We Occupy the Future

Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Part IV

Published on the anniversary of the 504 Sit-In (USA) and the Medibank Blockade (Australia)

We Occupy the Future

On April 5, 1977, disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco, demanding enforcement of Section 504 and refusing to be erased from the future. One year later, across the Pacific, protesters in Melbourne blockaded a Medibank office, insisting that architectural access was not a luxury but a right.

These acts of defiance, grounded in care, community, and unapologetic presence, form the backbone of this fourth entry in the Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies series. Here, I confront the techno-fix fantasy that haunts speculative fiction and reimagine futures where disabled bodies are not corrected or cured, but centred, celebrated, and architecturally included.

“Disability is not a brave struggle or ‘courage in the face of adversity.’ Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live.”
— Neil Marcus, playwright and activist
We do not occupy the future through pity. We do it through design.

The topic of disability is neither academic nor esoteric in my life: born with disability, I quickly learned to accept it as “normal” for me – and I have managed to live a fairly unaffected life as a result. The science fiction community contains many people who are disabled in some way, and as a community we have come to embrace difference and diversity with celebration. Sadly, the literature and entertainment we enjoy does not reflect that diversity, nor that joyous celebration. This needs to change.

In speculative fiction, disability is often treated as a problem to be ignored outright; or simply solved, like a flaw awaiting correction through magic, technology, or narrative redemption. These “techno-fix” fantasies promise sleek futures where prosthetics become superpowers, pain is erased by neural implants, and access is retrofitted only after the fact. But beneath the shimmer of innovation lies a deeper erasure: the lived realities of disabled people, their communities, and their resistance to being rewritten.

Classic SF Erasures: Foundations of the Fix

Before speculative fiction imagined disabled people as victims of apocalypse, it imagined them as monsters, metaphors, or mistakes. These early science fiction texts didn’t just ignore disabled lives—they built futures where difference was punished, erased, or “corrected” through horror, science, or moral redemption.

Frankenstein (1818): The Creature’s stitched body is feared, not understood. His difference is framed as monstrosity, not identity.

The Invisible Man (1897): Griffin’s disembodiment is framed as power. Invisibility becomes escape from care, community, and accountability.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896): Vivisection is used to “fix” animal bodies into human form. The Beast Folk are denied agency, identity, and continuity.

The Time Machine (1895): The Eloi are infantilized and passive; the Morlocks are deformed and monstrous. The future stratifies embodiment into beauty and brutality.

The Ship Who Sang (1969): Helva is born with severe disabilities and becomes a cybernetic ship. Her autonomy is framed through usefulness, not identity.

Flowers for Algernon (1959): Charlie’s intellectual disability is “cured,” then mourned. His identity is erased by enhancement.

These stories don’t imagine disabled futures. They imagine futures without disabled bodies at all. They taught generations of readers that difference must be feared, fixed, or forgotten. Even when disability is present, it is rarely lived—it is abstracted, mourned, or erased.

This section is not a condemnation. It is an archive. These texts shaped the genre’s aesthetic and its anxieties. They built the scaffolding for the techno-fix fantasies that followed. And they remind us: before we were victims, we were monsters. Before we were erased, we were redesigned.

These late-century classics didn’t erase disabled bodies outright. They abstracted them, enhanced them, or criminalized them. Disability became a flaw to be hidden, a threat to be neutralized, or a condition to be mourned. These stories refined the genre’s discomfort with disabled embodiment, building futures where survival required transformation.

The Forever War (1974): A soldier displaced in time suffers psychological trauma and alienation. PTSD is present, but framed as disconnection—not continuity.

Beggars in Spain (1991): The sleepless are genetically engineered to outperform the rest. Sleep becomes disability; rest becomes weakness. Sleepless ≠ Worthless

The Gods Themselves (1972): An alien triad includes a cognitively distinct member—essential, not flawed. Neurodivergence is present, but abstracted.

These works don’t mourn disabled lives—they sidestep them. They imagine futures where embodiment is optional, enhancement is mandatory, and access is retrofitted only after transformation. They don’t erase disability through death—they erase it through design.

Victims of the Future

In many speculative futures, disabled people are not absent; they’re present only as victims. Day of the Triffids opens with mass blindness, but offers no authentic disabled lives—just panic, pity, and collapse. Zombie apocalypses routinely treat mobility aids or neurodivergence as death sentences. The message is clear: survival belongs to the able-bodied.

These stories rarely ask what disabled communities might build, protect, or imagine. Instead, they frame disability as vulnerability—a plot device to heighten danger or justify euthanasia. The disabled body becomes shorthand for helplessness, not humanity.

Even more insidiously, disability is often rendered alien. In X-Men, mutation is metaphor—but the disabled body is either cured (Professor X regains mobility through tech) or erased (characters like Caliban are dehumanized). In Star Trek, Geordi La Forge’s visor is a technological fix, not a lived experience. These metaphors flatten disability into abstraction, stripping away culture, agency, and voice.

What’s missing is the reality: disabled people live full, complex, joyful lives. They protest, parent, create, and imagine. They are not waiting to be cured—they are demanding to be seen.

