Intervening in the Present Through Fictions of the Future

This chapter focuses on how diverse speculative fiction has intervened in discourses of the so-called refugee crisis by posing key questions regarding social justice and categorization of being human and thus who is entitled to certain rights. Some recent fiction can be positioned as examples of concurrences where the goal is to intervene in the present by talking about the future, while other older speculative fiction’s concerns with large questions of what it means to be human can be used in the present to critically think about treatment of refugees and their dehumanization. The android has in this regard been particularly useful to “think with.” The discussion is based on the author’s research on racism and irregular migrants from West Africa to Europe.