Category: Science Fiction

Race and the Colonial Imagination

Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Part I

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

Artwork by Copilot AI

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.

Image by Clau M from Pixabay

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

Art by Copilot AI

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

Art by Copilot AI

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)

Art by Copilot AI

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.

Further Reading

Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Speculative Fiction and the Colonial Imagination

A four-part journey through how speculative fiction echoed empire, rewrites resistance, and reclaims futurity.

Part One: Race and the Colonial Imagination
Published: 2 January 2026
Read Part One
From Lucian to Le Guin, speculative fiction’s imperial DNA is exposed: how imagined futures rehearsed conquest, racial hierarchy, and colonial logic.

Part Two: The Hero Must Be Rewritten
Published: 22 February 2026
Read Part Two
Gender and the myth of the universal hero. This chapter rewrites masculinist genre scaffolding, tracing how speculative fiction disciplines emotion, care, and female agency.

Part Three: Sexuality & Queer Futures
Published: 1 April 2026
Read Part Three
A queer reading of Star Trek and speculative canon. This chapter critiques heteronormative erasure, celebrates queer fandom’s legacy, and imagines futures beyond genre discipline.

Part Four: We Occupy the Future
Published: 5 April 2026
Read Part Four
Published on the anniversaries of the 504 Sit-In and Medibank Blockade, this chapter confronts techno-fix fantasies and reimagines futures where disabled bodies are not corrected or cured, but centred, celebrated, and architecturally included.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with editorial and layout assistance from Copilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

Fandom’s Humanitarian Legacy

Published on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, 25 November 2025.

This date honours support networks, queer shelters, and feminist ficathons that fandom has sustained for decades.

“Compassion is sometimes the most valuable leadership quality.”
— Captain Kathryn Janeway

“Let me help.” — Spock, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

“Violence is a choice… We can choose to stop it.” — Sir Patrick Stewart.

Our human adventure is just beginning…

One of my efforts in past years was helping to start a Star Trek club. Although it officially celebrates its fiftieth birthday next year (2026), many of its foundations were laid the year before… fifty years ago this year.

Over the last half century, people have thanked me for founding a club that, in their own words, literally saved their lives. It gave them networks of support, extended families, and lifelong friends and partners. I remember fans rallying to secure medical care that saved a young woman’s eyesight. I joined letter campaigns advocating for the space shuttle and for medical research funding. Clubs and individuals supported annual telethons and charities for cancer, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, animals, a children’s hospital, and homelessness. Conventions continue to run auctions for charity.

These communities also organized care networks for those on the spectrum, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people living with disability; decades before diversity, equity, inclusion, or multiculturalism became mainstream. Inspired by the principles of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations and Let Me Help, they formed living communities that reflected the utopian ideals that first inspired them. I look forward to more charity as a practical expression of the difference that fandom can make.

Before modern fandom became a constellation of hashtags and conventions, it was a quiet network of zines passed hand to hand, club meetings in school rooms or church halls. Long before social media allowed modern forms of networking, fans were organizing by snail mail to achieve justice: raising funds for disaster relief, publishing charitable anthologies, and responding to global crises with speed and compassion.

What follows is a necessarily incomplete list of fandoms and activism, dating back longer than we imagine.

Before Fandom Had a Name

Art by Copilot AI

Before fandom revolved around cosplaying Hercules, Loki and Thor, it revolved around cosplaying earlier incarnations of Hercules, Loki and Thor. Ancient cultures didn’t gather around franchises or conventions; they gathered around legends. From the cult of Osiris in Egypt to the Epic of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, stories were not just told, but reenacted in festivals, temples, and seasonal ceremonies.

These early fandoms built identity around shared stories:

  • Egypt (c. 2500 BCE):
    The cult of Osiris held annual festivals reenacting his death and rebirth. They included public grain distribution and burial rites for the poor, especially during the Khoiak festival. Temples in ancient Egypt served as a focus of community well-being and economy: managing land, storing grain, and hosting festivals. These events included public feasting and burials for the poor, echoing humanitarianism before modern welfare institutions.
  • Mesopotamia (c. 2100 BCE):
    The Epic of Gilgamesh circulated across city-states, inspiring temple performances and civic duties. Temples functioned as economic and ceremonial centres: managing grain, hosting seasonal festivals, and offering employment.
  • Indus Valley (c. 2500–1900 BCE):
    Though textual evidence is scarce, archaeological finds in Mohenjo-daro and Harappa suggest community granaries and advanced water systems. These imply coordination and shared resource management, which may have supported seasonal gatherings and celebrations. Such support networks hint at shared care that echoes today’s fandoms.
  • Shang Dynasty China (c. 1600 BCE):
    Ancestor veneration in Shang Dynasty China involved resource pooling. Clans funded burials, elder care, and community feasts. They were built on tradition and kinship.

Medieval Rudimentary Fandom: Ritual, Storytelling, and Benevolence

A morality play unfolds in a castle courtyard, watched by monks, knights, and townsfolk. A Hospitaller knight stands beside a noblewoman, while a bard prepares to recite. The scene evokes medieval forms of fandom, where myth intersected with community care. Its costumes and rolepay were strikingly reminiscent of a modern-day convention. Art by Copilot AI.

Long before fan clubs and ficathons, medieval Europe cultivated early forms of fandom through stories, theatrical performance, and acts of community solidarity.

In the Society for Creative Anachronism, medieval lore is relived. Members cosplay knights, bards, and monarchs drawn from mythic archetypes, reviving the age of chivalry and storytelling. Echoing the guilds of yore, local chapters often host fundraising tournaments and feasts, with charitable efforts documented in outlets like the East Kingdom Gazette, a modern chronicle of pageantry, service, and aid.

Morality Plays as Aid

From the 12th century onward, morality plays like Everyman and The Castle of Perseverance were staged by guilds to raise funds for hospitals, leper houses, and burial societies. These performances were often tied to Corpus Christi festivals, blending religious allegory with civics.

I recall visiting an old UK church many years ago, and reading a medieval honour roll above the doorway that listed ancient community tithes: how many crops or oxen or pennies or hours of volunteer time that each community member had pledged annually to help the poor. Although the list was some centuries old, its documentation of medieval village life was reminiscent (to me) of modern fandom: recording community, documenting their efforts, acknowledging the difference that each individual had made for the collective good. Adjusted for modern times and contexts, this listing could easily pass as an honour roll on a convention website or club newsletter – people acting positively as a reflection of the ethics and inspiration they found in their community stories.

What began as medieval community building now appears at conventions and charity networks.

Chivalric Orders and Story-based Support Systems

Military-monastic orders like the Knights Hospitaller and Order of Saint Lazarus enacted chivalric ideals through organized charity. They provided care for pilgrims, ransomed captives, and operated hospitals across Europe. According to the Catholic University of America Press, the Order of Saint John “sheltered pilgrims, tended to victims of skin diseases, and cared for orphans and the sick.” A discussion on Reddit’s Medieval History forum adds that these orders “were monks as well as knights,” forming a dual role of ritual and service.

Noble Patronage and Literary Devotion

The court of Marie de Champagne, patron of Chrétien de Troyes, helped promote Arthurian myth and the ideal of courtly love. Though not directly linked to charity drives, her court supported religious institutions and civic stability.

As described by the Renaissance English History Podcast, Marie “played a pivotal role in fostering the concept of courtly love,” inspiring iconic works like Lancelot. Meanwhile, World History Edu notes that Chrétien’s romances “reshaped Arthurian legend from historical epic to moral narrative.”

These courts functioned as early forms of fandom.

Early Modern Fandoms: Literary Devotion and Abolitionist Networks

Long before fanfic and filking, fandoms formed around salons, concert halls, and pamphlet presses. Shakespearean societies, Mozart devotees, and abolitionist circles built supportive communities through performance, correspondence, and civic activism.