Futures That Cure to Forget

Some speculative futures don’t erase disabled people outright—they “fix” them instead. But the cure is no act of care. It’s a narrative convenience, a way to sidestep the complexity of disabled lives. In these stories, disability is a temporary obstacle, not a permanent identity. Once cured, the character is free to join the plot. Before that, they are a burden.

From cybernetic implants to genetic reprogramming, speculative fiction often treats disability as a flaw to be corrected. The future becomes a sterilized utopia, where difference is erased in the name of progress. These techno-fix fantasies echo real-world ableism: the pressure to conform, the denial of access, the refusal to imagine disabled joy.

Even when framed as empowerment, the cure trope undermines authenticity. It suggests that disabled people must be transformed to be valuable. It erases culture, community, and resistance. It forgets that many disabled people do not want to be cured. They want to be included.

Victim Mentality: Apocalypse Without Us

In speculative disaster fiction, disabled people are often present only as victims—never architects of survival.

Day of the Triffids: A comet blinds most of humanity, but the story offers no authentic disabled lives: just panic, pity, and collapse. Blindness is treated as mass helplessness, not a lived identity. There’s no infrastructure of care, no adaptation, no community; no learning from their skills and lived experience. The blind are burdens to be rescued or abandoned. The message is clear: survival belongs to the sighted.

Zombie Fiction: In The Walking Dead, mobility aids and neurodivergence are liabilities. Disabled characters are rare, and when present, they’re often sacrificed early. In Blood Quantum, Indigenous immunity reframes survival—but disabled characters remain peripheral. In The Girl with All the Gifts, neurodivergence is monstrous, not human. The metaphor flattens disability into threat.

Disaster Futures: In I Am Legend, disabled bodies are absent from the ruins. In Children of Men, global infertility erases disabled futures alongside reproductive ones. In The Road, survival is brutal, solitary, and able-bodied. There’s no space for interdependence or access.

The Invisible Man?

Gattaca (1997)
Genetic “perfection” becomes the price of admission. Vincent hides his heart condition to pass as valid. Disability is not just invisible—it’s criminalized.

Altered Carbon (Netflix)

Bodies are disposable. Consciousness is uploaded and swapped. Disability is incompatible with upload culture and is erased by design. There’s no space for embodied difference when bodies are interchangeable.

(In Gattaca, difference is criminal. In Altered Carbon, it’s discarded).

The Matrix (1999)
Neo’s real-world body is frail and passive. His power comes only in the virtual world, where disability vanishes. The film never explores disabled embodiment—only escape.

Idoru (William Gibson)
Near-future Tokyo is saturated with tech, but disabled bodies are absent. The virtual replaces the physical. Futurity becomes a testbed for erasure.

“The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Digital futures don’t erase pain. They erase presence.

Beauty and the Beast Retellings
Disability is framed as moral lesson or aesthetic flaw. The Beast’s transformation erases difference. Disabled embodiment is tolerated only until it’s cured. Retellings of Beauty and the Beast treat disability as something to overcome, not live with.

Star Wars — The Force Fixes All
Once a Jedi, Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader after catastrophic injury. His cybernetic suit keeps him alive, but also isolates him emotionally and physically. Vader’s disability is framed as punishment, not adaptation. In Star Wars, prosthetics are upgrades, not identities. Luke’s hand is replaced without comment; Grievous is monstrous. The Force heals, but it does not accommodate. There are no disabled rebels, no access architecture on Coruscant, no interdependent communities in the Resistance. Redemption comes through power, not care.

Cured to Be Useful

Spock (Star Trek: The Original Series) Temporarily blinded in “Operation — Annihilate!”, Spock’s condition is mourned as tragic… until it’s reversed by a biological twist. His “third eyelid” restores vision, erasing the disability and sidestepping adaptation. The episode treats blindness as catastrophe, not continuity. There’s no cultural depth, no Vulcan sensory practice; just relief that the fix arrived.

Geordi La Forge (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Blind from birth, Geordi receives a VISOR that grants him vision—but the show rarely explores his lived experience. His blindness is abstracted into tech, not embodied as culture or identity.

Christopher Pike (Discovery / Strange New Worlds)
After a radiation accident, Pike becomes paralyzed and mute. His condition is framed as tragic prophecy, not lived reality. He is mourned, not accommodated.

Keyla Detmer (Discovery)
After injury, Detmer receives a cybernetic implant. Her trauma is hinted at, but never fully explored. The tech restores function, but emotional depth is sidelined.

Reginald Barclay (TNG)
His anxiety and neurodivergence are treated as pathology. He’s “fixed” through therapy and tech, but rarely given narrative dignity.

Nog (DS9)
After losing his leg, Nog receives a prosthetic—but his PTSD is resolved through assimilation. The prosthetic restores utility, not identity.

Dr. Miranda Jones (TOS)
A blind telepath who wears a sensor web to perceive her environment. Her blindness is hidden, treated as shameful, and revealed only as a plot twist. She is powerful, but only once her disability is concealed.

Riva (TNG)
A deaf diplomat who communicates through a chorus of telepathic interpreters. When they are killed, he reveals he knows sign language, but only after a crisis. His disability is accommodated, but framed as exceptional.

Techno-Fix = Inclusion
In these futures, disabled characters are included only after enhancement. The fix becomes the condition for narrative value.

