Politics & Power Quote by Sarah Zettel

The sneaky power here is the way Zettel flips a sci-fi staple into a moral boomerang. “Indigenous presence in the Solar System” sounds like the setup for first contact, an encounter with alien others. Then she snaps the lens back: “It’s us.” In a single pivot, the romance of exploration collapses into a history lesson Americans prefer to file under “complicated.” Space isn’t an empty stage; it’s a neighborhood we already occupy, meaning the language we use about frontiers carries baggage.

Her second move is sharper: she doesn’t ask what we’d do if aliens attacked, but what we’d do if they “moved next door.” That phrasing drags colonization out of the realm of abstract conquest and into domestic intimacy: proximity, property lines, the quiet violence of settlement disguised as normal life. By paralleling extraterrestrial arrival with Europeans “moving next door to the American Indians,” she sidesteps the heroic vocabulary of discovery and forces the reader to sit with the asymmetry that follows technological advantage: treaties as theater, “trade” as leverage, misunderstanding as a convenient alibi.

The intent isn’t to moralize from a distance; it’s to contaminate our futuristic imagination with historical consequence. Zettel’s subtext is that the story we tell ourselves about space exploration is often the same story colonizers told themselves about the Americas: progress, destiny, civilization. The context is classic speculative fiction doing its best work: not predicting gadgets, but interrogating the defaults we carry into the next frontier.