Shakespeare: By the 18th century, Shakespeare’s works were ritualized in annual festivals, public readings, and theatrical replays. The Shakespeare Club of Stratford-upon-Avon, founded in 1824, organized commemorative events and supported local education and preservation efforts.

Mozart: Devotees of Mozart formed early musical societies that hosted benefit concerts for hospitals, orphanages, and civic causes. The Mozarteum Foundation, established in Salzburg, preserves this legacy while supporting music education and humanitarian outreach.

Abolitionist Networks: Literary fandom promoted moral actions in the 18th and 19th centuries, as readers of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass formed correspondence circles, hosted readings, and funded anti-slavery campaigns. These early fandoms used story as blueprint, encouraging adherents to act. The American Memory Project documents how pamphlets, speeches, and serialized narratives became tools of abolitionist organizing.

Fandom’s Historic Heart: A Legacy of Kindness

Long before Luke wielded a lightsaber or Spock raised an eyebrow, Arthur’s Excalibur and Sherlock’s logic were already shaping myth and ethics for millions. From Victorian sleuths to medieval legends, historic fandoms have long inspired acts of organized kindness.

Sherlock Holmes: The First Modern Fandom

Sherlockians formed one of the earliest organized fandoms, and their charitable legacy reflects that. The Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1934, and its global scion societies have hosted charity dinners, auctions, and literacy drives. The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, founded in the 1960s, challenged gender discrimination, supporting women’s education and literary employment.

In 2013, the Sherlock Holmes Charity Game Bundle raised funds for Children of Ukraine, offering digital Holmes games and donated 100% of proceeds. Sherlockian societies continue to support libraries, literacy programs, and historical preservation, especially in London and New York.

Robin Hood: Myth Versus Real-World Impact

Robin Hood fandom may not gather at conventions, but its mythology has inspired major philanthropic activism. The Robin Hood Foundation, founded in 1988, is one of the largest anti-poverty charities in New York City. Though not a fandom group per se, its name and ideals are explicitly drawn from the credo: “taking from the rich to give to the poor.” It has raised over $3 billion for housing, education, and disaster relief.

The Foundation’s annual Robin Hood Gala is one of the world’s largest single-night fundraisers, featuring performances by artists like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.

King Arthur: Ritual, Resistance, and Revival

Arthurian fandom is more diffuse, but its mythos has inspired charitable and educational efforts. The Quondam et Futurus Wiki catalogs Arthurian legend and encourages community contributions to preserve mythic heritage. Arthurian societies often support educational charities, medieval studies, and peace-building initiatives, echoing Camelot’s ideals.

Even the Teachers’ Charity Carnival featured in the PBS series Arthur implicitly references how Arthurian ideas promote charitable viewpoints inside children’s media.

Lord of the Rings: Myth into Method

Tolkien fandom has built some of the most robust charitable activism in fandom. The Tolkien Trust, founded in 1977 by Tolkien’s children, supports disaster relief, refugee aid, environmental causes, and education. Major grants have gone to Médecins Sans Frontières, UNICEF, Oxfam, and BirdLife International.

The Tolkien Society (UK) is a registered educational charity that hosts seminars, publishes journals, and supports literacy scholarship. In the US, the Mythopoeic Society, founded in 1967, supports academic work on Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams, and hosts Mythcon, often with charity components.

Tolkien fandom builds real-world opportunities for healing and hope.

Fandom and Charity: From Activism to Zines

Fandom has always been more than escapism. Across decades, fans have organized charity drives, published benefit zines, and built clubs that channel imagination into real-world activism. From AIDS activism in the 1990s to Palestine in the 2020s, these efforts show how storytelling communities become beacons of hope.

AIDS and Fandom

During the height of the AIDS crisis, fandoms rallied to support affected communities. Conventions like Zebracon, Revelcon, and Friscon hosted charity drives for organizations such as the Pediatric AIDS Foundation [Fanlore].

  • David Gerrold, writer of the shelved Star Trek: TNG script “Blood and Fire” sold the script to raise funds for AIDS Project Los Angeles. (I purchased a copy directly off him at a Melbourne convention in the early 1990s, being one of many fans learning how to put kindness into practice).
  • U.F.P. Australia, a Star Trek RPG club, raised money for a local PWA centre supporting people with AIDS.
  • Charity Zines: Several fan-published zines donated proceeds to AIDS-related causes, blending creative expression with activism.

Fanworks also explored AIDS as a theme, especially in slash fiction, reflecting both grief and advocacy.

Gaza Solidarity in Fandom

“Fandom responds — art, fic, and care in the face of crisis. Art by Copilot AI

In response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, fandoms launched coordinated charity efforts. The Gotcha for Gaza initiative, begun in June 2024, organized multifandom fundraisers, fic commissions, and charity zines to support aid efforts.

  • Fans donated to vetted charities and received custom fanworks in return: art, fic, cosplay, and more.
  • Support came from volunteer creators across fandoms like Tian Guan Ci Fu, Marvel, and Undertale.
  • Proceeds supported causes such as evacuation aid, medical supplies, feminine hygiene kits, and pet care.

These efforts showed how fandom can respond with speed and creativity to a crisis like Palestine.

Conventions, Fanzines, and Clubs

Beyond crisis response, fandom has long built networks for charity and community:

Fandom as Aid

Fandom’s charitable legacy has enabled fans to create zines that fund survival, auctions that support health clinics, ficathons that turn grief into action.

From the earliest fan clubs supporting cancer telethons to more modern fic commissions funding tsunami relief, fandom has organized; not because they’re asked to, but because their stories have taught them how to care.

These networks often precede institutional response. When disaster strikes, fans are already mobilizing: vetting charities, coordinating creators, and distributing aid.

As fandoms grow more intersectional, their mutual aid expands too: queer fans supporting trans youth shelters, K-pop fans funding flood relief, speculative fiction fans defending literacy and climate justice.

Fans don’t just imagine better worlds; they build them, one story and one donation at a time.

art by Copilot AI

Legacy in Practice

Arthur C. Clarke supported disability rights and disaster relief in Sri Lanka, where he lived for over 50 years. He co-founded Underwater Safaris, promoting inclusive diving programs for paraplegic youth and science education. Clarke’s cross-cultural advocacy earned him both British and Sri Lankan honors, and his global work is explored in the British Journal for the History of Science.

Octavia Butler seeded scholarships for marginalized writers through the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, administered by the Carl Brandon Society. Her legacy also lives on through Pasadena City College scholarships for first-generation students, ensuring futures she never lived to see.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future inspired real-world climate policy discourse, including proposals for a carbon coin tied to carbon mitigation. The idea draws from Delton Chen’s Global Carbon Reward initiative, and Robinson describes the novel as a “cognitive map” for post-capitalist futures.

Fandom and LGBTQ+ Charity

Fandom has long been a sanctuary for queer expression, and a launchpad for LGBTQ+ activism. From slash fiction to convention fundraisers, fans have organized to support queer lives, challenge media homophobia, and raise funds for equality. These efforts reflect fandom’s role as both cultural critic and activist.

Zines for Queer Advocacy

  • Charity Zines: Fan-published zines have raised funds for LGBTQ+ organizations, including Lambda Legal, The Trevor Project, and Trans Lifeline. These often coincide with Pride Month or respond to political flashpoints [Fanlore].
  • Slash Fandom: Historically, slash zines were sold at conventions with proceeds supporting queer youth shelters and HIV/AIDS clinics.

Conventions and Campaigns

  • Escapade: A long-running slash convention in California, Escapade has hosted charity auctions supporting LGBTQ+ causes, including local trans support groups and legal aid funds.
  • LGBT Fans Deserve Better: A fan-led campaign in response to the death of Lexa on The 100 raised over $170,000 for The Trevor Project and other queer charities, while sparking industry-wide conversations about representation.

Digital Solidarity

Online fandoms have mobilized ficathons, art commissions, and livestreams to support LGBTQ+ charities—often in response to anti-trans legislation, media erasure, or community grief. These decentralized efforts turn fandom into a rallying space.