Disability = Plot Device
These characters are rarely allowed to live with disability. Instead, they are cured, upgraded, or mourned. Their bodies serve the story—not themselves.

Care ≠ Cure
What’s missing is interdependence, community, and disabled joy. These futures imagine access only through transformation—not through care.

Erased by Design

Dominique “Dom” Ward (War of the Worlds, 2019–2022)
A wheelchair user and moral anchor in Season 1, Dom survives the alien apocalypse with quiet resilience. But in Season 2, he vanishes without explanation. Even after the timeline resets, he remains absent.

Captain Christopher Pike (Star Trek)
After a radiation accident, Pike becomes paralyzed and mute. In the original series, he’s confined to a blinking wheelchair until his disability is effectively ‘erased’ in his mind. In Discovery, his fate is reframed as anticipated gothic horror. Disability becomes tragedy, not continuity.

Norton Drake (War of the Worlds, 1988–1989)
A wheelchair-using computer expert and core member of the Blackwood Project. Norton is competent, witty, and unenhanced. But when the show was retooled for Season 2, he was written out entirely. No death, no farewell—just disappearance. His erasure was editorial, not narrative.

Colin Laney (Idoru, William Gibson)
Laney’s neurological condition gives him pattern recognition abilities, but his embodiment is abstracted into digital skill. He’s useful, but not explored. His body is present, but his identity is erased.

Max (Dark Angel)
Max suffers seizures due to genetic engineering—but they’re treated as flaws in an otherwise perfect body. Her condition is a plot inconvenience, not a lived reality. Disability is erased through enhancement.

Davros, creator of the Daleks, is one of the few visibly disabled characters in Doctor Who — and he’s a genocidal megalomaniac. His mobility aid and speech device are framed as grotesque extensions of his evil. The show rarely counters this with disabled heroes, communities, or care. Disability is villain-coded, not lived. Even in a universe of time travel and regeneration, disabled futures are feared, not lived.

Alita (Alita: Battle Angel)
Awakened in a cyborg body, Alita’s disabled past is never explored—only her enhanced present. Prosthetics become superpowers, not access. Her body is visible, but her disability is erased.

Raven Reyes (The 100)
After a spinal injury, Raven walks with pain and limited mobility. But the show quickly sidelines her disability, focusing on her technical genius. Her pain is referenced, but rarely centered.

Hiccup (How to Train Your Dragon)
After losing his leg, Hiccup receives a prosthetic and continues adventuring. While the film avoids pity, it also avoids depth. His disability is never explored culturally or emotionally—it’s a design feature, not a lived experience.

Survival ≠ Inclusion
These characters live—but their futures are framed through discomfort, silence, or abstraction. They are not erased by death, but by design.

Disability = Narrative Tension
Their conditions heighten emotional stakes, but rarely invite cultural depth or community. They are present, but not centered.

Function Over Feeling
Their bodies serve the plot, but their perspectives are muted. What’s missing is agency, dialogue, and disabled joy.

“You entered a normal man. You leave blind — blind — BLIND.”
— Isaac Asimov, The Secret Sense (1941)
Enhancement without care is not inclusion. It is exile.

The New Wave of Diversity — Disability as Culture, Not Cure

A new wave of speculative fiction is emerging: one that refuses the fix. These stories centre disabled embodiment not as a flaw, but as a foundation. They imagine futures built on ramps, interpreters, and seismic sight, not biological upgrades. They do not mourn disabled lives. They celebrate them.

Care = Continuity. These characters survive through community, adaptation, and presence.

Disability = Culture. Their identities are not obstacles. They are sources of insight, resilience, and joy.

Access ≠ Enhancement. These futures do not retrofit inclusion through technology—they design it through care.

This is not diversity performed as obligation. These authors build futures where disabled joy is not exceptional—it is expected.

Zane Obispo (The Storm Runner, J.C. Cervantes)
A Mayan fantasy hero with a limp… He’s not a burden. He’s the protagonist.

Emily Gresham (War of the Worlds, 2019–2022)
Blind from birth… Her disability is central, not symbolic.

Toph Beifong (Avatar: The Last Airbender)
Blind and brilliant… She’s not a burden—she’s a legend.

August Pullman (Wonder, R.J. Palacio)
Born with a craniofacial condition… He’s a builder of community.

“You can’t blend in when you were born to stand out.”
— R.J. Palacio, Wonder (2012)

Chien-Shiung Wu (speculative retelling)
In this reimagined future… Her disability shapes her science, not her silence.

Yasira Shien (The Outside, Ada Hoffmann) Autistic and defiant… Her neurodivergence is not a flaw—it’s a source of cosmic insight.

Jack (The Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon) Autistic and proud… He resists the cure and claims neurodivergence as culture, not pathology.

“If they cure me, will I still be me?”
— Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark (2002)

Murderbot (The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells) Social anxiety and trauma are not flaws… They’re the lens through which Murderbot navigates care, autonomy, and survival.

Ana (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Meg Elison) Her chronic illness and reproductive trauma are not erased… They’re archived as survival.

Sancia Grado (Foundryside, Robert Jackson Bennett) Her neurological condition and prosthetic limb are central to her hacking brilliance… She’s not upgraded—she’s unrepentantly embodied.

