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Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial
Is it inhabited? This question makes the shared stakes of science fiction and colonialism obvious, wherein the wide imaginaries of empire and what counts as life - scientifically, ethically, politically - and the moral and technological possibilities of terraforming and the impulse for exploration are all fused. Science fiction, and the genres that preceded and grounded it, such as scientific romance and tales of lost civilizations, emerged alongside the birth of industrialized global trade and imperial rushes for new resources. If the scientific romance dramatized the effects of new technologies on history and forms of life, then lost civilization stories dealt with themes of the alien, the forgetting of history, and more explicitly, with episodes of war and oppression.
153 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 25, 2025
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February 11, 2026
If it's two books I have been eagerly waiting for this, I would go for Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right and Ben Woodard's Uninhabited. They are both slim volumes (approximately 100 pages each) and are fairly easy to read, but they condense a significant amount of research and would be best viewed as part of an ideal curriculum, not just scholarly contributions, but also as textbooks to some of today's most pressing and depressing issues that living in a science fiction world has made unavoidable. Shortly put, sci-fi cannot be left in the hands of billionaire techbro nerds playing bratty space cowboys.
For me, they're both complementary. One (Jordan S. Caroll's) deals with Euro-American racist and supremacist utopias, and the nearly century-long science fiction debates over who is allowed to imagine or inhabit the future, or if indeed that future will truly be planetary and antifascist. Ben Woodard's deals with what one could call not just the globalization of SF, but searching for new universals amidst the decentering not just of the still dominant Anglo-American (North American) science fiction, but also amidst a reevaluation of non-European cohort of theorists, especially relevant in the context of Caribbean thought (Sylvia Wynter, Aimee Cesaire and Eduard Glissant to name the most familiar) but now essential for rethinking a science fiction for the 21 c century.
I must also say I am still slowly catching up on most of these. Honestly, I'm having difficulty with Wynter's writing, and I'd prefer an introductory text like Ben's dwelling on the intricacies & stakes of Wynter's major ideas and texts, which feel somewhat daunting to me.
This of course comes as now surprise as more and more -particularly the Middle Passage gets more historical weight and political economic attention as the preparative part of the capitalist framework (Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History by David McNally and Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution by Maxine Berg), that has held a proeminent role in afropesimist, afrofuturist, africanfuturist, critical race theory and Black Marxist criticism.
The book largely follows the UN geoscheme - and also is nuanced about its treatment of the colonial gaze as it applies to various countries as well as anti-colonial and liberation struggles and the actual history of imperialism around the world. To take two random examples - in the case of India the history of the British East India Company or the Chinese Opium War's and treaty ports. That's something that is sometimes missing from the impetus to decolonialize (referring here to W. Mignolo's dehistoricization as well as its largely ponderous jargon, criticised by Neil Larsen).
Beside that, Ben Woodard is particularly careful to point out that there's concept creep btw "myth and foundational ideas", and that there's a certain metaphysical or theological carryovers into the makeup of the conception of SF, but also makes clear that is is high time to ditch, if possible, the Christian assumptions that have plagued the genre.
Of course, there is room for more - say Indonesian SF or Maori SF (games included), but this would have been a much larger book, and today's real variety of SF is already very hard to parse and encompass. I was missing some treatment of Eastern European or Balkan or Turkish SF, which is a special case in itself, and might have found an adjacent place in the chapter about Techno-Orientalism and Orientalism, I guess.
Unihabited also takes on the thorny notion of the Anthropocene (its temporal and spatial dimensions), trying to "discern the various critical differences between the various ends of the world (or worlds)" engaging with the work of "Wynter, Tallbear, Todd, Whyte, Danowski, Viveiros de Castro" and others. I think it helps to have a certain familiarity with these thinkers, but at the same time, there are ample quotes and segments to illustrate their ideas in this volume.