  • For Lorie: A multifandom ficathon supporting Ovarian cancer research.
  • Stream for Good: Livestreamers raising funds for LGBTQ+ health and rights.
  • Embryo Digital: Pride-inspired art commissions supporting akt, a charity for homeless LGBTQ+ youth.

Queer Fandom as Infrastructure

Queer fandom as infrastructure, zines as lifelines and grief-related activism. Art by Copilot AI.

From zines to hashtags, queer fandom has built a moral infrastructure that honors identity, funds survival, and challenges injustice.

Fandom Forward: Organized Kindness

Modern fandoms are no longer passive audiences. From K-pop’s ARMY to the Harry Potter-inspired Fandom Forward, fans have raised millions for disaster relief, education, healthcare, and human rights.

K-pop’s ARMY: Global Mobilization

BTS’s fanbase, ARMY, has become a philanthropic force. In 2020, fans matched BTS’s $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter in under 24 hours [NPR]. But their activism spans continents and causes:

  • Food Drives: ARMY Singapore raised funds for Food Bank SG, distributing 136 bundles of food to disadvantaged communities.
  • Environmental Action: Korean fans adopted whales through WWF in RM’s name, including a Beluga and Narwhal.
  • Medical Aid: ARMY Peru supported leukemia research; ARMY Russia donated $15,000 to Gift of Life for children with cancer.
  • Disaster Relief: Fans in Nepal organized nationwide collection points for flood victims.

Fandom Forward: From Hogwarts to Haiti

Founded in 2005 as The Harry Potter Alliance, Fandom Forward turned magical allegory into civic action. Their campaigns tackled genocide, climate change, book bans, and labor rights:

Even as Fandom Forward closed its doors in 2024, its legacy lives on in fan-led chapters and campaigns worldwide.

Myth into Method

These fandoms don’t just imagine heroism; they become them. Whether it’s gifting rice in honour of a K-pop idol or defending literacy like Hermione Granger, fans enact the values they admire. Fandom becomes a way to dream forward, together.

Fandom Responds to the Wave: Tsunami Relief and Aid

Fan calendars as humanitarian clocks… aid across Asia. Art by Copilot AI.

When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck on Boxing Day 2004, it wasn’t just governments and NGOs that mobilized. Fandoms responded with speed, creativity, and kindness.

  • Reach Out to Asia, a charity born from the disaster, auctioned a guitar signed by 19 rock legends (including McCartney, Clapton, and Page) which sold for $2.7 million, effectively transforming a fan artifact into one of the most valuable single humanitarian tools ever wielded.
  • Anime Detour, a fan convention in Minnesota, redirected its entire 2011 charity auction to the Red Cross for Japan tsunami relief, raising over $36,000. Their charitable fundraising has continued since 2005.
  • K-pop fandoms in Indonesia raised nearly $100,000 in 2021 for flood and earthquake victims in South Kalimantan and Sulawesi. These weren’t isolated donations. They have supported Black Lives Matter and criticised political crises.

Fandom for the Planet: Environmental Activism

Environmental activism has become a major focus in fan-led movements, especially in K-pop and speculative fiction communities.

  • Kpop4Planet, founded by fans of EXO and BTS, campaigns against coal expansion, deforestation, and climate inaction. Their digital petitions and tree-planting drives have reached tens of thousands, proving that fan networks can rival NGOs in reach and impact.
  • In 2021, Blackpink’s COP26 campaign video urged fans to act on climate change, reaching nearly 60 million subscribers.
  • Youth 4 Climate Action, a fan-rooted Korean movement, sued their government for climate inaction.

Fandom for the Planet: Global South Perspectives

Global fandom (symbols of care supporting the planet). Art by Copilot AI.

Fandom’s ecological imagination isn’t confined to East Asia or Western speculative fiction. Across Africa and Latin America, fans have mobilized for climate justice with creativity and passion.

Whether through cosplay protests, ficathons for reforestation, or zines that highlight climate justice, fans in the Global South are transforming ecological grief into creative resistance. Their activism is rooted in local storytelling traditions and indigenous cosmologies.

Africa: Climate Justice as Community Ritual

In Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, fan-rooted youth movements have joined forces with African Activists for Climate Justice (AACJ). These groups blend pop culture, digital storytelling, and grassroots organizing:

  • Fan-driven campaigns on platforms like Power to Voices amplify climate narratives using memes, cosplay, and remix culture.
  • Feminist fandoms in South Africa’s Wild Coast region use zines and fan art to resist environmental damage.
  • Young Lawyers Initiative (Nigeria) channels fandom’s enthusiasm into activism, training youth to become climate defenders.

Latin America: Resistance

In Colombia, Brazil, and Chile, fandoms have woven climate justice into cultural resistance:

Indigenous Storytelling Beyond Fandom

Living Story as Infrastructure
In Australia, First Nations creators have shaped media that blends Aboriginal lore with speculative futurism. One powerful example is Cienan Muir, a Yorta Yorta, Taungurung, and Ngarrindjeri advocate who founded IndigiNerd, a platform celebrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices in comics, cosplay, and geek culture. Through IndigiNerd, Muir has created safe spaces for Indigenous youth to explore identity, storytelling, and pop culture without shame. IndigiNerd hosted Australia’s first Indigenous Comic Con, spotlighting First Nations artists and storytellers.

Similarly, the TV series Cleverman, shaped by Indigenous creators including Hunter Page-Lochard, drew from deep cultural wells. Page-Lochard is the son of Bangarra’s former Artistic Director Stephen Page, and his performance connections link to Bangarra Dance Theatre.

The show inspired fan-led support through:
– Cosplay and fan art inspired by culturally grounded design, including the Hairypeople created in collaboration with Indigenous artists
– Educational campaigns on land rights and cultural survival.

Global Constellations
Across the world, Indigenous creators are building story as infrastructure:
– In Aotearoa, Māori artists like Cassie Hart and Whiti Hereaka remix speculative fiction with whakapapa and atua, creating novels and comics rooted in tikanga and ancestral lore
– Sámi creators resist green colonialism and climate injustice through storytelling, opposing projects that threaten land and reindeer herding culture.
– Queer Indigenous fans build zines and ficathons as lifelines—not just art—through collectives like Brown Recluse Zine Distro and LGBTQ Nation.

Tradition, Protest, and Memory
Indigenous fans mobilize around:
– Language reclamation and media critique
– Ficathons and art auctions supporting land defense and water justice
– Story as survival, not spectacle.

Galactic Solidarity: Star Trek and Star Wars

Roddenberry’s vision: a compassionate federation, where fans become the heroes. Art by Copilot AI

Star Trek and Star Wars, two of the most expansive mythologies of our time, have inspired generations to act with compassion, courage, and collective purpose. Their communities have mobilized for education, inclusion, medical aid, and planetary protection, proving that even galaxies far, far away can shape the world right here.

Although fans might suggest that these franchises focus on different mythologies (utopianism as opposed to good versus evil), both narratives present modern morality plays and promote the ultimate victory of goodness over evil; in turn, encouraging fans to live the dream.

Star Trek: Take the Chair, Make an Impact

In 2024, the Star Trek franchise launched a global charity campaign called Take the Chair, Make an Impact, inviting fans to imagine themselves in the captain’s seat and chart a course toward justice. The campaign partnered with three nonprofits:

  • Code.org: Promoting computer science education for every K–12 student.
  • DoSomething.org: Empowering youth-led activism and civic engagement.
  • Outright International: Advocating for global LGBTIQ equality.

Fans participated through events in Chicago, Berlin, and Vancouver, and 25% of select merchandise sales were donated to these causes.

Star Trek’s ideals (diversity, inclusion, and hope) became not just celebration, but action. Fans didn’t just quote Roddenberry’s vision; they lived it.