The Midwife (Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher) She walks with pain, wisdom, and quiet rage… Her disability is not weakness—it’s legacy.

“My advice to other disabled people would be: concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well…
Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.”
— Stephen Hawking

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

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

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

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

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

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

©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.

At the Edge of Wonder

“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” – Bill Anders (Apollo 8, December 1968)

Earthrise from the Moon – as photographed by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders at Christmas 1968 (NASA photo).

Apollo once rose to meet the Moon’s pale face,
and found the Earth instead, shining in its own surprise.
Now Artemis moves along that inherited path,
entering the silence where distance teaches us who we are.

And now four travellers drift along that ancient arc,
their heartbeats the only warmth in the Moon’s long shadow.
They carry our questions farther than any story has gone,
their windows holding the small, bright memory of home.

At the farthest point any human has ever stood,
their courage becomes its own kind of gravity.
In this quiet frontier where science reaches outward,
they prove how far the human spirit is willing to go.

In this moment, they inherit every vision that humanity cast into the stars,
from ancient myths to engines built on reason’s fire.
Here at the edge of all imagined futures, the human quest reveals itself:
not escape, but the courage to understand our place in the vastness.

In a world so often pulled down by fear, by greed, by the smallness we carry,
their courage rises as a reminder of what we’re still capable of achieving.
While some choose limits or conflict, these travellers choose the unknown,
showing that humanity’s finest moments come from reaching beyond ourselves.

And now they carry forward that first small step Apollo left in lunar dust,
turning a single footprint into the next stride of our shared history.
Here, humanity meets its own reflection in the dark beyond the Moon,
proving again that our greatest leaps begin with the courage to go farther.

And soon they will turn back toward the world that sent them,
carrying the quiet proof that distance can deepen our belonging.
Their journey will fold into the long memory of returning home,
reminding us that exploration is a way of learning to cherish what we are.

Whatever path awaits them after this long arc through shadow,
their footsteps will settle into the lineage of every human who dared.
This moment becomes a seed for futures we cannot yet imagine,
a reminder that legacy begins whenever someone chooses to go farther.

And when they turn for home, they’ll bring back more than distance…
a new chapter written beyond the reach of any footprint.
Their passage will settle into history, not in dust, but in what it inspires,
reminding us that every return becomes the beginning of the next great step.

From Artemis’ ancient storytellers to Verne, Wells, and Clarke’s bright futures,
from Apollo’s dust‑lit courage to the imagined Moon of Space:1999,
their journey gathers every dream ever cast toward the lunar light,
reminding us that each new step is born from centuries of human wonder.

Why 4 April 2026?

Artemis II is intended to carry four humans farther from Earth than any person has ever travelled.

Although NASA will publish the exact launch and mission details at appropriate times, the farthest point will occur several days into the mission.

With 1 April the announced as possible launch date, 4 or 5 April possibly marks that symbolic turning point — the moment when humanity once again reaches the edge of its known universe and chooses to keep going, whether the crew is already in flight or soon to begin their journey.

This blog ©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with some editorial 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.

Sexuality & Queer Futures

Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Part III

Published to commemorate the birthday of Samuel Delaney.

“The Utopian futures of Star Trek have remained determinedly heteronormative, with occasional hand-waving to mollify the fans – there are gays, but we’ve not seen them (where’s Will?); there were gays, but a plague killed them (triffic); or there were gays, but it got cured (thanks). The best we are left with is a game of Spot the Queer – a tactic borrowed from the McCarthyites – where those of us in the know decode a look, a phrase, a liking for show-tunes, into the sense that so-and-so in that program or film is secretly gay. The streets find their own uses for things, and we slash away.”

– Butler, 2009, p. 388

Speculative fiction has always promised us the future — just not to all of us. From the beginning, the genre learned how to dream big while keeping its doors firmly shut. Lucian’s lunar satire, Shelley’s stitched‑together Creature… desire was there, but only so it could be mocked, punished, or corrected. Queer longing was never the problem. The problem was the genre that insisted on disciplining it.

Lucian gave us men marrying men on the Moon, but only as a joke — a bit of cultural inversion played for laughs, not liberation. Shelley’s Creature wanted love and was punished for daring to ask. These early works didn’t open pathways; they taught speculative fiction how to bolt them shut. Queerness became something to point at, not something to inhabit.

By the time the pulp magazines arrived, the exclusions had calcified. Amazing Stories, Astounding, all those glossy futures full of straight white men conquering planets and seducing decorative women — that was the template. Queer writers hid behind initials. Women were told to use male names. Black and Indigenous futures weren’t just absent; they were unimaginable. Even as the genre evolved — Golden Age optimism, New Wave experimentation, cyberpunk rebellion — it carried its old scaffolding with it.

And it wasn’t just about who appeared on the page. Genre taught readers how they were supposed to feel. Love was straight. Bodies were binary. Intimacy was allowed only if it served the plot. Any attempt to write queer desire was dismissed as “not real science fiction,” “too political,” or “just fan fiction.” The genre became a kind of closet, and queer readers learned to survive by reading between the lines.