Still, I want to emphasise that Ben Woodard's key addition to the science fiction scholarship also makes a claim about the notion of plural or multiple modernities, "that modernity is a tendency relative to each culture rather than there being a singular (European) form".
Not only is Ben Woodard's book a welcome addition to his previous work around Schellingian philosophy (Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space and the Volition of Thought), British idealism (F. H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy: Animating a Lost Idealism, dark vitalism (Slime Dynamics) and especially the conceptual history of biology and the life sciences, but it bears the weight of his familiarity with both global SF (be it Indigenous futurisms, Gulf Futurism, or the plethora of South Asian or Chinese SF) but witouth imposing a theoretical frame, witouth using them as target material or forcing one own pet theoretical approaches in an act of "cultural extractivism". As mentioned, a great role is played by the theological underpinning that seems to be carried over even by the neo-Darwinist orthodoxy.
In contrast with older conservative (fusionist - for this check Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right), the "new fusionists" seem particularly adept at ditching not just the previous spiritual/cultural luggage and adopt old racist science or biology derived arguments in support of the three hards (hard borders, hard currency and hardwired human nature). There's a long preparation for these debates starting with O. Wilson's sociobiology (including criticism by anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology), disputes from the late 1970s which were largely academic and ending up with the pop science books by science popularizer and early science celebrity Richard Dawkins (Selfish Gene, Blind Watchmaker, Mount Improbable, etc and particularly his BBC documentary), that brought increased visibility not just for genetics and the genocentric model of we're all "survival machines" and mere "selfish gene replicators" and even if Dawkins to his credit tried to mitigate rhe socio political conclusion, his "gene point of view" emphasis amply coincided with Thatcher's "There's no society" and TINA.
Decolonising SF also means, in more practical and direct terms, a constant move to also historicise biology as a science and the philosophy of biology or why even extinction as being a historical concept, "[extinction]which is central to thinking extinction has been perpetually pushed away from being a historical science (which generally includes geology, paleontology, archeology, cosmology, etc.)" (from the Conclusion: Colonial Ends). "Lost worlds" and "scientific romance" the twin pre-SF sources of science fiction are approached witouth making this another book about the origins or critique of SF as a genre rising out of (second) colonial (wave) or (high) imperialist context (which has been done amply by many other authors Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction).
Altough what makes a world inhabited (for who?), uninhabited or even the mention of "terra nullius", off-worlds and Mars colonies, as we are talking about making the Earth uninhabitable, inevitably brings us back to Imperialism as the highest stage of Capitalism in my opinion, Ben makes clear that the new space billionaires exploitation of the Uninhabited space, differ from the older colonial haunts. According to this book, there's a fundamental difference between displacing and exterminating indigenous people or enslaving them on Earth and the new space race to privatize spaces exploration, colonise uninhabited worlds (planets) while trying to avoid any kind of regulations so as to ensure your company will monopolise 'escape velocity' technology, space exploration & suck all resources.
The space billionaires have not only espoused a religious framework (Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race), but they seem very eager to fuse Californian Ideology with Texan Ideology (combining a staunch belief in the oil industry and millenarian Christianity) under zero gravity conditions.
Fascism is a stage of colonialism as many in the radical black tradition made clear (Aimee Cesaire, George Padmore and others). Prosperity gospel & Drill baby drill in the deregulated (if inimical to earthly life and deadly cold) expanse of the final frontier has a clear supremacist base with establishing the Lebensraum for the chosen white spaceborn few. Instead of being steeped in the idealization of a pure unchanging golden past, the new fascism is more about eugenics, IQ and a social Darwinstic logic. Imho, diverging from previous "Plantatiocene", settler colonial societies or ecological imperialism logic (say acclimatising various species acclimatization or soypunk billionaires destroying both Amazon and indigenous populations in the name of profits and soy future), space billionaires are actually concretely making the Earth less inhabitable or actually uninhabitable while pushing for a lifeboat solutionism. This distinction is pretty important, specifically because they pretend to labor under an x-risk mandate.