Star Wars: Force for Change

Launched in 2014 by Lucasfilm and Disney, Star Wars: Force for Change channels fan energy into global problem-solving. The initiative has supported:

  • UNICEF: $4.2 million raised for children’s health and education worldwide.
  • FIRST Robotics: Sponsoring STEM competitions for students globally.
  • Children’s Hospitals: Mark Hamill and others visiting patients in costume to lift spirits.

Fans have entered sweepstakes to appear in films, bought themed merchandise for charity, and joined campaigns to support refugee relief and youth empowerment.

The 501st Legion: Villains Doing Good

The 501st Legion, a global Star Wars costuming group, has turned stormtrooper armour into a tool for kindness. With over 14,000 members, they’ve supported:

  • Make-A-Wish Foundation events and hospital visits.
  • Disaster relief fundraisers and community outreach.
  • Educational programs and parades promoting inclusion.

Though they dress as villains, their mission is deeply heroic: bringing joy, raising funds, and standing for hope.

Galactic Myth, Earthly Impact

Whether it’s a tricorder or a lightsabre, these fandoms wield symbols that inspire action. Through organized kindness, fans turn myth into motivation.

Time Lords of Kindness: Doctor Who and the Ethics of Aid

While Star Trek and Star Wars offer galactic visions, Doctor Who brings morality closer to home. Its fandom has long blurred the line between fiction and activism.

Charity Anthologies and Zines

  • Adventures in Lockdown (2020) raised funds for Children in Need, featuring stories by Russell T Davies, Neil Gaiman, and others written during the pandemic.
  • Time Shadows and Second Nature (2016–2018) supported charities like Enable Community Foundation and LimbForge through fan-edited anthologies.
  • A Pile of Good Things and The Hybrid zines raised funds for mental health and LGBTQ+ causes, blending character arcs with real-world care.

Conventions and Campaigns

  • Children in Need Specials have featured Doctor Who cast since the 1980s, including live appearances and donation drives.
  • Fan clubs and cosplay groups have organized raffles, livestreams, and charity auctions — often timed to regenerations, anniversaries, or season premieres.

Fandoms of Resistance: Babylon 5, Firefly, & Hitchhiker’s Guide

Not every fandom builds vast humanitarian infrastructure, but even quieter communities can spark compassion and kindness. Babylon 5, Firefly, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy each offer unique stories of activism.

Babylon 5: Quiet Legacy

While Babylon 5 lacks a flagship charity, its concepts of resistance and diplomacy have inspired fan-led actions. Creator J. Michael Straczynski has publicly supported causes like LGBTQ+ rights and mental health, often engaging fans in awareness campaigns. Fan forums and conventions have hosted a memorial fundraiser for cast member Richard Biggs and a tribute video for Andreas Katsulas; this last including a memorial edit requested by his widow featuring her favorite G’Kar quote.

Firefly: Browncoats Doing Good

Aiming to Misbehave. Art by Copilot AI.

Few fandoms have mobilized like Firefly’s. The Can’t Stop the Serenity initiative, founded in 2006, organizes annual charity screenings of Serenity to raise funds for Equality Now. Over $1.3 million has been raised across 124 cities.

Local chapters like the Arizona Browncoats operate as registered nonprofits, supporting community causes through events and merchandise. These efforts echo Firefly’s ideal: “Aim to misbehave… for a good cause.”

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Quirky but Quiet

Art by Copilot AI

Though less visible, HHGG fandom has flirted with organized kindness. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Foundation was registered in the UK to promote education and communication skills, especially literacy. Its current status is unclear, but the potential remains.

New Stars in the Constellation

Fandom’s humanitarian legacy continues to evolve.

Steven Universe

A fandom rooted in queer empathy and emotional literacy. Fans have supported trans youth shelters, mental health campaigns, and Pride fundraisers.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Fans have mobilized for Indigenous rights, water justice, and refugee aid.

Critical Role / TTRPG Fandoms

Charity streams have raised millions for disaster relief, trans rights, black lives matter, and mental health.

Percy Jackson / Riordanverse

Fans champion neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ youth, echoing Rick Riordan’s inclusive stories. Literacy drives and Pride campaigns support Camp Half-Blood.

Good Omens

Fandom has supported refugee aid and queer charities, often through ficathons and art commissions. The divine plan becomes a metaphor for kindness.

Polynesian Panther Party: Fandom-Adjacent Infrastructure

Like fandoms, the Polynesian Panther Party built emotional and logistical scaffolding through media, myth, and community care. Their posters, zines, and oral histories functioned as acts of resistance. With chapters across New Zealand and Australia, they mirrored fandom’s decentralized structure and lifelong affiliations. As NZ History notes, their motto “Once a Panther, always a Panther” echoes across fandom culture.

Fandoms Beyond Genre: Music, Sport, and Literary Legacy

Not all fandoms orbit speculative worlds. Some rise from stadiums, concert halls, and libraries, yet their networks of care are no less significant. These communities have mobilized for disaster relief, human rights, and planetary stewardship, proving that organized kindness transcends genre.

  • Music Fandoms Against Gender-Based Violence: During the 16 Days of Activism campaign, UNDP Indonesia hosted a panel titled “Calling Music Fans ‘FANDOM’ to End Gender-Based Violence”. The all-women panel spotlighted how female-led fandoms (especially in K-pop and pop music) have mobilized to challenge gender norms, support survivors, and fund shelters for women and children. Speakers emphasized fandoms as decentralized movements of empathy, often dismissed due to gender bias, yet deeply effective in raising awareness and organizing aid.
  • K-pop Fandoms (BTS, EXO, Blackpink): Already featured above, but worth reinforcing: K-pop fans have planted forests, funded medical aid, and matched million-dollar donations in under 24 hours.
  • Taylor Swift / Swifties: Swifties have organized donation drives for LGBTQ+ youth, domestic violence shelters, and education funds, often in response to lyrics, tour dates, or media flashpoints.
  • Football Fandoms (Liverpool, Celtic, FC Barcelona): Sport fandoms have long histories of humanitarian action. Liverpool fans raised funds for Hillsborough victims and refugee aid. Celtic supporters launched food banks and anti-racism campaigns. FC Barcelona’s foundation supports global education and health initiatives.
  • Author Fandoms (Pratchett, Gaiman, Le Guin): Fans of Terry Pratchett have raised funds for Alzheimer’s research and literacy programs. Neil Gaiman’s fandom supports refugee aid and LGBTQ+ causes, often through charity anthologies. Ursula K. Le Guin’s readers have mobilized for climate justice and Indigenous rights, echoing her ecological and anarchist themes.

Fandom’s legacy is one story, one fan, one act of kindness at a time.

As for me, I see that Star Trek taught us that the future is not a place we arrive at, it’s something we build together.

From the first zine passed hand to hand to the latest charity auction, fans have embodied Roddenberry’s vision not just in fiction, but in practice.

We raised funds for medical aid, defended LGBTQ+ dignity, and built support networks decades before institutions caught up.

Inspired by the principles of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, we’ve built clubs, conventions, and campaigns that reflect the utopia we seek.

We don’t just quote “Let Me Help.” We live it.

Fanthropology 101: Dreaming and Doing in the Real World

A four-part journey through how fandom helps us imagine better futures, and build them.

Part One: Forgotten Futures
How two dreamers imagined a better world, and gave us tools to build it
Published: 8 September 2025
Read Part One
Edward Bellamy and Gene Roddenberry didn’t just write stories, they sketched blueprints for justice, dignity, and shared humanity. Their utopias still shape how fans rehearse better futures.

Part Two: Dream It Forward
Why fandom isn’t just fun, it’s how we practice empathy
Published: 4 October 2025
Read Part Two
From Arthurian quests to Star Trek conventions, this chapter shows how fandom helps us rehearse courage, community, and care—turning stories into solidarity, and imagination into action.

Part Three: Fandom’s Humanitarian Legacy
How fans built real-world networks of care, long before hashtags and headlines
Published: 25 November 2025
Read Part Three
Ficathons, charity drives, and survivor support groups—this essay documents how fandom became a lifeline for many, offering help where institutions failed.

