Politics & Power Quote by Sarah Zettel

Zettel smuggles a political argument into a craft note about worldbuilding: aliens aren’t just exotic decoration, they’re a pressure test for human self-justifications. By framing her “advanced society” as morally and ecologically “radically different,” she’s refusing the lazy sci-fi move where the future conveniently shares our assumptions, just with better gadgets. The aliens become a mirror that doesn’t flatter us, forcing the reader to confront how contingent our ethics really are.

The kicker is the analogy to Europeans and American Indians, which drags the genre’s fun-house premise into the blood-lit terrain of colonial history. “Advanced” sits there like a loaded term. We’re used to it meaning superior; Zettel uses it to expose how claims of advancement often function as a permission slip for extraction. The reference quietly warns that encounters between civilizations don’t unfold as neutral exchanges of ideas. They get narrated by whoever has the power to name what counts as “proper use of natural resources” and whose morality gets to set the terms.

Contextually, this is a late-20th-century science fiction writer signaling a shift in the genre’s moral center: from conquest plots to contact ethics, from pioneering myth to accountability. The subtext isn’t just “respect other cultures.” It’s a more abrasive question: when we meet an Other with a coherent, non-human framework for stewardship, do we adapt, bargain, or do what history suggests we’re good at - calling them naive, then taking what we want.