ABSTRACT
This chapter draws a series of connections between anthropology and science fictional world-building to reflect on the possibilities of ethnographic enquiry into the extraterrestrial. More specifically, the chapter hones in on Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novella Elder Race, in which an anthropologist-protagonist on another planet is used to displace earthbound assumptions in a manner that is strikingly reminiscent of how anthropologists engage in frontal comparison through ethnographic immersion on Earth. As such, Elder Race serves to highlight the science fictional qualities of anthropology, and especially those evinced by topological approaches to socio-material relations developed in the anthropology of infrastructures. Whereas situating anthropos in space becomes a means to investigate and unsettle earthbound categories, the anthropology of infrastructures helps foreground cosmic relations by exploring how extraterrestrial processes are brought down to Earth.