But silence never held completely. Queer fans slashed the canon open. Women built zines and archives. Disabled readers demanded access. Marginalized creators wrote futures that refused to be corrected. Speculative fiction became a battleground — not over what could be imagined, but over who was allowed to imagine it.

Even the Moon Wasn’t Safe

Lucian’s A True History (2nd century CE) is often called the first piece of science fiction, and it already tells us something about the genre’s instincts. It imagines men marrying men on the Moon — not as solidarity, not as possibility, but as satire. Queerness is a punchline, an inversion of Greek norms meant to amuse the reader. The Moon men aren’t subjects; they’re spectacles.

So from the very beginning, speculative fiction didn’t reach for liberation. It reached for parody. Lucian’s queerness is alien, exotic, and ridiculous — a pattern the genre would repeat for centuries. Even in its earliest form, science fiction learned to treat queer bodies as curiosities, not companions.

From lunar satire to coded survival, the genre’s relationship with queer desire began with a joke… and queer readers have been rewriting the punchline ever since.

Genre Was the Closet

Speculative fiction didn’t just forget queer desire — it trained itself to suppress it. The rules were simple: love was straight, bodies were binary, and anything outside that frame had to be alien, tragic, or villainous. If queerness showed up at all, it was only so the story could punish it.

Across the 20th century, the biggest franchises — Star Wars, Doctor Who, Babylon 5, The Twilight Zone — offered no openly queer characters. Not one. Before the 1990s, queerness was either invisible or punished for daring to be visible. Even Sulu, retroactively declared gay in Star Trek Beyond, spent decades as a character whose queerness existed only in the negative space. The genre didn’t overlook queer people. It taught itself to erase them.

As James Satter put it:

“Forty years after his first appearance, Hikaru Sulu is heterosexual only through inference; he remains discernibly queer.”

When queerness did appear, it was coded and punished. The flamboyant villain…. the seductive alien… the emotionally unstable outsider. Queer-coded characters were never the heroes; they were the threat.

The Forever War turned homosexuality into a state mandate, framed as dystopian. Stranger in a Strange Land dismissed queerness as cultural decay. The Mule in Foundation was sexually ambiguous and emotionally deviant, his queerness folded into his psychic instability. Lost in Space gave us Dr. Smith, coded as camp to signal danger (and to hint at nastier implications about boys and predators). Doctor Who offered the Master (seductive, theatrical, unhinged) and Davros, whose obsessive fixation on the Doctor echoed the genre’s fear of queer intimacy. Star Wars gave us Palpatine’s decadent menace and Hux’s repressed fury, both queer-coded. Blake’s 7 gave us Servalan, glamorous and predatory, and Travis, whose scarred obsession with Blake read like repressed desire turned violent.

Even stories that weren’t “about” sexuality still rehearsed the same logic. In Gattaca, Vincent must masquerade as genetically “normal” to access a future denied to him. In R.U.R., robots are punished for wanting love. In Clone Wars, clones who assert individuality or intimacy are labelled defective or unstable. These weren’t accidents. They were choices. Queerness was allowed only as threat, never as truth.

And Star Trek, the franchise that promised a better future, wasn’t immune. Q’s fixation on Picard, Trelane’s camp omnipotence, the (originally) all‑male Borg collective, Kivas Fajo’s obsessive desire to possess Data… queerness was spectacle, jealousy, danger. Even HAL 9000, in 2001, is framed as a being too refined and too sensitive… a queer-coded threat in a world of men.

Genre didn’t just exclude queer people. It built a closet and called it world‑building.

The Queer of Gothos

The Enterprise enters a “star desert” (so-described, with references to dunes, mirages, and oases) and waiting in the middle of it all is Trelane, the Squire of Gothos. He lives in an opulent oasis, kidnaps crew members, collects Earth memorabilia, and performs his own private drag show of history. He plays soldier, fashion designer, judge, spoiled aristocrat. He throws tantrums when denied applause. His fixation on Kirk is unmistakably queer-coded. Later canon calls him a juvenile Q, but honestly, he didn’t need the retcon. He was already camp.

James Doohan once wrote about Roddenberry’s wartime encounter with an effeminate sheikh: a desert rescue, romantic overtures, and the delicate dance of not offending a powerful host in an otherwise hostile environment. The parallels are hard to ignore. The Squire of Gothos reads like a stylised retelling: queerness framed as spectacle, hospitality edged with threat, desire punished for wanting too much.

Trelane doesn’t just bend reality; he plays with it. He’s a child in costume, demanding admiration, desperate for connection, and punished the moment he reaches for it. And once again, the straight-coded hero escapes, while the queer-coded host is scolded, corrected, and sent to his room.

From villains to lovers, the path remains tainted: Riker’s intersex lover Soren, in The Outcast, is forcibly “corrected” and returned to him as a shell of herself. Willow and Tara’s kiss in Buffy is followed by Tara’s death – ditto for Talia Winters following her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fling with Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5. Captain Jack Harkness flirts across timelines, but his queerness is played for spectacle, not sincerity, and his lover dies tragically. Even Dumbledore’s love is retroactive, revealed only after the story safely ends, and never allowed to live on the page or the stage.

These weren’t accidents. They were genre norms. Queer desire was framed as unnatural, disgusting, or deviant; comprising a topic avoided in polite conversation, and within franchises seeking not to alienate conservative consumers; and erased from canon.