Part Four: From Fic to Future
Fan fiction isn’t just storytelling, it’s ethical and pragmatic life guidance
Published: 31 December 2025
Read Part Four
Honouring Diane Marchant and the legacy of fan creators, this chapter explores how fandom helps us rewrite injustice, rehearse empathy, and build continuity across generations.

©2025 Geoff Allshorn, with editorial and layout assistance from Copilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

And the Children Shall Lead


My only surviving substantial photo of the club. Some of the MASC club members at a solar eclipse excursion, Beveridge (central Victoria), 23 October 1976. (No, we were NOT looking at the Sun through a telescope, we were using pinhole cameras and other forms of technology to observe the eclipse indirectly.)

I remember this 1976 eclipse. Even the cows in the paddocks around us knew to seek shelter when the sky dimmed, but they returned when the light came back. That day, while the rest of the world was going about its business, we looked up — not just at the eclipse, but at a future that was calling us.

Genesis: From Primary School to the Paddock

They say “show me the child and I’ll show you the adult,” but that’s only half the story…

As children, we sometimes begin something small that echoes across decades, shaping lives in ways we never imagined. I had that chance – or perhaps I created it with friends – and half a century later, I can look back with astonishment at the outcomes.

It all began with a group of free spirits in primary school, role-playing “Thunderbirds” and “Lost in Space” and “H.R. Pufnstuf” while other boys were learning to kick footballs and the girls were playing elastics. While the popular kids were modelling themselves on footballers or beauty pageant queens or whatever gender binary norms were being presented in the 1960s, we looked up to Apollo Moonwalkers, the space family Robinson, and Lady Penelope – bold, confident figures who shaped their worlds. Will Robinson (a child our own age) thrived in alien landscapes, and SHADO’s own Commander Straker built the teams to face them. These weren’t just TV characters. They were our blueprint for adulthood. Later, as an adult, I can see in hindsight that the original club members grew into diverse, independent, self-empowered (sometimes bohemian) agents of their own destiny.

I was jealous of one of the girls – Annie – because she not only had a telescope but she was subscribed to a weekly comic/magazine called “Countdown” that featured graphic art stories of everything from “Thunderbirds” and “UFO” to other British science fiction (which may have inspired one of my earliest efforts at creating a fanzine). I even remember that at the tender age of 10, she filked the song “Blowin’ in the Wind”, rewriting the words to be space-aged:

The answer my friend, is in the vacuum of space
The answer is in the vacuum of space…

My recollection of her song reveals the potential for creativity that we unknowingly captured in those early days. Our gang – our club, simply known as “the club” in those times – would expand and grow as we did. In 1972, the last year of the Apollo Moon landings, we began to develop a fanzine, The Space Age – our own voice.

Drafting the Future

As we drifted off to different high schools, I eventually lost touch with some of those early friends, but made others. Two of my new friends – Peter and Russell – joined the Astronomical Society of Victoria with me in 1973. Becoming inspired by that group’s organisational structure (its general meetings and committee meetings, its Constitution and activities), we decided to remodel our little club to copy this format.

Inspired by the organisation name SHADO (Supreme Headquarters, Alien Defence Organisation) from the early-1970s TV show “UFO”, we named our club CATSMILK (the Celestial and Terrestrial Scientific Melbourne Interplanetary Link Kommission – “yes with a K” – forgive the juvenile idea, we were only 12 years old!) A couple of years later, hitting puberty, we decided that this name was a bit childish, so we renamed it as MASC (the Melbourne Amateur Science Club) and expanded our club membership to around 13 school kids across two or three schools.

The Melbourne Amateur Science Club (MASC) became a more “mainstream” (ie. “respectable”) and informal group of late primary school and lower secondary school students who ran their own science and technology-based activities. Club meetings were held on a rotating basis at private homes.

From 1973 to 1977, MASC published Club News and The Space Age — this latter being our launch-sequence zine inspired by Countdown magazine and named in part-homage to The Age newspaper. Its spirit-duplicated pages, supplemented by parental photocopies, carried our voices into the great unknown. Few copies survive, but the legacy endures.

MASC was composed of a series of subsections, each run by teenager with a particular interest in that field, for example: Physics, Astronomy, Archaeology, Chemistry, Electronics, even including Astrology and UFOlogy (these last two were intended to scientifically investigate these pseudosciences), with aligned subjects including Music and Photography. Each MASC subsection aimed to produce a report for club meetings, or the newsletter or zine.

Ignition: A Fandom Takes Flight

From CATSMILK (also eventually known as CATSMILC) to MASC, our club evolved from backyard experiments to a fandom that shaped lives.

One of our aligned interests — science fiction — quietly inspired the formation of a new subsection that would become Austrek in October 1975, sparked by Star Trek’s return to Australian television with the advent of colour TV. Teachers supported us: Mr D gave us access to duplicating machines, Mr M offered scientific guidance, and David A (who became more than just a teacher, but also a friend and colleague) stayed on as an Austrek member.

After distributing Austrek flyers at the Melbourne Star Trek Marathon in November 1976, the subsection grew so rapidly it absorbed MASC’s limited resources and became a standalone club. From there, the legacy unfolded.

Austrek touched thousands: inspiring careers, forging marriages, and offering community to those who felt alienated. It seeded other clubs, nurtured lifelong friendships, and — long before it was fashionable — embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values.

Most school clubs are teacher-led, curriculum-bound, and short-lived. MASC was none of those things. It was self-organised, cross-disciplinary, and sustained across years and schools. Where most school clubs dissolve with the end of an academic year, ours evolved, absorbed, and ignited.

From Sneakers to Starships

Saint Ignatius of Loyola apparently once said, ‘Show me the child and I’ll show you the adult.’ But in fandom, the child is already the architect: documenting, designing, and dreaming in real time.

While Fanlore and Fancyclopedia trace a broader pattern (teenagers founding clubs, publishing zines, shaping conventions), MASC stood apart for its sustained life, cross-disciplinary visions, and its transformation into Austrek, a fan institution that has contributed to the future. Jin-Shiow Chen reminds us that adolescent authorship is not a phase, but a blueprint. MASC didn’t just imagine a future; it built one – adapted, evolved, but always true to its founding spirit. What began as youthful imagination became lasting reality.

Role-playing Will Robinson on an alien world, or Jimmy on the somewhat fantastical Living Island (home of Pufnstuf), was more than childhood fantasy. It was rehearsal for adulthood in a wondrous world, and it helped a group of schoolkids build something that continues to resonate today. Decades later, the idea remains powerful: dreams can inspire our world and shape the stories still to come.

Sic itur ad astra.
Thus we can journey to the stars — and sometimes, we bring others with us.

Legacy: To Boldly Care

The club didn’t just shape others — it changed my life.

In more than a metaphorical way, I was adopting the heroic qualities I admired in others. I met scientist and explorer astronaut David Scott — commander of Apollo 15 — as a teenager, and later encountered Ed Bishop, the actor who portrayed resilient and determined Commander Straker in UFO. These weren’t just distant icons; they were role models for how I chose to live, lead, and contribute to the community.

Austrek wasn’t just a fandom; it became an extended family. For many of us, it was the first place they felt truly seen, supported, and safe to be themselves. It offered belonging to those who felt alienated, and care to those navigating hardship. Through shared stories, mutual aid, and empowerment to develop their confidence and life skills, Austrek changed lives. It was a sanctuary disguised as a science fiction club.

Even Thunderbirds, with its ethos of rescue and humanitarian action, helped shape my sense of responsibility. The idea that helping others could be a mission — not just a story — stayed with me.

That same spirit of aspiration led me beyond fandom. As well as helping launch Austrek, I volunteered with Amnesty International Australia, where we literally saved lives and helped shape humane laws. After that and most recently, I have worked to assist LGBT+ refugees, some of the most disadvantaged people on Earth.