In short I like that Uninhabited does not try to fully rescue Hegel (in the sense that Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History) or just find white allies, resisting both excoriating science fiction SFFnal texts (say his example of the 1950s Forbidden Planet as a replay of "lost worlds" and Shackespear's Tempest) not sugest a "revisionary interpretation" but electrifying the text where applying Wynter's genealogical critique makes it more worldly and why Frankenstein and other key texts are about the working and still under construction - definitions of the human (read also Orientation in a Big World: On the Necessity of Horizonless Perspectives by Patricia Reed).
For me, they're both complementary. One (Jordan S. Caroll's) deals with Euro-American racist and supremacist utopias, and the nearly century-long science fiction debates over who is allowed to imagine or inhabit the future, or if indeed that future will truly be planetary and antifascist. Ben Woodard's deals with what one could call not just the globalization of SF, but searching for new universals amidst the decentering not just of the still dominant Anglo-American (North American) science fiction, but also amidst a reevaluation of non-European cohort of theorists, especially relevant in the context of Caribbean thought (Sylvia Wynter, Aimee Cesaire and Eduard Glissant to name the most familiar) but now essential for rethinking a science fiction for the 21 c century.
I must also say I am still slowly catching up on most of these. Honestly, I'm having difficulty with Wynter's writing, and I'd prefer an introductory text like Ben's dwelling on the intricacies & stakes of Wynter's major ideas and texts, which feel somewhat daunting to me.
This of course comes as now surprise as more and more -particularly the Middle Passage gets more historical weight and political economic attention as the preparative part of the capitalist framework (Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History by David McNally and Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution by Maxine Berg), that has held a proeminent role in afropesimist, afrofuturist, africanfuturist, critical race theory and Black Marxist criticism.
The book largely follows the UN geoscheme - and also is nuanced about its treatment of the colonial gaze as it applies to various countries as well as anti-colonial and liberation struggles and the actual history of imperialism around the world. To take two random examples - in the case of India the history of the British East India Company or the Chinese Opium War's and treaty ports. That's something that is sometimes missing from the impetus to decolonialize (referring here to W. Mignolo's dehistoricization as well as its largely ponderous jargon, criticised by Neil Larsen).
Beside that, Ben Woodard is particularly careful to point out that there's concept creep btw "myth and foundational ideas", and that there's a certain metaphysical or theological carryovers into the makeup of the conception of SF, but also makes clear that is is high time to ditch, if possible, the Christian assumptions that have plagued the genre.
Of course, there is room for more - say Indonesian SF or Maori SF (games included), but this would have been a much larger book, and today's real variety of SF is already very hard to parse and encompass. I was missing some treatment of Eastern European or Balkan or Turkish SF, which is a special case in itself, and might have found an adjacent place in the chapter about Techno-Orientalism and Orientalism, I guess.
Unihabited also takes on the thorny notion of the Anthropocene (its temporal and spatial dimensions), trying to "discern the various critical differences between the various ends of the world (or worlds)" engaging with the work of "Wynter, Tallbear, Todd, Whyte, Danowski, Viveiros de Castro" and others. I think it helps to have a certain familiarity with these thinkers, but at the same time, there are ample quotes and segments to illustrate their ideas in this volume.
Still, I want to emphasise that Ben Woodard's key addition to the science fiction scholarship also makes a claim about the notion of plural or multiple modernities, "that modernity is a tendency relative to each culture rather than there being a singular (European) form".
Not only is Ben Woodard's book a welcome addition to his previous work around Schellingian philosophy (Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space and the Volition of Thought), British idealism (F. H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy: Animating a Lost Idealism, dark vitalism (Slime Dynamics) and especially the conceptual history of biology and the life sciences, but it bears the weight of his familiarity with both global SF (be it Indigenous futurisms, Gulf Futurism, or the plethora of South Asian or Chinese SF) but witouth imposing a theoretical frame, witouth using them as target material or forcing one own pet theoretical approaches in an act of "cultural extractivism". As mentioned, a great role is played by the theological underpinning that seems to be carried over even by the neo-Darwinist orthodoxy.