They Let Us Love, Then Made Us Pay

Somewhere between Wyoming and the Delta Quadrant, there was always a Brokeback Asteroid waiting for us.

The pattern is old, and it’s everywhere. A queer‑coded character reaches for love, intimacy, or selfhood — and the story punishes them for it. The straight‑coded character survives, grieves, and moves on. The queer one is erased.

You already know the classics — Soren, Lenara, Tara, Ianto, Lexa — but science fiction has been rehearsing this choreography for decades.

Star Trek kept returning to the same script

Petri & Elaan (TOS): Queerness coded as primness and ineffectuality.
Charlie X (TOS): Charlie’s needy fixation on Kirk is punished with exile.
Trelane (TOS): Camp omnipotence framed as threat.
The Lorelai Signal (TAS): Heterosexuality as biological inevitability.
Data & Fajo (TNG): Queer‑coded villain punished; Data walks away untouched.
Riker & Soren (TNG): Soren is “corrected”; Riker grieves.
Riker & Brenna (TNG – “Up the Long Ladder”):
Brenna asks Riker if he likes girls. “Of course,” he says, because the script can imagine no other answer. A tiny moment that reveals everything: heterosexuality is compulsory, unquestioned, and absolute.
Crusher & Odan (TNG): Beverly recoils from queerness; the future snaps back to straight.
Jadzia & Lenara (DS9): A kiss across lifetimes, then silence.
Seven of Nine (Voyager): Deep intimacy with women reframed as “mentorship”; only straight romance made canon.
Trip & the Cogenitor (Enterprise): A third‑gender being dies; Trip is told off for trying to help.
Garak & Bashir (DS9): Queer‑coded longing suppressed by producers.

Doctor Who and its universe weren’t immune

The Master: Decades of queer‑coded obsession with the Doctor, always punished.
Nyssa & Tegan: Intimacy coded but never allowed to breathe.
Ace: Queer‑coded, punished for desire; queerness confirmed only in novels.
Jack & Ianto (Torchwood): Love allowed, then killed.
Clara & Me (Ashildr): Romantic‑coded bond teased, never textual.

Star Wars repeated the pattern

Asajj Ventress: Queer‑coded intensity punished with betrayal and death.
General Hux: Repressed, brittle, humiliated, discarded.
Lando (Solo): Pansexuality played as a joke; nothing allowed to be real.

Battlestar Galactica (2004)

Felix Gaeta: Queer, idealistic, executed by firing squad.
Cylon fluidity: Non‑binary‑coded bodies framed as seductive or dangerous.

The Expanse

Camina Drummer: Queer in the books; the show softens and sidelines her relationships.
Julie Mao: Desire punished; she becomes a corpse‑bride for an alien intelligence.

Fringe

Alt‑Astrid & Astrid: Queer‑coded tenderness never allowed to be textual.

Orphan Black

Cosima & Delphine: Canonical love, but Delphine is shot, resurrected, traumatised.
Tony: Introduced as a trans clone, then erased.

Sense8

Nomi & Amanita: Groundbreaking, but the show is cancelled before their story can fully unfold.

Literature’s long shadow

Baron Harkonnen (Dune): One of the most infamous queer‑coded villains in SF.
Ender’s Game: Intense boy/boy intimacy punished with isolation and violence.
Hyperion: Queer‑coded longing framed as tragic or morally compromised.
Altered Carbon: Fluid bodies treated as grotesque or disposable.

Video games, too

Mass Effect: Queer characters often killed, traumatised, or sidelined.
The Last of Us: Bill & Frank’s love framed through loss (game version).

The straight‑coded character survives.
The queer‑coded character is punished, erased, or killed.
Grief becomes a privilege reserved for heterosexuals.

These weren’t isolated incidents. They were patterns. They were genre norms. Queer desire wasn’t just punished, it was erased. And queer fans learned to mourn quietly, between the lines.

A Whole New World

Not everyone followed the script.

While mainstream science fiction kept rehearsing the same old punishments, a handful of writers cracked the genre open from the inside. They didn’t ask permission. They didn’t wait for the future to arrive. They built it themselves.

Theodore Sturgeon was one of the first to refuse the closet.

In 1953, The World Well Lost gave us two alien lovers fleeing persecution — a thinly veiled allegory for same‑sex love, written with tenderness instead of fear. Venus Plus X imagined a post‑binary society where gender dissolves into possibility. And in “Amok Time,” he slipped in an ambiguous final moment that launched decades of Kirk/Spock slash. Sturgeon didn’t code queerness as threat. He coded it as love.

James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) broke the genre’s gender rules by disguising herself as a man.

Her stories — Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, The Women Men Don’t See — didn’t just critique gender; they weaponised it. Tiptree’s queerness lived in the layers: the pseudonym, the bisexual desire, the ambivalence about embodiment. She cracked the boys’ club open by walking in through the front door wearing a mask.

Ursula K. Le Guin imagined ambisexual beings in The Left Hand of Darkness, but filtered them through the discomfort of a cisgender male envoy.

