Challenging the Myth of Firstness

John Rieder explores Zac Zimmer’s “First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas.”

By John RiederOctober 27, 2025

• SF

• History

ZAC ZIMMER’S new book First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas examines texts in several media that use the tools of speculative fiction to reimagine the history of early encounters between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the American continents. This careful, learned, beautifully written piece of criticism makes an important intervention in both historiographic and artistic contexts. Zimmer argues that these fictional and artistic efforts do not merely revise received accounts of these episodes but go beyond that to imagine how these encounters could have happened otherwise, and to unlock access to the possible futures closed down by Eurocentric colonial ideology.

Although Zimmer’s critique of the colonialist bias in accounts of what is called the Iberian Conquest of the Aztec and Incan nations or of hagiographic narratives about Jesuit missionaries in Iroquois and Algonquin societies echoes a firm consensus among academic historians regarding the gaps and distortions of the received historical record, it is nonetheless a timely response to the warfare being waged against that consensus by right-wing ideologues. Zimmer nicely catches the equivocal status of recorded history when he observes that the speculative fictions he surveys are “grounded in historical truth, even while they decry the lies which that history tells.” Or, as he says of Black Robe’s “realistic” depiction of Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century America, the 1991 film is strictly accurate according to the European sources, and that is precisely the problem. As former ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill suggested of the film at the time of its release, in Zimmer’s paraphrase: “[I]t’s all true. But it’s all wrong.”

The project Zimmer delineates involves negotiating between the truth and falsity of recorded history, interrogating its archival forms, and historicizing the processes that produced them. Zimmer’s interpretive project therefore unfolds within a matrix of recorded truth, recorded falsehood, unrecorded truth, and speculative fiction. These are the nuances, familiar to professional historians, that are under attack in the cultural warfare being waged in such factually threadbare, propagandistic accounts of American history as The 1776 Report, commissioned in 2020 by the first Trump administration in response to The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize–winning 1619 Project and reaffirmed in an executive order of January 2025 calling for its version of history to form the basis of “patriotic education” in US schools. Although Zimmer’s book does not explicitly engage such reactionary political initiatives, it is a welcome and timely contribution to the resistance against them.

The primary strength and originality of First Contact lies in its attention to speculative fiction. Zimmer argues that, in the face of the archive’s biases and its erasure of Indigenous perspectives and voices, speculation becomes a fruitful, perhaps even indispensable, supplement to the documental records of early colonial encounters in the Americas. Speculative fiction, or SF, allows for understanding colonial encounters both as they occurred historically and as they might have happened otherwise. In order to sort through the array of recorded truth, recorded falsehood, and unrecorded truth, the aura of inevitability that the colonial accounts give the victors’ narrative has to be dispelled, making room for the stories of the others in those encounters. The unrecorded truth of these encounters can be elicited “only by considering the many ways things could have been different.” Zimmer’s thesis, then, is that “SF can teach its readers and audiences […] how to use the tools of worldbuilding to truly imagine other worlds, conversant with other cosmovisions.” The goal of that world-building is to make room for Indigenous versions of the world both in the historical accounts and, crucially, in the realm of present and future possibility.

Zimmer’s turn to SF partakes of a widespread movement, instigated by Anishinaabe scholar Grace L. Dillon’s description of Indigenous Futurism in her groundbreaking Indigenous SF anthology Walking the Clouds (2012) and named CoFuturisms by the editors of the recent Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (2024). CoFuturisms are, according to the editorial introduction to The Routledge Handbook, fictional and artistic speculative “modes that remind us that we [BIPOC people] belong in the future and of the importance of recovering our often suppressed pasts.” Many of the entries in the Routledge volume emphasize that the assertion of relevance in the future likewise depends on asserting both present vitality and past significance. Colonial invasion and settlement often narrated themselves as making a clean break with the past, or as the very beginning of things, as though the colonized land had no real past at all. CoFuturisms’ invented futures are all about restoring continuity to the history of the colonized, linking present, past, and future to one another in acts of remembrance and invention.

Zimmer’s central argument goes directly to these points. Its main thrust is to demystify the “first” in first contact. The first encounter or first contact does not memorialize a singular event but is rather something repeated over and over, a trope or commonplace carrying heavy ideological baggage. The “first” in first contact imposes recognition of contact between Europeans and Amerindians in the Iberian Conquest as an originary event, the making of a new world, rather than as a set of complex interactions with manifold forms of continuity and rupture. Clearly, in doing so, it amplifies colonial voices and perspectives while silencing or obscuring Indigenous ones.

