In Fiction We Trust: Critical Explorations On Colonial Cosmology

Dear reader,

I have decided to start publishing the chapters that make up the analytical manuscript called “In Fiction We Trust: Critical Explorations on Colonial Cosmology.” Available chapters are and will be linked to this page and also published as PDFs.

After working on this manuscript for months, I realized that it could be expanded ad infinitum. Its size made it difficult to make a thorough edit on my own, given other work and responsibilities that I took up. Thus, I will publish all chapters here, one-by-one, so that others may reflect, and perhaps even provide critical and useful feedback.

Along my journey, one point always kept me intrigued: how academics and intellectuals who are openly critical of colonialism in general and value indigenous ways of knowing might also be utterly unable to be critical of the colonial cosmology of the state and its fictional space programs. In other words, they are deeply critical of the state, its lies and its abuses, but simply accept at face value all of the state’s cosmological productions and pronouncements, discarding their own analytical skills. For me, this is still a fascinating phenomenon, especially given how easily we can demonstrate the fictional nature of all so-called space programs and related lore.

Finally, as a critical work, this book deals with issues that are only sensitive because they question beliefs that have been rooted in the colonial outlook for hundreds of years. As such, they are tied to naïve and monolithic conceptions of science and mathematics.