Years later, she admitted the limits of that lens — and revised her own worldbuilding in Four Ways to Forgiveness and beyond. Le Guin didn’t just build worlds; she returned to them, corrected them, and made them more honest.

Samuel R. Delany tore the scaffolding down entirely.

In Trouble on Triton and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, he wrote queer protagonists who were messy, desiring, political, and gloriously uncorrected. Delany didn’t treat queerness as metaphor. He treated it as story structure.

Octavia Butler reimagined intimacy itself.

Her protagonists — often Black, female, fluid, and impossible to categorise — refused the genre’s binaries. In Imago and Fledgling, love isn’t punished. It’s transformed.

Joanna Russ didn’t ask for inclusion. She demanded rebellion.

The Female Man didn’t politely critique masculinist genre logic — it shredded it. Russ wrote with rage, wit, and queer defiance. Her protagonists weren’t palatable. They were revolutionary.

And then, in the early 1990s, television began to crack.

Quantum Leap played with gender fluidity through body‑hopping narratives, offering glimpses of queerness without naming it… except for one episode about a young gay man and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which terrified sponsors and delivered the show’s highest ratings.

Alien Nation used alien‑human dynamics to interrogate race, sexuality, and assimilation. Its queer‑coded subplots didn’t ask for permission; they challenged the genre’s comfort zones. Is it any wonder that this series was quickly cancelled?

They weren’t just stories. They were cracks in the wall. They showed the future didn’t have to inherit the old punishments. They suggested that queerness wasn’t a threat to the genre; it was the thing keeping it alive.

“Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be — a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us — have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”
— Samuel R. Delany

They Rewired the Genre

They didn’t just imagine futures. They rewired the genre.

While speculative fiction punished queer visibility, fans rewired the genre from below. Slash fandom didn’t just interpret canon; it rebuilt it. Zines weren’t footnotes. They were blueprints. Queer fanfic didn’t ask permission. It bulldozed its way into public spaces.

Queer women, disabled fans, and trans archivists built participatory infrastructure: archives, fan campaigns, slash repositories, and mutual aid networks that refused correction. They didn’t wait for canon to catch up. They built futures in the margins.

Fanlore, AO3, and countless zines became sites of reclamation. These weren’t just fan responses. They were editorial acts of justice. They documented what genre erased. They remembered what canon punished. They built scaffolding where speculative fiction collapsed.

They didn’t escape the closet; they rewired it. Fandom rewrote the coordinates. We occupy the future.

References:

Andrew M Butler, in Rob Latham et. al., 2009. “SFS Symposium: Sexuality in Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, Science Fiction and Sexuality (November), pp. 385-403. JSTOR, accessed 26 September 2025.

James Doohan & Peter David, 1996. Beam me up, Scotty: Star Trek’s “Scotty” – in his own words, Pocket Books, p. 162.

Michael Green, 2013. “Screenwriting Representation: Teaching Approaches to Writing Queer Characters”, Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 65, No. 1-2 (Spring/Summer), pp. 30-42. JSTOR, accessed 26 September 2025.

James Satter. 2006. “The Hidden Homosexual: Reexamining ‘Star Trek’’s Sulu.” Science Fiction Studies, Greencastle: SF-TH Inc, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 379–82. JSTOR, accessed 16 May 2023.

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

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

Sixty-Five Orbits

A Humanist’s Guide to the Next Revolution

Author’s Note: This isn’t an old man’s ramble. It’s an attempt to make sense of sixty‑five years of learning, unlearning, and imagining better futures. If there’s any wisdom here, it’s only because so many others handed it to me first.

“What’s past is prologue.” — The Tempest

Sixty‑five years is long enough to see patterns repeat and long enough to recognise when they finally break. I don’t think of this birthday as a milestone. It’s a checkpoint, a moment to look at the world I inherited, the work I’ve done, and the future that still needs building.

As I mark another orbit around the Sun, I’m reminded that our journey begins when we first act on the world, and ends only when we can no longer contribute to it.

I was born into a narrow set of expectations: straight stories, straight lines, straight heroes. Those narratives shaped the world around me, even when they had no room for people like me. Humanism taught me to question who those stories served. Queerness taught me to recognise the gaps. Science fiction taught me that the future is not fixed; it’s constructed. Activism helped me translate my ideals into reality. Those threads have shaped every orbit of my life.

Across every orbit, I’ve learned that the future isn’t something we inherit, it’s something we author. And creativity isn’t passive — it’s a decision to step into the future and start shaping it with your own hands.

First Steps, First Journeys

ai-generated image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I didn’t inherit a legacy so much as a set of constraints. The stories available to me as a young person were rigid, moralising, and exclusionary. They told me who mattered and who didn’t. They told me what a life should look like. They told me what futures were possible. I learned early that those stories were incomplete. I didn’t reject them outright; I examined them, kept what was useful, and discarded what wasn’t. That process — assessing, revising, rebuilding — became the foundation of my work.

My first steps toward creative authorship came in stages: raising money for charity at twelve, rejecting homophobic Christianity at twenty‑seven, deepening my activism and community work across the decades that followed, and interrogating the cult of consumerist capitalism in my sixties. Each step was a refusal, a quiet revolution against the stories that tried to shape me.

