0. Editor’s Note

First Light Of A Crooked Sun — August Linn

Machine Learning — Tan Jing Min

Grape, Backwards — ash chua

And They All Lived: Remembering the Happy Smiley Writers Group — Ng Yi-Sheng

Searching for One’s Roots 2.0 — Shawn Seah

Island — Stephany Zoo

Falling into a black hole — Ann Grá

Monsoon Season — Zavier Seow

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 2
— Vivekanandan Sharan

When They Burned the Butterfly: An Interview with Wen-yi — Megan Chee

Strange New Worlds — Brandon David Servos

Strange New Worlds

Brandon David Servos

Brandon David Servos studies Literature at NUS. He is an editor for The Sengkang Sci-Fi Quarterly and Margins, and a 2025 Hopwood Awards winner, receiving first place in undergraduate non-fiction, among other categories. In his free time you can find him watching horror movies and writing short stories at the intersection of ecocriticism and the gothic imaginary.

It might be said that the concept of space colonisation forms the bedrock of the science fiction imagination. A good percentage of these stories involve one - typically human, typically western, typically patriarchal - race, either exerting power over other planets and galaxies, or travelling like tourists to alien civilisations, awestruck and disturbed by weird, exotic ways of life. Star Trek’s USS Enterprise has a mission "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before"; Star Wars’ opening entices us with a fantasy of unfamiliarity, promising a story about “a galaxy far, far away”. Today, tech founders like Elon Musk take the concept of “colonising” Mars more seriously, ignoring the deep-rooted traumatic associations that the terms and institutions of “colonisation” still evoke in the cultures that were and continue to be changed by it. As a critical gesture, the current moment seems to be an apt time to reexamine how exactly cross-cultural interactions are depicted in a field that many would consider to be generally innocuous, if not historically left-leaning and politically important. This article briefly examines popular American media depictions of alien life and questions what is at stake in trying to imagine other fictive civilisations, and whether these others are actually as fictive as we would like to imagine.

The filmic heyday of sci-fi in the 60s and 70s imagined alien races through Orientalist tropes, a trend that persists till today. Consider the original pilot of Star Trek: The Original Series, which featured an Orion slave girl belly dancing to Middle Eastern music amid a backdrop of palm leaves and men in vaguely Arabic clothing. While the green skin and black hair isn’t technically brownface, the culturally literate viewer is able to discern the light in which this image should be read. Sixteen years later in The Empire Strikes Back, the planet of Tatooine is presented as an arid desert rife with criminal activity. At the locus of such preoccupations, there is of course the infamous scene in which Jabba the Hutt imprisons Princess Leia in her uncomfortably revealing golden bikini. While discussions around this scene typically and rightfully centre on the hypersexual fantasy of non-consent enacted by the male gaze, what is equally irksome are the racialised undertones of this alien society. Jabbas's dome-shaped palace is decorated with geometrical art which architecturally evokes a mosque, and the crime lord's hookah-smoking proclivities need no elaboration. The most striking similarity to Star Trek is in the slave girls, dancing and singing for a captive male audience.

As Edward Said writes, there is an association “clearly made between the orient and [...] licentious sex” (190). Princess Leia is the slave girl that we see the most of, but the others are all played by women of colour - both in human and alien terms; these actresses are painted in various shades of purples and greens, inhabiting the only significant roles played by non-white women in the original trilogy. Like Leia's, their outfits leave little to the imagination, yet seem to be both cheaper and more risqué, almost evocative of bondage gear. Collapsed onto this image are the various forms of otherness - sexual, racial, alien - to which the Star Wars viewer is compelled by an interplay of desire and repulsion.

The other dominant culture that the heroes of The Empire Strikes Back interact with are the Ewoks, who unlike the crime-crazed inhabitants of Tatooine, are presented as cute and ultimately co-optable. They straddle between innocence and ferocity, having the appearance of teddy bears yet possessing the temperament of the ‘savage native’. They have odd religious beliefs - like worshipping the droid C-3PO - and are portrayed as holding spears, dressing in the skins of strange animals, and eating people. Despite this, the Ewoks are considered an ally that the heroes need to work together with in order to defeat the empire; at the end of the movie, the heroes are seen rejoicing with the Ewoks, dancing before their fires. C-3PO sums up the relationship up nicely when he remarks, “Wonderful. We are now a part of the tribe.” This trend of the main characters being included in a native culture that is foreign yet accepting, and in some way aiding these people in the process, has gained traction in sci-fi over the years. Defaulting to the term ‘white saviour’ is tempting and often accurate, yet it glosses over the more complicated relationship that a lot of sci-fi has with alien cultures.
A good example of this complication can be seen in two of the most commercially successful recent sci-fi franchises, James Cameron’s Avatar and Denis Villeneuve's Dune. Both revolve around white men who, once part of the institutions that oppressed the indigenous people of a planet - the Na'vi of Pandora, the Fremen of Arrakis respectfully - then decide to become literally “part of the tribe”, from outsider to insider.

