The Expanse Part 3: The limitations of apocalyptic and dystopian science fiction

How we must shift our mindset to envision futures that no longer prescribe the end, but envision a future in which a restored and revitalized Earth, and all peoples, thrive

"We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is."

Stanisław Lem, Solaris (1972)

A cinematic moment of solitude in some unknown place and time, but an image from a series of images that tell a story I’d like to know more about nonetheless. Photo by Alex Shuper on Unsplash

I spend a lot of time thinking about the problem of durational existence¹, wondering what it means to alter or subvert the confines of time’s linear arrow; especially as we’re further hindered by the increasingly crushing vice of contemporary life and society. Where do we go from here, and how do we get there? There are so many people working so hard to co-create better futures. I think we know we’re working towards something we may never see in our lifetimes. But how would the creation of new worlds change if we were able to fold the future into now, or rewrite the past and bring it forward, so we could in some way experience the future we’re building? This is not an original thought. I’ve been enthralled by stories of future and parallel worlds, hybrid realities, and time that either warps, leaps, or folds back on itself from a very very young age. But lately, I’m more deeply influenced by art and stories from the movements of Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism.²

I’ve been revisiting Wiradjuri writer, artist, and scholar Hannah Donnelly’s essay, Indigenous Futures and Sovereign Romanticisms, Belonging to a Place in Time, in the book Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation, and Criticism. In it, Donnelly cites Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon, who coined the term “Indigenous Futurisms” to describe a genre of storytelling through which Indigenous writers intentionally experiment with, dislodge, and change the perimeters of science fiction to liberate the constraints of the genre to then assert Indigenous science into the discourse as a compliment to a perceived Western enlightenment, as well as integral to 21st century sensibility.³ Donnelly makes a distinction between Indigenous Futurism as told through speculative fiction, and futurism that interrupts colonial white supremacist narratives about how Indigenous Peoples are written about. Indigenous futures foretell what’s to come differently, by virtue of proposing futures that confront the settler colonial perspective of all time frames, from past to present to future. ⁴

Across speculative and science fiction, there are stories of apocalypse. But Indigenous Futurism can hold two different experiences of apocalypse, which Donnelly calls first and second invasions. Stories of invasion from the white imagination are a first apocalypse, an ending to a world that has held to an established order.⁵ When I think of these, I think about how they perpetuate contemporary narratives of dystopia—events that have happened and are currently happening to Indigenous, Black, and people of the global majority—into a future where no progress has been made to repair or reverse these. They are often so grim, gritty, and bleak as to fetishize cataclysm and despair; offering little hope. At worst, the Earth is dead and gone; at best, Earth is simply in the process of dying. In stories where Earth dies, humanity faces its end through either extinction from some unnamed calamity, and all other life with it is completely lost. In stories where Earth has been sustained in some way, humanity could meet its end through mutation into an entirely new species, or through the emergence of a pandemic that turns the majority of humans into ravenous bloodthirsty ghouls or zombie hordes. In stories where Earth has somehow averted an apocalypse, but has become fully dystopian, humanity is more often than not projected onto other planets and moons to either expand, or try again someplace new. Narratives from the white imagination center the demise of the settler, and continue to push the marginalized out to even more distant margins. 

Do you remember the epic science fiction drama, The Expanse? This story, overall, has mystic undertones that I wanted to see more of but for the purposes of this conversation, I'm interested in addressing the world(s) in which it takes place—that of an Earth that has been irreparably ravaged by industrial pollution and climate change, and humankind has colonized Mars, the Asteroid Belt, moons and outer planets, and the overall solar system. There are three distinct populations, each with their own class association: Earthers, Martians, and Belters. Earth is the seat of the solar system's political hub, and Earthers are seen as the bourgeoisie, the wealthy, and the privileged class. But over half the population lives in poverty, earning a meager basic income and basic housing. There is an even harder caveat: there aren't enough jobs. Most are unable to enter into a profession, no matter how much they want to work and contribute to society. We learn more about this in Season 2 Episode 10, Cascade when Martian sergeant Bobbie Draper meets a man named Nico in this “underworld” who barters for bone density pills in order to help her get to the ocean. She correctly guesses he wanted to be a doctor, and through his explanation we gain a peek into the disadvantages of an overrun system.⁶ Martians are seen as the scientists and military class, descendants of the initial settlers who began to harbor resentment towards Earth for its control over their colony, regarding Earthers as wasteful polluters taking what they had for granted while Martians fought to seek technology to terraform Mars, with the aspiration to care for it better than Earth had been treated. As they became more self-sufficient and began to excel in technology and environmental sciences and research, they fought for independence from Earth's governmental control, becoming a formidable superpower and adversary. Belters, people born in the Asteroid Belt and the outer planets, are viewed as uneducated misfits; an exploited labor class who provide resources and materials through mining and manufacturing. They're mistreated and mistrusted by both Earthers and Martians, and therefore Belters endure ongoing hardship and oppression. As a result, organized resistance movements have grown from labor unions and networks of trade into a fully-formed alliance that seeks not only to establish independence and sovereignty, but also to assert itself as a political power with influence in the solar system.