Zimmer’s readings are largely a matter of undercutting the ideological implications of the first contact trope by employing instead the notion of the “contact zone” formulated most influentially in Mary Louise Pratt’s 1992 book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. The point that Zimmer powerfully reinforces is that there is not and never has been a “New World” laying itself open to discovery, colonization, and resource extraction. Instead, the so-called frontier has been the scene of a complex history of isolation, interconnection, and their consequences, which are continuously being worked out and reworked in relationships of domination or cooperation, appropriation or symbiosis. Replacing first contact with the contact zone recognizes the destructive, rupturing effects of contact but substitutes an awareness of continuity for the hegemonic ideology’s hyperbolic claims of novelty. That restored awareness of continuity strips away the aura of destiny investing the ideology of progress, and thus opens up not only ways of thinking the early history of contact differently but also ways of envisioning other futures than those deemed possible within the colonial imaginary.

A good deal of the interpretive work Zimmer accomplishes is to connect speculative versions of the future with their roots in reimagining the past, and specifically their revisiting and revising the archival materials on which the myth of first contact is based. The three chapters following the introduction examine, in turn, three archival forms: the anthology, the museum, and the map. Each chapter combines astute readings of recent speculative work (the earliest is Tísner’s 1968 Catalan novel Paraules d’Opoton el Vell [“The Words of Old Man Opoton”], translated into Spanish by the author in 1992 as Palabras de Opoton el Viejo) with careful accounts of the historical construction and reception of these archival forms in assembling the colonial narrative of the New World. The argument shuttles back and forth between historical records of early contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the American continents and the speculative fictions that make use of those records to reimagine those encounters and restore the silenced voices of the Indigenous participants in them. Sometimes the fictions take the form of alternate histories—for instance, Tísner’s novel inverts the Spanish invasion of the Americas into an Aztec conquest of Europe—but most of the speculative work is set in the future.

The chapter on anthologies offers readings of three novels that work through the legacy of Miguel León-Portilla’s La vision de los vencidos (1959), translated as The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. León-Portilla’s popular and influential book is a remediation of a 16th-century anthology, the 12th book of the Códice florentino, produced by Franciscan missionaries whose mission was the extirpation of Aztec culture. Zimmer shows that there are two warring interpretations of the encounter at work in both the 16th-century and 20th-century anthologies themselves, one making the anthologies support a narrative of colonial triumph via multicultural negotiation, the other extracting from them a decolonial account of political oppression. Zimmer adds a third, a “speculative tangent.” The three novels, Tísner’s Palabras de Opoton el Viejo, Carmen Boullosa’s Llanto: Novelas imposibles [“Wailing: Impossible Novels”], and Hugo Hiriart’s La destrucción de todas las cosas [“The Destruction of Each and Every Thing”], all published in 1992, “suggest imaginative yet historically grounded methods of listening for the traces of silenced voices” in the fragmentary historical record. As the work the three authors perform on the archival material shows,

history itself is a battlefield, where the weapons are narrative and aesthetic, archival and imaginative. And the task of reimagining a past without erasing its participants or condemning them to a defeated position is a challenge—perhaps the primary challenge—faced by novelists committed to communicating historical truth.

Zimmer’s next chapter tackles the institution of the museum, conceived as “the high-class story that a colonial system tells itself.” The key to the speculative and critical versions of the museum surveyed in this chapter is that they rethink the museum as a contact zone so that the linear and progressive histories the museum typically offers are recast in terms of multiplicity and reciprocity. Unlike the other chapters, which focus on speculative narrative fiction, this chapter explores the critical impact of artistic work, including performance art, sculpture, installations, and curated exhibitions. The speculative tools Zimmer sees these artists putting to work on the museum include ideology critique, in Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit … (1992–93), a performance piece that exposes the ethnocentrism embodied in colonial anthropology; alternative history, in Eduardo Villacis’s The Smoking Mirror (2021), which, like Palabras de Opoton, imagines an Aztec conquest of Europe; and engagement with temporal scale, as in Adrián Villar Rojas’s series of sculptures set in an imaginary, far-future alien museum that estrange terrestrial “civilization” even more radically by turning its traces into “cosmic readymades.” Zimmer concludes the chapter with an account of Mundos alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, a 2017 exhibition “that obliterate[s] the anthropocentric scale of colonial anthropology.”

