Writing in Colonial Fantasies

The new 'us and them': an exploration of the science fiction genre, its authors and why it matters

I recall a conversation a couple of years ago with a friend who questioned my preference for reading only non-fiction. His point was that oppressed people should read for recreation and not just for the benefit or extension of the theoretical/justice work we do. So, I returned to the genre that had attracted me to reading as a child and teenager but this time to familiar stories authored by Blackfullas. I will point out that non-fiction writers are a rare but critical part of First Nations literature in this country, and quite frankly, we need more of them. But getting back to the point of reading fiction, recently, I’ve been considering science fiction. It’s a genre I have been reluctant to read because it seems a frivolous use of time to devote to someone else’s renderings of the future. Last year I read Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 Parable series and Kindred (1979). I’ve started reading the recently released Always Will Be: Stories of Goori Sovereignty from the Futures of the Tweed (2024) by Bundjalung and Lebanese writer, Mykaela Saunders. It’s safe to say, my apprehensive return to recreational reading has been refreshing because Black and Indigenous authors write us into fictional futures and don’t leave us bewildered, asking ourselves ‘but what happened to all the Black and Brown people?’ 

It's not new information that settlers dominate science and speculative fiction as both authors and main characters. They compose endless narratives about discovery, invasion, and colonisation. Science fiction has provided the perfect genre for them to continue the ‘explorer’ legacies of their forebears in realms here and in imaginary far-off galaxies. In their writing they remove and erase Indigenous people or, through appropriation, transfer Indigeneity to themselves¹ (Hunt, 2018). For example, in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) there is a scene in which Charlize Theron’s character ‘Furiosa’ is reunited with the Vuvalini (The Many Mothers tribe) having been ‘stolen’ from that tribe, along with her mother, as a child. In the scene that shows Furiosa’s return to her ‘tribe’ she identifies herself as a member of Vuvalini, she names her mother (Mary Jo Bassa), explaining that she was ‘initiated’ by a woman named K.T. Concannon, and that she comes from the clan group ‘Swaddle Dog’. In this scene, a naked white woman can be seen perched high on a derelict rig. She peers down at Furiosa through the steel structure on either side of them as they are surrounded by high sandy dunes in the desert. The naked woman responds to Furiosa’s announcement with a loud trill signalling to others who emerge from the dunes in a variety of roaring, dusty vehicles and motorcycles. So, why write Indigenous people and futures into stories when you can transfer cultural practices from actual Indigenous societies to imaginary white ones, right?

In science fiction, writers can fantasise frontiers with themselves as the ‘sexy’ natives to play out settler eroticisms. They write and act out these fantasies and create insatiable appetites for opportunities to colonise and recolonise. Dystopian science fiction is premised on the erasure of Indigenous people and destruction of lands and waters. It creates new settler societies whose purpose is to create a ‘utopia’. And herein, is the violence of colonial storytelling, to create their ‘great society’, it is necessary for them to also create a hellish process of elimination – a dystopia. The elimination process storylines are usually established on the premise that Indigenous people were too weak to survive, too inferior to thrive, or too worthless to matter to the story and so the havoc wreaked upon them is justified. 

I find the line between fiction and non-fiction to be more perforated than solid. They seep into each other to a point that leaves me wondering if it is writers, corporates, lawyers, or politicians who are able to imagine the most oppressive situation for Indigenous people. One only needs to consider what we are witnessing in Gaza. Europe and the Anglosphere have ensured that the utopia that was created for Israel in Palestine was offset by a dystopia for Palestinians, such is the grotesque nature of colonial fantasies.  ‘Dystopian’ is an apt description of the extreme inhuman treatment that Palestinians are being forced to survive. Israel’s destruction of whole cities and family bloodlines, the scale of death and cruelty and the inconceivable level of trauma being inflicted on Palestinians is streamed directly into our hands via our phones. Instead of holding books describing horrors and tragedies for us to imagine, now we view images and videos of unimaginable acts of violence being perpetrated with impunity and elation. It is as morbid as it is devastating that governments, ours included, have backed Israel’s annihilation of Palestinians and the theft of their lands and resources. And whilst many citizens around the world are calling it a genocide, others choose to trivialise it, justify it, or ignore it. It’s as if what has been happening for decades in Palestine and other colonial projects such as West Papua, the Congo and Kanaky is happening to characters in a book or a movie. 

Meanwhile on these lands, Blackfullas know too well that we are living through the dystopian futures that our Ancestors would not have imagined. Our Old Peoples’ understanding of futures did not require a collapse of everything for themselves or others, such was their ability to live in relationship with place and people. On the other hand, the societal and environmental destruction that we are enduring is the utopian future that previous generations of settlers carefully planned for their descendants who now dominate us, our lands and waters. Settler re-creations of the environments they occupy are part of their manufacturing of narratives in which they are permanently positioned as the heroes and heroines of their colonial adventures. Their stories are steeped in the fiction of ‘terra nullius’. We witness their narratives forming and re-forming when their political, legal and educational systems bend and shape the story they tell about why they are here. Our governance of people and places relegated to the annals of history, deemed insufficient for the supposed sophistication of a settler society. In surviving dystopia, we are expected to play the role of ‘extras’ in the background of their colonial stories – not permitted to imagine our own present with them let alone our futures without them. And of course, we know that sovereign Blackfullas will always be the antagonists of settler narratives.

I’m reminded of an interview of Octavia E Butler where she was asked “is it possible for Black people or people of Colour to formulate visions of the future that are both liberating and purposeful?” to which Butler astutely responded, “of course…we better!” Who we consume fictionally or non-fictionally in storytelling is important. Colonial imaginings of the future whether fiction or not, feasts on the destruction of Indigeneity and hoards more palatable forms of it. Black and Indigenous science fiction is key to imagining futures for Indigenous peoples because they can lend ideas to how we might hold on to all of ourselves in future spaces. However, we must also be nourished and fuelled by non-fiction Indigenous writers who critique this place as both the geography of our being and the construction of the settlers’ forebears. It is those writers who are revealing the colony’s scripts and offering us the plot twists settlers did not plan for.

1. Hunt, Dallas. (2018). “In search of our better selves”: Totem Transfer Narratives and Indigenous Futurities. American Indian Culture and Research Journal. 42. 71-90. 10.17953/aicrj.42.1.hunt.