. But postcolonial writers have long used speculative fiction to reclaim memory, reframe myth, and resist inherited futures.
What Is Postcolonial Speculative Fiction?
Rewrites history from the margins, not the metropole
Centers Indigenous, diasporic, and hybrid identities
Challenges Western epistemologies and genre convention and genre conventions
Imagines futures forged through resistance, not conquest
These stories don’t just diversify speculative fiction. They demand accountability. They ask: whose future is being imagined, and who gets to survive it?
Nnedi Okorafor and the Rise of Africanfuturism
Nnedi Okorafor coined Africanfuturism to distinguish her work from Afrofuturism. Where Afrofuturism often centers diaspora, Africanfuturism begins on the continent—with ancestral memory, ecological intimacy, and resistance to neocolonialism.
Brave New Worlds
While Nnedi Okorafor reclaims African futurity through ancestral memory and ecological intimacy, other writers have taken speculative fiction in radically divergent directions—each dismantling inherited genre architecture and rebuilding it from the margins.
Samuel R. Delany queered the future and fractured its syntax, crafting nonlinear, erotic, and philosophical worlds that defied Campbellian gatekeeping. In Dhalgren and Babel-17, language becomes a site of rupture, desire, and epistemic rebellion—where survival is not heroic, but contradictory and intimate. His work made space for Black, queer, and experimental voices long excluded from the genre’s canon.
Ambelin Kwaymullina centers Indigenous epistemology, where Country is sentient and survival is relational, not extractive. Her Tribe series, beginning with The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, imagines a future Australia where Aboriginal youth resist authoritarian control through memory, care, and vegetal agency. She brings First Nations futurity into a genre that once erased Indigenous presence entirely.
Tade Thompson reframes alien invasion as postcolonial surveillance in Rosewater, the first book of the Wormwood Trilogy. Set in a Nigeria transformed by alien infrastructure, his work probes sovereignty, complicity, and biopolitical control—where the alien is not otherworldly, but intimately colonial. His narratives center African protagonists and postcolonial critique in a space long dominated by Western technocracy.
Aliette de Bodard constructs diasporic empires governed by relational AI and matriarchal ethics. In her Xuya universe—especially On a Red Station, Drifting and The Citadel of Weeping Pearls—technology is kin, not tool, and memory is a form of governance. Her futures resist techno-Orientalist tropes by centering Southeast Asian intimacy and ancestral ethics, restoring diasporic and feminine agency to speculative space.
Together, these authors don’t just diversify speculative fiction—they reprogram its moral code. Their work insists that futurity must be accountable to history, kinship, and resistance. They write not from the center, but from the wound—and in doing so, they make the genre answerable to the lives it once erased.
Expanding the Final Frontier
Asianfuturism and the Techno-Orientalist Gaze
Speculative fiction has long exoticized East Asian cultures through the lens of techno-Orientalism—a term coined to describe how Asian bodies and aesthetics are rendered as futuristic yet dehumanized. Cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner and Neuromancer drape their dystopias in kanji signage and robotic geishas, but rarely center Asian protagonists or epistemologies. Writers like Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie) and Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown) resist this flattening by reclaiming diasporic memory and racial coding as speculative tools. Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya universe deepens this resistance, imagining a galactic empire governed by Vietnamese ethics and relational AI. Her work doesn’t just challenge techno-Orientalist tropes—it rewrites the future through Southeast Asian intimacy and ancestral governance.
Global South Speculation and the Postcolonial Viewpoint
Beyond Western genre boundaries, speculative fiction from the Global South offers radically different visions of futurity. Vandana Singh’s ecological SF interrogates climate collapse through Indian cosmology, while Sofia Samatar blends Somali myth and linguistic hybridity in A Stranger in Olondria. Cuban author Yoss crafts socialist futurism laced with Caribbean surrealism, challenging capitalist assumptions embedded in mainstream SF. These writers don’t merely diversify the genre—they provincialize its center. Their futures are forged through resistance, hybridity, and survival—not conquest. In a genre once dominated by Anglo-American technocracy, Global South voices restore speculative fiction’s capacity for moral plurality and cultural accountability.
Biological Racism and the Legacy of Eugenics
Speculative fiction has often rehearsed the pseudoscience of racial hierarchy—from H.G. Wells’s “dying race” trope in The Outline of History to the genetic determinism of Gattaca and X-Men. These narratives frame evolution as a racial ladder, where some bodies are destined to vanish and others to inherit the future. Octavia Butler’s Patternist series dismantles this logic, imagining psychic networks shaped by trauma, not purity. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy goes further, embedding inherited violence into the geology of the planet itself. These counter-narratives don’t just critique eugenics—they reimagine survival as a collective reckoning with history, embodiment, and care.
Cognitive Colonialism and Language Erasure
Western speculative fiction often privileges linearity, logic, and linguistic dominance—reinforcing cognitive colonialism through its very structure. Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 exposes this by weaponizing language itself, while Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary imagines a post-apocalyptic Japan where language deteriorates alongside the body. Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M explores memory loss as a speculative metaphor for cultural erasure. These works challenge the genre’s epistemic assumptions, asking what futures become possible when cognition is plural, memory is contested, and language is no longer a tool of mastery. They don’t just imagine new worlds—they imagine new ways of knowing.
These aren’t gestures of inclusion. They are structural challenges to tradition, each one demanding that speculative fiction be answerable to the histories it once erased. It must imagine futures where care is not weakness, where memory is not burden, and where survival is not mastery, but mutuality. This is not a genre revision. It is a moral imperative.
Art by Copilot AI
Speculative fiction didn’t escape colonialism. It was born there. To imagine futures worth surviving, we must first confront the histories we inherit.
From here, the future awaits. And perhaps, in time, even AI or other sentient forms will add their own stories to the genre, reimagining not just who survives, but who dreams.
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.