CATSMILK may be a silly acronym, but it provided sustenance for the growth of ideas that changed lives. The blueprint we drafted as children became a framework for action — not only for others, but also for me.

This blog ©2025 Geoff Allshorn, with some editorial and layout assistance from CoPilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

Forgotten Futures

This essay is published in celebration of Star Trek Day (8 September) the anniversary of the original series’ premiere in 1966. It honours the visionary legacy of humanist Gene Roddenberry and the enduring dream of a better future for all humanity.

Art by Copilot AI

“With a tear for the dark past…”
“…turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward.”
— Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887

“It isn’t all over…”
“…everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning.”
— Gene Roddenberry, on Star Trek’s vision

In 1888, Edward Bellamy published a novel that sold over a million copies, inspired a political movement, and imagined a future without poverty or greed. Looking Backward: 2000–1887 was more than fiction. It was a blueprint for a better world. Bellamy’s vision of a cooperative, egalitarian society captured the imagination of a generation grappling with the chaos of industrial capitalism.

Set in the year 2000, Looking Backward follows Julian West, a 19th-century man who awakens in a future Boston transformed by nationalized industry, universal employment, and economic equality. In Bellamy’s utopia, citizens receive equal credit from the state, labour is honoured, and poverty has been eradicated. The novel presents a society governed by reason, solidarity, and shared prosperity; a future where competition has given way to cooperation, and justice is built into the very structure of daily life.

Nearly a century later, Gene Roddenberry picked up the torch. His creation, Star Trek, launched in 1966, offered a similarly hopeful vision: a future where humanity had transcended its divisions, embraced peace, and explored the stars not for conquest, but for understanding. Roddenberry’s Federation was Bellamy’s Boston in orbit; an evolved society built on shared purpose, moral clarity, and technological abundance.

Today, few remember Bellamy’s name… and Roddenberry’s legacy could learn lessons from why.

Before we confront the threats facing utopian storytelling today, it’s worth asking: what kind of thinker was Edward Bellamy or Gene Roddenberry?

From Human to Humanist

Was Edward Bellamy a Humanist?

Although Edward Bellamy lived before the modern humanist movement, his utopian vision in Looking Backward resonates deeply with humanist principles: reason, compassion, and social justice. He imagined a society where cooperation replaced competition, and civic dignity was prioritized over profit — ideals rooted in Enlightenment thinking.

Raised in a religious household, Bellamy’s philosophy evolved into what Arthur E. Morgan called a “religion of solidarity”: a secular ethic grounded in empathy and collective responsibility. His blueprint featured universal employment, equal resource distribution, and respect for labour — all hallmarks of humanist ethics.

In many ways, Bellamy was a proto-humanist: an early voice calling for a society built on justice, reason, and shared humanity. His legacy continues to inspire those who believe a better world is achievable through moral imagination and collective effort.

Was Gene Roddenberry a Humanist?

Yes — formally, proudly, and profoundly. Gene Roddenberry was not merely aligned with humanist ideals; he was publicly recognized as a humanist and used Star Trek as a vehicle to express those values. His vision of the future was secular, ethical, and radically optimistic — a moral blueprint for humanity’s potential. Humanists UK

  • Belief in human progress: Roddenberry envisioned a society where exploration replaced conquest, and knowledge was pursued for the betterment of all. His optimism reflected a belief in humanity’s capacity to evolve through empathy, science, and cooperation. Screen Rant
  • Secular ethics: A lifelong atheist, Roddenberry rejected supernaturalism and embraced a moral framework rooted in dignity, justice, and rational inquiry. His characters were ethical agents, navigating complex dilemmas with integrity and courage. We’re History
  • Focus on equality and dignity: The Federation abolished poverty, prejudice, and currency. Starfleet officers served not for profit, but for principle (embodying humanist ideals of pluralism, peace, and shared responsibility). CBR

Roddenberry’s humanism remains a living tradition. Yet today, both his and Bellamy’s visions face mounting threats from political extremism and religious fundamentalism, to corporate censorship and cultural decline. In a post-truth world where science is contested and empathy dismissed, their utopias remind us that the human adventure is not guaranteed; it must be defended.

Philosophical Parallels: Two Utopias, One Dream

Art by Copilot AI

Though separated by nearly a century, Edward Bellamy and Gene Roddenberry imagined futures where humanity had outgrown its divisions. Both rejected the zero-sum logic of capitalism and envisioned peace not as the absence of war, but the presence of justice.

Bellamy’s utopia was economic: a society where money was obsolete, work was honoured, and citizens received equal credit from the state. His future was built on solidarity and civic dignity.

Roddenberry’s vision was moral and technological. In Star Trek, replicators eliminated scarcity, and exploration replaced conquest. The Federation had no currency, no poverty, and no prejudice. Starfleet officers were philosopher-engineers, guided by ethics and curiosity.

Roddenberry extended Bellamy’s dream beyond humanity. His Federation embraced sentientism: dignity for all self-aware beings, from Vulcans to androids. This shift anticipated today’s debates on AI rights, animal ethics, and planetary stewardship. His utopia wasn’t just post-scarcity; it was post-anthropocentric.

Both men believed that, given the right conditions, humanity could evolve into something noble. Their futures weren’t just fantasies… they were moral blueprints.

“Starfleet was founded to seek out new life — well, there it sits! Waiting.”
— Captain Jean-Luc Picard, The Measure of a Man (TNG, Season 2)

Both men’s visions rejected the zero-sum logic of capitalism. Both imagined peace not as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice. And both believed that humanity, given the right conditions, could evolve into something noble.

Why Bellamy Faded

Despite his enormous influence in the late 19th century, Bellamy’s legacy dimmed over time. His utopia, once a rallying cry for reformers, became a relic.

  • Static vision: Looking Backward presented a finished society — perfect, harmonious, and unchanging. Over time, this began to feel sterile and implausible.
  • Political baggage: Bellamy’s Nationalist Clubs promoted democratic socialism, which later became controversial and misunderstood.
  • Literary shifts: As dystopias rose in popularity, Bellamy’s earnest optimism felt out of step with the darker tone of modern fiction.

From Clubs to Culture

Bellamy’s Nationalist Clubs were more than political experiments. They were early rehearsals of utopia. These grassroots groups built community around shared ideals, much like fandoms today. Their meetings, publications, and mutual aid efforts foreshadowed the participatory culture that Star Trek fans would later embody.

Roddenberry didn’t just inherit Bellamy’s blueprint; he reengineered it. Where Bellamy’s followers organized politically, Trek fans organized culturally. The Federation became more than fiction; it became a metaphor for participatory hope.

Why Roddenberry Endures

Roddenberry’s utopia didn’t arrive fully formed. It evolved. That adaptability is key to its lasting appeal. Star Trek unfolded over decades, across series and films. Each generation reinterpreted the Federation’s ideals through new characters, challenges, and cultural lenses. It absorbed real-world issues (civil rights, gender equality, environmentalism) and reflected them back through allegory. It wasn’t static; it was affective.

Bellamy’s vision was locked in print; a frozen ideal. The modern world ultimately left him behind. Roddenberry’s dream endured because it was ironically sustained by the very capitalism he sought to critique. For commercial reasons, the franchise evolved to stay relevant: it took three decades to assign captaincy to African-American and female leads, and five decades to acknowledge LGBT+ existence. Progress didn’t move at warp speed, but it moved.

Roddenberry didn’t just imagine a better potential future: he set in motion a living dream: one that continues to adapt, provoke, and inspire.

Relevance Today

In an age of climate crisis, automation, and rising inequality, Bellamy’s dream may be less naïve than it once seemed. Universal basic income, cooperative economics, and post-scarcity technologies are no longer science fiction; they are policy debates.

Roddenberry’s Federation continues to inspire. But perhaps it’s time to revisit Bellamy… not as a relic, but as a reminder. His vision of economic justice, civic dignity, and peaceful progress still speaks to our deepest hopes. If Roddenberry gave us the stars, Bellamy gave us the ground beneath them: a vision of Earth as it could be, if we dared to dream again.