The reason I went into so much detail around all of this is to illustrate how this isn’t so much a story of a future world as it is the story of the Modern era, and the story of our contemporary world, right now. In telling the story of expansion, industrialization, development of new sciences and technologies, new nation-states, wars, division, power dynamics and differentials, rebellion, and the effects of rapid unmitigated climate change driven by capitalism and colonialism; we project an origin story that began with 15th century European conquest onto a future world where our oppression and injustices continue. There is little hope. And the story is designed this way—the authors of the novel series state that part of the point they wanted to make was that humanity never changes, and that history tells the future. Their proposal is that maybe out of 1300 new worlds, some piece of humanity will “get it right”.⁷ But what has it taken to get to even this point, where new worlds were possible? And why must we seek a “new world” to learn how to “figure it out”? 

We no longer need to imagine apocalypses in this timeline.⁸ We are watching them unfold in the moment, live, streaming across the screens of our phones, computers, on television, and listening to it on podcasts and radio. We’re witnessing them as they show up at our doorstep. The apocalypse unfolds as it flattens entire city neighborhoods and refugee camps in Gaza, killing over 20,000 people while polluting the earth and the sea; as it slowly devours the lush rivers and rainforests of the Amazon; as it encroaches on the mountains, forests, and tundra of Sápmi; in the way it poisons the water in the neighborhoods of Flint, Michigan; how it hungers for more cobalt and precious metals to build our electronics from the wounded red earth of the Congo; when it seeks to build pipelines for oil across the high grassy plains of Standing Rock and through the tall boreal forests of Wetʼsuwetʼen Territory. It creeps into our own lives, as we endure a rampant unmitigated pandemic and face the potential of further unknown health conditions from a novel virus while the cost and accessibility of healthcare becomes untenable. It’s slowly eroding civil liberties, healthcare and reproductive rights, and the right to exist for women, trans, nonbinary, and LGBQI people. It’s sucking our bank accounts dry as we suffer increasing economic hardship across all working classes that are not the wealthy one percent. No. We do not need stories of the apocalypse.

I wonder what it will take for us to cease this relentless prescription of the future, to stop inscribing dystopia onto humanity’s future as if we can never escape it. Our work is not to escape to other worlds, but to remain here and tend to this Earth, our singular birthplace and home—there is no other. We create what we dream. What can we possibly create when we only dream nightmares? What is there to build towards if we only see our inevitable demise? Science fiction is a mirror, not a prophecy. It shows us the horrors of our world, politics, and choices that we live each day. The best stories in science fiction have always been cautionary tales meant to alert us to the danger that we still have time to thwart. In that way, I think even stories from white authors who find ways to expand beyond the limits of white imagination have often attempted to show us how the end is also a beginning.⁹ Can we see further, beyond the presentation of entertainment, to reflect on the power of metaphor and allegory that teaches us something about ourselves? Can we see, through these stories, how the structures we live within right now were not built to nourish and sustain us? What stories will we tell to ignite and illuminate our imagination of a healed Earth, and people, coming together to build a world of connectivity and creativity?

There is another part to this essay, which I decided to break up because it was getting super long. In it, we come back to Hannah Donnelly’s essay and thoughts about Indigenous Futurism, and look at the film Blood Quantum as somewhat related to Grace Dillon’s genres of Native slipstream and apocalypse.¹⁰ 

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Further reading and viewing for those interested:

Afrofuturism Wikipedia page

Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Demian DinéYazhi', WE LEFT THEM NOTHING, printed and co-designed by John Akira Harold, nun studios, 2021

Eye Candy, Afrofuturism Is The Sh*T: A Brief History And Five Books To Get You Started, Afropunk, October 2017

The Expanse, Season 2 Episode 10, Cascade

George R. Stewart, Earth Abides, Random House, 1949

Grace Dillon, Imagining Indigenous Futurisms, from Walking the clouds, An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillon, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2012

Grace Dillon Wikipedia page

Hannah Donnelly, Indigenous Futures and Sovereign Romanticisms, Belonging to a Place in Time, from Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation, and Criticism, edited by Katya García-Antón​, Office for Contemporary Art Norway/Valiz, Amsterdam, 2018

Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest, OSU Press, Corvallis, 2003, edited by Grace Dillon

Howard Rambsy II collection of writing on Afrofuturism on his website, Cultural Front 

Kensy Cooperrider & Rafael Núñez, How We Make Sense of Time, Scientific American, November 2016

Laine Kaplan-Levenson, Sci-Fi Writer Octavia Butler Offered Warnings And Hope In Her Work, Throughline on NPR, 2021

