![]() ![]() Reverse extractivism is a colonial fever-dream, one that the reveals the colonist’s ultimate desires through its uncanny logics. If Extractivism is Colonial, Reverse Extractivism is Neocolonial I call what Thompson offers us through the Homian invasion reverse extractivism. Only then, after acquiring a body, can the aliens start mining the resources of this “new” world. In Thompson’s narration, the colonizing force takes control of resources by taking over human bodies, slowly and inexorably changing human DNA until each body is fully alien and thus readied for a Homian consciousness to be downloaded into it. In a form of mass suicide, they uploaded their consciousnesses to a quantum server to await a suitable planet-that is, one that includes suitable bodies. They decimated their own planet so thoroughly that they could no longer survive as a species. Instead, Thompson’s novels put an important spin on traditional colonial narratives in science fiction: the Homians are never physically going to arrive to take over. So even though the so-called Homians have sent probes across space searching for resource-rich planets to colonize, they do not plan to board spaceships following the probes to the planet, expand their empire, or export the wealth of the colonies back to the metropole. ![]() In fact, their homeworld no longer exists in a liveable form. The aliens are not removing earth’s resources to take back to their homeworld. At first glance, Tade Thompson’s trilogy of novels chronicling an alien invasion in Nigeria may not appear to deal with extractivism. ![]()
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