This transformation is, for both Avatar’s Jake Sully, and Dune’s Paul Atreides, physicalised: where Jake gets blue skin by turning into one of the Na’vi, Paul gets the same blue eyes that the Fremen get from exposure to spices on Arrakis. Again, like on Tatooine, colour becomes the mark of difference, similar to how it indicates racial differences in our world. Yet who would accuse Avatar of blueface, or Star Trek of greenface? One reason is that through the medium of sci-fi, these characters, along with the white liberals who write and watch these stories, are able to enact a kind of exorcism of their guilt by effectively transforming into another race and removing the biological difference that distinguishes them from their marginalised counterparts. As such, they are able to make the imaginative leap past white saviourism and into complete assimilation. This transformation is possible precisely because of the vagueness of the symbolic language used - one might not definitively say that blue, green and purple are meant to be stand-ins for race, though it is clear that this is what they symbolise in-universe. In the same vein, it is equally difficult to accuse the writers, costume designers and actors of cultural appropriation in an industry that is meant to take creative liberties in service of more imaginative storytelling. Consider the common retort of this not actually being a real culture and thus there being no harm done. Yet, this argument does not hold when we consider how easy it is to tell the heavy Arab, African, and Indigenous American influences in the media discussed, and that we cannot help but read and watch these narratives in relation to our world and its history.

Some say that words like appropriation and Orientalism do not hold as much weight for these more contemporary films because the representations are not as egregious as, let’s say, Star Trek’s Orion slave girl. Still, it is important to view any cultural fictionalising that purports itself to be innocuous with a degree of hesitation. In Dune, for example, how are we to read the Fremens who mindlessly worship Paul as their messiah because of a false prophecy spread? Do we read it in the same light as the Ewok’s worship of C-3PO and chalk it up to a more innocent, unthinking race? Or do we read this as a more nuanced portrayal of political machinations under the guise of globalism? Similarly, in Avatar, do we read the Na’vi’s scanty tribal wear as appealing to the same sort of fantasy that Leia’s bikini did, or as an honest representation of indigenous clothing - historically, these groups were much less modest than would be considered acceptable to the modern sartorial palate. The difficulty lies in acknowledging that these groups are fictional constructs that are heavily inspired by real cultures, and that any representation cannot be read as pure creative liberty - that putting on a costume is never a neutral act. When writers acknowledge the origins from which they draw their tropes, they need to follow up with a humanised representation, to centre a narrative on their perspective. Whether or not the cultures - and which specific cultures? - were depicted accurately is another issue. Is accuracy even the right term to use, and is it something that can be demanded from tropes so fictional yet so based in the concrete?

How does one then depict alien life in a way that does not run the risk of borrowing too heavily from the clothing, beliefs, language and general ways of life of extant human cultures? Is this a concern that writers even need to be having? Can we only imagine otherness as an amalgamation of the diversity of human culture that already exists, and is this okay? Villeneuve's other masterpiece, Arrival, shows an alternate way of envisioning another race - the film’s Heptapods are seen as the antithesis to the relatable alien; they defy understanding, and all we see of them seem to be giant finger-legs that trace cryptic runes in black clouds of ink. These awe-inspiring, mildly terrifying creatures cannot be mapped onto any existing cultural representation in the same way that most humanoid alien races can, and yet the entire film’s premise is about issues of translation, of the difficulty of understanding one culture through the lens of another, a difficulty seen through the lens of Amy Adams’ Dr Banks, a linguist trying to decipher the alien script. What makes the Heptopods so compelling is how they elude most existing alien tropes. While never fitting into the easy model of an anthropomorphic race with a strange accent and strange skin, they also don’t belong to that other category of mindlessly murderous monster, into which we might place Dune’s sandworm, or Alien’s Xenomorph, or Godzilla, or Cthulhu. When the only depiction of alien life that bypasses Orientalist tropes is one that is explicitly horrific and dangerous - let us not forget Lovecraft’s rampant racism which fuelled the existential horror behind Cthulhu, the dread of interracial and intercultural mixing - what are we then left with?
The answer is not something that is presented to us easily, especially in a creative space like sci-fi, which is based so much on looking to the past. Nerd culture is all about cycles of reference: even newer installments of Star Wars and Star Trek need to worldbuild off of an older model, older planets and alien races. Newer original franchises, while spared the baggage of older material, still need to build worlds that reflect, either subconsciously or intentionally, the sorts of stories that fans grew up with. Edward Said notes how Orientalism is “formalized into a repeatedly produced copy of itself” (197). As much as we grimace at the casually problematic elements of our favourite pieces, we still watch, read, and play them because of the impact that they had on our lives and on a popular culture that was shaped long before we were able to understand the make of its mould. The question then becomes: what space can the future hold for our collective interplanetary imagination? With writers like Ted Chiang and Liu Cixin now braving the literary frontier of science fiction, a global audience is becoming more attuned to voices that no longer serve a Eurocentric narrative.

Arrival’s depiction of the Heptapods is the first I have seen that does not take lightly the question of translation, of representing the voice of a culture that we might not have the means of understanding. As writers and readers, let us extend this level of care and attention to understanding cultural difference instead of focusing solely on how tantalisingly, horrifically, or exotically we represent foreignness. If we are more focused on how things are represented, instead of focusing only on the what, we might be able to avoid repeating our creative mistakes. Yet, as fans of this genre know all too well, the boundaries between the past and present are less concrete than we might think. I find it hard to forget the green Orion slave girl, or the many characters like her who make up the bedrock of this corner of our cultural imagination. I know, in the back of my mind at least, that she will always be belly dancing her way to a stranger past.