Those choices enabled me to outgrow the religion I was raised in and find humanism as the position that gave voice and form to my ethics and efforts. The so‑called “Golden Rule” appears across religions and philosophies, a genuinely humanist idea that unites us despite creed or culture. I find comfort in the African concept of Ubuntu — “I am because we are” — a philosophy of shared humanity as old as our origins on that continent.

History is full of people who challenged the systems that harmed them — from medieval critics of religious extremism to modern voices questioning the inequalities produced by consumerist capitalism. As I grow older, I find myself asking whether the stories we’ve been trained to uphold still serve us. That isn’t radical; it’s simply the same humanist instinct that has guided every step of my life.

Life Stories

Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project on Display in the Exhibition Building, Melbourne. Photo (c) 1999 Geoff Allshorn.

The stories I’ve written across my life weren’t planned. They emerged from necessity. During the AIDS crisis, activism wasn’t optional. It was survival. We built care networks because the world refused to care for us. Those years taught me that community is not an abstract value; it is a practice. Queer activism reinforced that lesson. We made ourselves visible in systems designed to erase us. We built archives, families, and movements that refused to disappear. Human rights work expanded that frame again, showing me how dignity is contested globally and how easily it can be denied.

My wider human rights activism helped me make a tangible difference: saving lives, rewriting laws, shifting community attitudes. My thirty‑three year involvement with Amnesty International Australia instilled in me the belief that “it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness”. In a world where wars escalate and human rights are being wound back, darkness is encroaching further into our lives. We can lock down into our isolated, insulated little bunkers and ignore the suffering of others, or we can step out into discomfort and join the fight.

Science fiction informed my journey — more than just recognising Captain Kirk’s moral imperative in his dying words, “Have I made a difference?” Science fiction gave me a language for possibility and a framework for imagining alternatives. Fandom, especially, taught me how to construct new architecture and how to rebuild it when it failed. It taught me that futures are not inherited; they are authored.

Now, at sixty‑five, I can see the connections more clearly. The work of activism, humanism, and futurism is the same work: identifying who is excluded, understanding why, and building structures that refuse that exclusion. The future I want is not a single narrative. It is a network of many. Africanfuturist, Indigenous futurist, Asian futurist, queer and trans futurist. Each one expands the map. Each one challenges the idea that there is only one centre or one path forward. Young futurists aren’t waiting for permission; they’re already remixing the world into something new.

I don’t have a long‑term partner or dependent biological children, but I’ve never lacked family. I have students whose lives intersect with mine, friends who walk beside me, activist colleagues who share my passions, and refugees I’ve supported as they rebuild their futures. Astronauts are courageous, activists are resilient, but refugees are the strongest people I know. Their lives remind me that strength is not loud or heroic; it is the quiet, daily work of rebuilding a future after everything familiar has been taken away. These relationships have taught me that family is not defined by blood or lineage. The human family is the one to which we all belong: a network of care, responsibility, and shared becoming. They remind me that the future belongs to those who rebuild it, not those who cling to the past.

The Meaning of Liff

Incomplete artwork from Kelvin Roberts – the Orion Nebula

Douglas Adams and John Lloyd wrote The Meaning of Liff as a playful reminder that meaning is something we invent — we give names to the unnamed, we define the overlooked, we create significance where none was provided. That idea has always resonated with me. I’m mindful of Brian Cox’s reminder that consciousness is the universe becoming aware of itself. It reframes the old question about the meaning of life: meaning isn’t discovered; it’s authored. If humanity disappears, the universe loses the only consciousness we know — and the only maker of meaning we know it contains. There’s something electrifying about realising we’re the universe’s way of drafting its own next chapter.

As I reach sixty‑five (an age that less than one percent of humanity attains) I think of the many friends, heroes, role models, and mentors who have already gone. In my twenties, I literally held the hands of young friends as they died during the AIDS epidemic. In more recent decades, I’ve watched older science fiction friends depart: the people who taught me to look to the future, to imagine alternatives, to build what didn’t yet exist.

And in the present, I sometimes hear of refugee friends dying — a reminder that loss is not only a memory of the past but a reality unfolding now, and that the comfortable world around us still turns away from the suffering of most of humanity.

I mourn my heroes and mentors too: AIDS and human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, authors, astronauts, scientists, refugees. Their lives shaped mine. Their courage, curiosity, and defiance helped me understand that meaning is not bestowed from above; it is created through action, imagination, and solidarity. As we lose our heroes and role models, we inherit an obligation to become those very things for others.

That idea reinforces my belief that our task is not to search for meaning, but to create it.

The Journey From Here

Twenty years ago, I survived two rounds of significant heart surgery. I am alive because two other people donated their heart valves when they died. My life continues their legacy — and this is particularly significant given that neither I nor my surgeon expected me to survive for twenty years. That survival carries an obligation: to make my life count, to honour the meaning their lives made possible.

I don’t feel finished. I don’t feel settled. I am absolutely not retired. I feel engaged. The next orbit is not about legacy; it’s about authorship: the ongoing work of shaping a future where everyone belongs.

I’m still learning. Still unlearning. Still building. Still becoming. And for the first time, I can see the shape of the work ahead — not as a burden, but as an invitation.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

The next orbit begins now.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with editorial assistance by 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.