“Humanity has the stars in its future…”
“…and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.”
— Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov: A Memoir

From Cultural Vanguard to Cultural Crossroads

For much of the 20th century, the United States shaped the global imagination. Through Hollywood, pop music, and television, it exported ideals of freedom, innovation, and moral debate. Star Trek was one of its beacons — a utopia imagined in its own image, inviting the world to dream along.

Even the name “America,” claimed solely by the United States, reflects a linguistic imperialism that erases the rest of the continent. This rhetorical dominance parallels the Federation’s own framing: a utopia imagined in the image of U.S. exceptionalism. Just as Starfleet’s command structure echoes military hierarchy, the Federation’s cultural ethos often mirrors American liberalism more than universal pluralism.

But that dominance is fading. Audiences now turn to stories from South Korea, India, Turkey, and beyond. Bollywood, Nollywood, Wellywood, and other industries offer narratives rooted in their own values and struggles. The promise of globalization has faltered, and US media often feels disconnected.

Meanwhile, political extremism and corporate censorship threaten the integrity of US storytelling. Sanitized scripts and cancelled voices signal a retreat from bold imagination. Star Trek always suffered from the tension to “boldly go” into social issue stories without offending sponsors or studio executives, and even today there are culture wars about whether the program should be woke or weak. Is it a commercial “starship” enterprise, or a mythic “Starship Enterprise”?

Utopia Under Siege: Star Trek, Censorship, and the Cultural Decline

The sky is darkening. The utopian dream, once nurtured by visionaries like Roddenberry, now faces mounting threats.

Recent events suggest that the utopian dream, once nurtured by visionaries like Roddenberry, is now under threat. The reported cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert by CBS, following Colbert’s criticism of Donald Trump and Paramount’s corporate dealings, is more than a media controversy. It’s a warning sign. When political pressure intersects with corporate interests, even satire becomes dangerous.

This isn’t just about one voice being silenced. It’s about the erosion of the cultural spaces where dissent, imagination, and moral clarity once thrived. If Hollywood (the engine behind Star Trek) begins to mirror the authoritarianism it once critiqued, then the Federation itself may be at risk.

Roddenberry’s universe was built on ethical courage. It challenged racism, war, and tyranny. It imagined a future where truth mattered and justice prevailed. But if the institutions behind Star Trek now prioritize profit over principle, what remains of that vision?

The decline of US cultural leadership isn’t measured in box office numbers. It’s measured in the stories we no longer dare to tell, the questions we no longer ask, and the ideals we no longer defend. Star Trek emerged from a nation steeped in contradiction: a self-declared champion of human rights, yet shaped by war, empire, and inequality. Starfleet, for all its utopian rhetoric, was modelled on military command — a structure that both enabled ethical exploration and mirrored the hierarchies it claimed to transcend. Within that tension, the franchise once dared to imagine better: a Federation built not on conquest, but on cooperation, pluralism, and moral clarity.

Today, that cultural and moral imagination is under siege. The rise of political and religious fundamentalism — exclusionary in tone, authoritarian in practice — has narrowed the cultural bandwidth for dissent, empathy, and ethical inquiry. The Trump movement didn’t invent this erosion, but they accelerated it: openly denying science and winding back human rights, normalizing cruelty and abuse, banning books and people they deem undesirable, cancelling history and stories they oppose, undermining truth and difference of opinion, denying diversity and empathy, and recasting pluralism as a threat. If Star Trek loses its edge, as part of a larger erosion of culture and human freedoms, we lose more than a franchise. We lose a tradition of storytelling that once challenged power from within, offered refuge to the marginalized, and insisted that a better future was possible, even when history said otherwise. The retreat from that vision signals not just creative fatigue, but a deeper cultural surrender.

“For small creatures such as we…”
“…the vastness is bearable only through love.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Where to From Here?

The decline of US cultural dominance doesn’t mean the end of utopian dreaming; it means the dream must evolve. Let global voices reinterpret the Federation. Let Nairobi, Seoul, or São Paulo imagine new futures. Defend artistic freedom. Reclaim moral imagination. Roddenberry’s vision was never a monument; it was a movement. And movements must adapt, resist, and renew.

Beyond the Federation: Utopia, Culture, and the Global Imagination

Star Trek’s Federation reached for the stars, but its roots were planted in Bellamy’s soil — a dream of justice before warp drives. For decades, U.S. culture dominated the global imagination, exporting ideals of freedom and exploration. But that dominance came with blind spots: a monocultural lens that often flattened diverse traditions into a singular mythology.

Today, a renaissance of global storytelling is reshaping what utopia can mean. From Korean dramas and Africanfuturism to Indigenous speculative fiction and Islamic futurism, new voices are expanding the dream. These visions bring fresh textures (spiritual, communal, ecological) that challenge and enrich the legacy of Roddenberry and Bellamy.

A truly universal utopia won’t be built from one culture’s imagination alone. It must be a mosaic: plural, evolving, and rooted in shared humanity. If Bellamy gave us justice and Roddenberry gave us wonder, perhaps the next utopia will give us balance between cultures, between Earth and stars, between past and future.

“To learn which questions are unanswerable…”
“…and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Today, we are witnessing a renaissance of global storytelling. From Korean dramas and Chinese myth-based video games to Indigenous speculative fiction and Africanfuturism, new voices are reshaping what utopia can mean. These visions bring fresh textures — spiritual, communal, ecological — that challenge, enrich and supersede the US dream.

What began as a singular vision must now become a mosaic: plural, evolving, and rooted in shared humanity.

A truly universal utopia will not be built from one culture’s imagination alone. It will be a mosaic: plural, evolving, and rooted in shared humanity. If Bellamy gave us justice and Roddenberry gave us wonder, perhaps the next utopia will give us balance — between cultures, between Earth and stars, between past and future.

Despite their utopian ideals, both Bellamy and Roddenberry reflected the gender norms of their time. Bellamy’s vision granted women economic equality but confined them to roles deemed suitable for their “disqualifications,” with domesticity idealized over independence. Roddenberry, especially in The Original Series, often portrayed women through a lens of sexualization and subordination, despite later efforts to evolve. Their futures imagined justice, but left gender equity unfinished. As we dream forward, we must ensure that tomorrow’s utopias do not inherit yesterday’s exclusions. Bellamy source, Roddenberry source

Women and Fandom: The Heart of the Trek Legacy

“I have always said that Star Trek introduced science fiction to women… and women to science fiction.”
— Geoff Allshorn

Star Trek didn’t just imagine a better future; it invited people to help build it. Despite their trivialisation and objectification in the program, women became central from the beginning. In 1966, Nichelle Nichols’ Lt. Uhura broke television barriers. She wasn’t a sidekick, she was a linguist, a bridge officer, and a symbol of dignity. Her presence inspired generations, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who urged her to stay, calling her “part of history.”

Since then, Trek has introduced powerful women like Janeway, Kira, Seven of Nine, and Burnham — leaders who challenged norms and expanded the franchise’s moral imagination. Behind the camera, women shaped Trek as writers, producers, and critics. Nana Visitor’s A Woman’s Trek chronicles this evolution, showing how the series mirrored — and sometimes led — shifts in women’s roles.

Women fans have done more than watch — they’ve rebuilt the culture around Trek. From zines to fanfic, conventions to campaigns, they’ve reimagined identity, justice, and belonging. Their engagement is co-authorship. They didn’t just keep the dream alive. They made it real.

Contrary to stereotypes, surveys show that Trek fans are as likely to be women as men. They’ve defended the franchise’s inclusive ideals, challenged its blind spots, and created entire subcultures around its values. As Professor Daryl G. Frazetti notes, Star Trek functions as a secular myth, and women have been among its most powerful mythmakers.

