Haunted Futures and Alien Archaeologies

While often associated with the new and the futuristic, science fiction and science fantasy frequently concern themselves with the past, especially its material remains. Within ‘hard’ science fiction that strives for scientific verisilimitude, the idea of alien ruins, huge derelict ships and devices or other abandoned spaces that must be explored by humans has long been one of the key ways writers have addressed the Fermi Paradox - the apparent absence of alien life in a galaxy that ought to be teeming.
These material remains and invented landscapes are haunted by, and serve as proxies for, the imagined species and cultures that created them. Such fiction is fundamentally archaeological, inviting us to reconstruct lost cultures through their material remains, but for all its scientism, it also frequently expresses a hauntological ambivalence towards the ruins it concerns itself with: the past is frequently unknowable, dangerous, prone to recurrence: while the material culture remains, the aliens are rarely completely gone.
Philip Boyes (University of Cambridge)
TAG Deva 2018
Session: Haunt This Place: Fantasy, Archaeology, and the Ghosts of the Land