Some of the book’s most interesting historical work comes in Zimmer’s account of the history of mapmaking in the subsequent chapter. Zimmer posits that maps both presuppose and construct cosmographies, embodying assumptions about the shape of the world that root and are rooted in the belief systems structuring a society’s governance and customs. Zimmer traces the history of European mapmaking from the premodern T-O model (three continents surrounded by an ocean) to the kinds of maps familiar to contemporary readers—for instance, the Mercator projection map, conceived around facilitating accurate navigation. He then juxtaposes an Incan map based on astronomical observation—the key is the seasonally shifting orientation of the Milky Way—and shows how it embodies Incan cosmographic notions of complementarity, diagonal opposition, and elevation.

Zimmer approaches the two pieces of fiction occupying the rest of the chapter, Daniel Salvo’s 2005 short story “Quipucamayoc” and Wilson Harris’s 2001 novel The Dark Jester, in terms of their speculative play with an aspect of Incan mapping—the Incan “ceque” system, a series of ritualized pathways branching out from the political and religious center to traverse and organize the entire Incan realm, and the “khipus,” which were “highly structured collections of strings and knots that served as recording devices,” the function of which is a topic of debate in historiography of the region. One theory is that the khipu is “a possible cosmological diagram of the Tawantinsuyu (the four realms of the Incan state).” In Salvo’s “Quipucamayoc,” which Zimmer describes as “a textile version of The Matrix,” the protagonist discovers that the khipus conceal the demise of an entire pre-Incan civilization, implying that “if we could decipher the khipus, they would tell us nothing more nor less than information is power, and that corruption infects us all.” Zimmer presents Wilson’s The Dark Jester as a philosophical tour de force in which the narrator, the Dreamer, observes in the Iberian Conquest “two different ways of organizing the universe crash[ing] into one another: one joined through knots of twisted memory, the ‘arteries of space and time’; and the other a vector of modernity tearing through the fabric of the universe and rending chasms across space-time.”

Zimmer’s penultimate chapter shifts the focus from archival form to the function of hospitality within the conceptual framework of colonial narratives of contact. Zimmer prefaces his reading of Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 SF novel The Sparrow by observing that the contact zone puts the hospitality relationship into crisis because it faces the challenge of achieving recognition and reciprocity across radically different cultural frameworks. A crucial feature of the concept is that it must be mutual, governing the behavior of both host and guest. That necessary reciprocity is precisely what is missing in many colonial accounts of contact. Framing contact as exploration or conquest erases the nature of the encounter as hospitality, as the reception of a guest or the behavior of one being hosted. This sort of erasure structures the hagiography of Jesuit martyrdom that underlies Russell’s novel, as Zimmer argues that the model for the protagonist of The Sparrow “is perhaps the most deranged example of hospitality in the historical records: the New World martyr. This is the model of the guest who accepts the host’s hospitality, and reciprocates with passive, unconditional militancy.”

Zimmer’s final chapter confronts the narrative of first contact the most directly of any of the chapters by taking on the mythic power of the figure of Christopher Columbus. Zimmer presents the figure of Columbus as “the condensed node of continental anxiety about firstness” and “a structural problem that expresses the connections between exploration, novelty, and conquest, and accordingly is a key site for the critical task of decolonizing the novum.” The point is that the novelty of the New World erases everything about the contact other than the colonial narrative and its effects, and Columbus is the paradigmatic symbol of European firstness, the hegemonic narrative tool for effecting that erasure. The readings include Abel Posse’s Los perros del paraíso (The Dogs of Paradise, 1983), Alejo Carpentier’s El arpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow, 1979), and Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991). The first two texts employ the figure of an anonymous Indigenous informant who gave Columbus prior knowledge of the route and destination, thereby subverting what Zimmer calls the “Colombo ex frigata” tropes of discovery and firstness. Vizenor, according to Zimmer, accomplishes a more radical reimagining of Columbus by turning him into a trickster figure. Vizenor’s Stone Columbus “rejects the etiquette of manifest destiny and settler colonialism, both of which demand unlimited hospitality while denying just reciprocity.”

Although Zimmer’s First Contact is a specialized book, and will surely be warmly received by specialists in his field, its reach goes far beyond that. Anyone interested in SF will have much to learn from it, and the much larger community of those looking for responses to and protection from the assaults on historical truth emanating from right-wing ideologues should welcome this lucid, learned, critically responsible account of the brilliant uses being made of SF in reimagining colonial history.