In contrast with older conservative (fusionist - for this check Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right), the "new fusionists" seem particularly adept at ditching not just the previous spiritual/cultural luggage and adopt old racist science or biology derived arguments in support of the three hards (hard borders, hard currency and hardwired human nature). There's a long preparation for these debates starting with O. Wilson's sociobiology (including criticism by anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology), disputes from the late 1970s which were largely academic and ending up with the pop science books by science popularizer and early science celebrity Richard Dawkins (Selfish Gene, Blind Watchmaker, Mount Improbable, etc and particularly his BBC documentary), that brought increased visibility not just for genetics and the genocentric model of we're all "survival machines" and mere "selfish gene replicators" and even if Dawkins to his credit tried to mitigate rhe socio political conclusion, his "gene point of view" emphasis amply coincided with Thatcher's "There's no society" and TINA.
Decolonising SF also means, in more practical and direct terms, a constant move to also historicise biology as a science and the philosophy of biology or why even extinction as being a historical concept, "[extinction]which is central to thinking extinction has been perpetually pushed away from being a historical science (which generally includes geology, paleontology, archeology, cosmology, etc.)" (from the Conclusion: Colonial Ends). "Lost worlds" and "scientific romance" the twin pre-SF sources of science fiction are approached witouth making this another book about the origins or critique of SF as a genre rising out of (second) colonial (wave) or (high) imperialist context (which has been done amply by many other authors Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction).
Altough what makes a world inhabited (for who?), uninhabited or even the mention of "terra nullius", off-worlds and Mars colonies, as we are talking about making the Earth uninhabitable, inevitably brings us back to Imperialism as the highest stage of Capitalism in my opinion, Ben makes clear that the new space billionaires exploitation of the Uninhabited space, differ from the older colonial haunts. According to this book, there's a fundamental difference between displacing and exterminating indigenous people or enslaving them on Earth and the new space race to privatize spaces exploration, colonise uninhabited worlds (planets) while trying to avoid any kind of regulations so as to ensure your company will monopolise 'escape velocity' technology, space exploration & suck all resources.
The space billionaires have not only espoused a religious framework (Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race), but they seem very eager to fuse Californian Ideology with Texan Ideology (combining a staunch belief in the oil industry and millenarian Christianity) under zero gravity conditions.
Fascism is a stage of colonialism as many in the radical black tradition made clear (Aimee Cesaire, George Padmore and others). Prosperity gospel & Drill baby drill in the deregulated (if inimical to earthly life and deadly cold) expanse of the final frontier has a clear supremacist base with establishing the Lebensraum for the chosen white spaceborn few. Instead of being steeped in the idealization of a pure unchanging golden past, the new fascism is more about eugenics, IQ and a social Darwinstic logic. Imho, diverging from previous "Plantatiocene", settler colonial societies or ecological imperialism logic (say acclimatising various species acclimatization or soypunk billionaires destroying both Amazon and indigenous populations in the name of profits and soy future), space billionaires are actually concretely making the Earth less inhabitable or actually uninhabitable while pushing for a lifeboat solutionism. This distinction is pretty important, specifically because they pretend to labor under an x-risk mandate.
In short I like that Uninhabited does not try to fully rescue Hegel (in the sense that Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History) or just find white allies, resisting both excoriating science fiction SFFnal texts (say his example of the 1950s Forbidden Planet as a replay of "lost worlds" and Shackespear's Tempest) not sugest a "revisionary interpretation" but electrifying the text where applying Wynter's genealogical critique makes it more worldly and why Frankenstein and other key texts are about the working and still under construction - definitions of the human (read also Orientation in a Big World: On the Necessity of Horizonless Perspectives by Patricia Reed).
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