In many ways, women and fandom are the Federation’s real architects. They’ve kept the dream alive, not just on screen, but in the world. The next utopia must rise from the margins: from the voices long excluded from the cultural blueprint.

Diane Marchant with her mother Jessie at Trekcon 1 (Australia’s first Star Trek convention) on 15 July 1978. (Photo by Helena Binns)

Fandom itself has long been a space where women thrive. Contrary to stereotypes, surveys show that Star Trek fans are as likely to be women as men, and they span every age, background, and identity. StarTrek.com’s fandom study confirms this. Women fans have written fan fiction, organized conventions, and defended the franchise’s inclusive ideals when corporate interests faltered.

Costume parade at Trekcon 1, 15 July 1978. Women comprise a significant proportion of the participants.(Photo from my collection)

Women have not only shaped the stories of Star Trek. They’ve reshaped the meaning of fandom itself. From early zine culture to modern fan fiction, women have long used Trek as a canvas for reimagining identity, justice, and belonging. This participation has often challenged the franchise’s own boundaries, pushing it toward greater inclusivity. Yet it also raises questions about cultural appropriation: when fans reinterpret Trek through feminist, queer, or decolonial lenses, are they expanding the myth, or appropriating it from corporate control? The relationship between fans and franchise is symbiotic, but not always equal. Women fans have campaigned to save cancelled series, demanded better representation, and created entire subcultures around Trek’s ideals. Their engagement is not passive consumption; it’s active co-authorship. As Professor Daryl G. Frazetti notes in his study of fandom, Star Trek functions as a secular myth, and women have been among its most powerful mythmakers.

In many ways, women and fandom are the Federation’s real architects. They’ve kept the dream alive — not just on screen, but in the world. The next utopia must rise from the margins: from the voices long excluded from the cultural blueprint.

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle…”
“…because we do not live single-issue lives.”
— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)

Pluralist Futures: Global, Intersectional, and Ethical

Speculative fiction has long mirrored society — but often through a narrow lens. Today, that mirror is cracking open. Indigenous futurism reclaims ancestral memory and land sovereignty. Queer utopias celebrate chosen families and radical love. Africanfuturism, Islamic futurism, and Pacific Islander storytelling bring spiritual, communal, and ecological textures to the dream.

Roddenberry imagined technology as liberation. But today’s tools — algorithms, drones, biometric surveillance — often serve power, not people. Utopia must now grapple with this duality: can we build tools that dignify, not dominate?

These aren’t just representational wins. They’re philosophical revolutions. The next utopia must be a mosaic — plural, evolving, and rooted in shared humanity. If Bellamy gave us justice and Roddenberry gave us wonder, perhaps the next utopia will give us balance.

Fandom as Resistance: Keeping the Flame Alive

Star Trek fandom has always been more than cosplay and convention. It’s been a crucible of dissent. Fans have demanded representation, challenged militarism, and reimagined canon through zines, fanfic, and activism. Their engagement is not passive consumption — it’s co-authorship.

As studios sanitize scripts and silence dissent, fans keep the flame alive. Roddenberry’s utopia survives not because of Hollywood, but because of the people who refuse to let it die. The next Federation won’t be built by corporations — it will be imagined by communities who dream forward, together.

A Final Reflection: The Gesture of Utopia

Utopia isn’t a genre; it’s a choice. A refusal to accept the world as it is. Bellamy and Roddenberry dared to dream beyond their time. Today, we must do the same.

Let the next Federation rise from Nairobi, Seoul, or São Paulo. Let it speak in many tongues, walk many paths, and honour many ancestors. Let it be messy, plural, and alive.

Because the future of utopia is not “American.” It is human. And humanity, at its best, dreams forward… together.

“We are part of this universe…”
“…we are in this universe, but more importantly, the universe is in us.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Sources & Citations

This bibliography reflects a deliberate blend of primary texts, scholarly commentary, and cultural sources, each chosen to honour the intellectual lineage and activist spirit of speculative fiction. Citations are presented not merely as academic obligation, but as a gesture of respect: to the thinkers, creators, and communities whose visions shaped this work.

Sources span traditional scholarship, fan studies, and multimedia platforms, acknowledging that utopian discourse lives both in books and in fandom. Where possible, I cite original publication dates and creators to preserve historical context. I include Wikipedia and fan sites selectively, not as authorities, but as cultural artefacts that reflect participatory knowledge-making.

Isaac Asimov, 1994. I, Asimov: A memoir, Doubleday.

Edward Bellamy, 1888. Looking Backward: 2000–1887, Ticknor and Company.

Gregory Claeys, 2010. The Origins of Dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell, Oxford Academic.

Martin Gardner, 1983. Bellamy’s Utopia Revisited, New Criterion.

Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ace Books.

Antonia Lipsett, 2019. “Roddenberry’s ethics and the Federation”, We’re History.

Audre Lorde, 1984. Sister outsider: Essays and speeches, Crossing Press.

Diane Marchant & Helena Binns, 1978. Trekcon 1 photograph, Fanlore.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia, n.d. Edward Bellamy.

Gene Roddenberry et al, 1966–present. Star Trek [TV series and films], Paramount/CBS.

Carl Sagan, 1980. Cosmos. Random House.

Screen Rant, 2024. Roddenberry’s Vision of Progress.

Leslie Marmon Silko, 1977. Ceremony, Viking.

StarTrek.com., 2024. Star Trek fandom study.

Sam Tyrie, 2020. “Bellamy’s Nationalism and the Politics of Utopia”, Jacobin.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2014. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, National Geographic.

Nana Visitor, 2025). A Woman’s Trek. Titan Books. (Memory Alpha listing)

Wikipedia contributors, n.d. Looking Backward. Wikipedia.

Wikipedia contributors, n.d. Nationalist Clubs. Wikipedia.

Women at Warp, 2023. Feminist analysis of Star Trek [Podcast].

Fanthropology 101, 2022. Star Trek as secular myth.

CBR, 2023. “Star Trek’s economy explained“.

JRank, n.d. Dystopia.

Author’s Note

This essay is both a tribute and a challenge. As a lifelong humanist and fan, I’ve always seen speculative fiction not just as entertainment, but as ethical rehearsal: a way to imagine justice, dignity, and shared humanity. Bellamy and Roddenberry gave us blueprints. Fandom gave us tools. The future will be built by those who dare to dream forward, together.

My thanks to the communities who keep these dreams alive in zines, in classrooms, in convention halls, and in quiet acts of courage. And to readers: may you find in these pages not just nostalgia, but possibility.

Fanthropology 101: Dreaming and Doing in the Real World

A four-part journey through how fandom helps us imagine better futures, and build them.

Part One: Forgotten Futures
How two dreamers imagined a better world, and gave us tools to build it
Published: 8 September 2025
Read Part One
Edward Bellamy and Gene Roddenberry didn’t just write stories, they sketched blueprints for justice, dignity, and shared humanity. Their utopias still shape how fans rehearse better futures.

Part Two: Dream It Forward
Why fandom isn’t just fun, it’s how we practice empathy
Published: 4 October 2025
Read Part Two
From Arthurian quests to Star Trek conventions, this chapter shows how fandom helps us rehearse courage, community, and care—turning stories into solidarity, and imagination into action.

Part Three: Fandom’s Humanitarian Legacy
How fans built real-world networks of care, long before hashtags and headlines
Published: 25 November 2025
Read Part Three
Ficathons, charity drives, and survivor support groups—this essay documents how fandom became a lifeline for many, offering help where institutions failed.

Part Four: From Fic to Future
Fan fiction isn’t just storytelling, it’s ethical and pragmatic life guidance
Published: 31 December 2025
Read Part Four
Honouring Diane Marchant and the legacy of fan creators, this chapter explores how fandom helps us rewrite injustice, rehearse empathy, and build continuity across generations.

©2025 Geoff Allshorn with editorial assistance from Copilot AI, used to refine structure, clarify citations, and enhance motif logic. All conceptual framing and final edits are my own. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.