Love After the End, An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, 2020

Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day, Tor Books, New York, 1997

Never Whistle at Night, An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr, Vintage Books, New York, 2023

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents, Seven Stories Press, New York, 1998

Paul Saffo, Elise Boulding on the "200-year present", The Long Now Foundation Ideas archive, July 2010, by way of Angie Miller who shared about this coined by Elise Boulding on Threads

Sadie Gennis, The Expanse authors were always building toward Leviathan Falls’ world-altering ending, Polygon, December 2021

Solaris, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, Screenplay by Friedrich Gorenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972

Spinoza’s Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, 4. Eternity of the mind, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Experience and Perception of Time

Tiya Miles, How Octavia Butler Told the Future, The Atlantic, January 2024 (this article came out the very day I was putting the final touches on this essay, and it was so timely and perfect I’ve added it here as a must-read)

Ursula K. Le Guin bibliography Wikipedia page

Walking the clouds, An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillon, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2012

Zombie apocalypse Wikipedia page

1. I was trying to find some sort of adequate synonym for the word “time” that encompassed a life, and landed upon “durational existence” and after laughing about this phrase for a minute, wondering if it was unapproachable, I decided to Google it. It turns out this is a thing. Spinoza talked about it. I don’t know enough to cite this properly or even know if the way I’m using it is the way Spinoza did, but at the end of this comment are a couple of resources. Maybe I knew this phrase at one point and it was just there, laying in wait in the depths of my subconscious until it was ready to emerge in a sentence, some day. The soup that is the writer’s brain is very full of things.

Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Spinoza’s Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, 4. Eternity of the mind, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

2. I’m no scholar or expert on the subject of either Afrofuturism or Indigenous Futurism, and I’m not Indigenous. I am a student; a curious and investigative person with a penchant for detecting patterns and throughlines. I’m referencing this topic because I think there’s a lot for the rest of us to learn from and take into consideration. It’s important to avoid being extractive—Donnelly addresses the way non-Indigenous scholars will, in their attempts towards decolonial work and centering Indigenous knowledges, imagine Indigenous futures in which they still have access to Indigenous thoughts, imaginations, and ways to survive the apocalypse; thus mining the future of Indigenous Peoples as much as the present. (Sovereign Words, pp 268) I certainly hope to avoid this. What interests me are the interconnections that I saw, and the differences, in the way different futures are presented and told according to worldview, life experience, histories, and culture. It is expressly avoiding the pitfalls of a limited white imagination that I hope to point at as the work for people identified as white, rather than extracting Indigenous wisdom to apply to ourselves; especially as original thought.

3. Grace Dillon, Imagining Indigenous Futurisms, from Walking the clouds, An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillon, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2012

4. Hannah Donnelly, Indigenous Futures and Sovereign Romanticisms, Belonging to a Place in Time, from Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation, and Criticism, edited by Katya García-Antón​, Office for Contemporary Art Norway/Valiz, Amsterdam, 2018, pp  261

5. Ibid, Donnelly, pp270

6. The Expanse, Season 2 Episode 10, Cascade

7. Sadie Gennis, The Expanse authors were always building toward Leviathan Falls’ world-altering ending, Polygon, December 2021

8. Demian DinéYazhi' speaks often about reimagining the future, but in their 2021 book, WE LEFT THEM NOTHING, they say:

"we must collectively stop imagining apocalypse or future world order dystopia"
"we must stop imagining destruction, oil fields, deforestation, cages, animal displacement, surveillance, and future genocide"
"we must stop doing this imagining for the sake of subversive prophecy"
"we must stop predicting apocalypses & fascist governmental hierarchies on behalf of post-colonial psychosis & power hungry heteropatriarchial degenerates"

Demian and I have had many conversations together and separately about no longer inscribing apocalypse and dystopia onto our future, and their work is a big influence on me. I can’t talk about reimagining futures without citing them here!

Demian DinéYazhi',WE LEFT THEM NOTHING, printed and co-designed by John Akira Harold, nun studios, 2021

9. I’m thinking about numerous works by the great Ursula K. Le Guin, of course; and a quieter story, The Dazzle of Day, written by the lesser known Molly Gloss. Le Guin and Gloss both portray worlds in which there are still power differentials, but they also present alternative futures that expand far beyond the limitations of oppression and warfare to get to many many things that are more interesting. Even in George R. Stewart’s 1949 novel, Earth Abides; the cataclysm is a beginning that seems to restore humanity, rather than resign itself to humanity’s end.

Also, this was fun—in looking up more information about several people here that I’m referencing to see what they had been up to lately, I learned that Gloss and Le Guin were very close friends; and that Grace Dillon edited a compilation of stories that included both of their works in an anthology of Pacific Northwest authors titled Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest.

10. Grace Dillon, Imagining Indigenous Futurisms, from  Walking the clouds, An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillon, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2012, pp 3-4, 8-9