When you close your eyes and think of home, what do you see? Is it your physical home? The people who feel like home? Your neighbourhood? Your childhood house? Something else? What does home mean to you?​

This Summer of Sci-Fi edition is a direct result of the fact that I'm moving in a few weeks, and what makes a home has been on my mind constantly. And of course, sci-fi has once again broadened my horizons and helped me make some genuinely important choices.

The concept of home runs through the entire genre. Your hero is far from home. Their home travels with them. They're searching for a new planet to call home. When the stakes are high and the settings are fantastical, it puts power dynamics and vulnerabilities on direct display in ways we often just feel, quietly, every day, without the language to name them.

So let's talk about home: what breaks it, what builds it, who controls it, and what keeps us reaching for it anyway.

Home is change

Here's an uncomfortable premise to start with: home is not a fixed location. It's not a deed, a postal code, or even necessarily a structure. It's something that has to survive contact with change, and a lot of our cultural mythology about home pretends otherwise.

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower opens with Lauren Oya Olamina inside a walled community that has convinced itself it can hold the outside world at bay. It cannot. When the wall fails and the neighbourhood burns, Lauren doesn't get to grieve a fixed address for long, because grief is a luxury the road doesn't allow. What she carries out of the ruins isn't a house. It's a theology — Earthseed, built on the founding premise that God is Change. Home, in Butler's framing, isn't the compound behind the wall. It's the practice of adapting without losing yourself, over and over, for as long as it takes.

Planet of the Apes runs the same idea in reverse. An astronaut leaves Earth in search of a habitable elsewhere, and the story's most famous gut-punch — one so embedded in pop culture that I'm not spoiling much by naming its shape — is the realization that the place he was searching for and the place he left were never as separate as he assumed. The definition of home you're carrying in your head can betray you the moment the actual place changes without your consent. You can lose a home without ever leaving it.

And then there's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which asks the question from the most intimate possible angle. Joel and Clementine build something together, it goes wrong, and they choose to erase each other from memory. It should be over. It isn't. Something in them keeps reaching back toward the same person, the same warmth, even stripped of the record of why. That's the part of the film I return to: the architecture of home isn't only stored in memory. Some of it lives lower down, in whatever it is that makes people drawn to each other.

Change doesn't destroy home. Change is the test that tells you what in your home was ever real to begin with.

Home is community

If change is the test, community is usually the answer. Almost none of the homes worth having in this genre — or in life — are built alone.

Parable of the Talents, Butler's sequel, drops Lauren into a country actively remaking itself against her. A demagogue named Andrew Steele Jarret runs on a platform to "make America great again" — Butler wrote that phrase in 1998, and I promise you I did not need science fiction to feel unsettlingly current this particular summer. Against that backdrop, Lauren doesn't retreat into isolation. She builds Acorn: an intentional community, assembled on purpose, held together by shared commitments rather than shared geography. It is imperfect, but as an author Butler is intentional about the imperfections and pitfalls (it is a Parable after all).

Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer tells a version of the same story through a different lens. Jane 57821 is a "dirty computer" — queer, Black, unwilling to be "cleaned" into compliance by a regime that treats difference as a malfunction to be erased. What Jane finds, and fights to keep, isn't a house. It's the other dirty computers. Home is the resistance she builds in relationship with people who refuse the same erasure she does.

Firefly makes this almost literal: Serenity is a ship, not a planet, and it is unambiguously home for a crew of smugglers, mercenaries, a preacher, and a couple of fugitives who have nothing in common except loyalty to each other. And Star Trek, across every incarnation, keeps returning to the same structural fact: the ship is home because the crew is family, assembled across differences, sometimes across species, held together by a shared mission rather than a shared birthplace.

None of these homes are stumbled into. They're built, on purpose, usually under some kind of pressure. That's not a coincidence. Community is rarely convenient. It's chosen.

Home is power

Here's the ugly and vulnerable side which we see so often in real life: home can also be the mechanism by which power controls you.

Mickey 17 gives us a worker who is, structurally, homeless in the most literal sense a person can be — a disposable body reprinted on demand, never granted the permanence that home requires, because permanence would cost the company something. It is not a coincidence that he finds himself in the middle of a space colonization project that paints the planet’s inhabitants as monstrous when the humans are the real invaders. As a displaced person in all senses of the word, Mickey fights to prevent the displacement of an entire species.

The Silo takes it further: everyone inside has a home, technically, but the terms of that home are set entirely by people who maintain their authority through a lie and enforce it through ritualized violence against anyone who asks where the walls actually end. They’re monitored, controlled, and in a very literal sense where you are born dictates your role in society; lower levels belong to dangerous and physically demanding jobs like mechanical, higher levels house police and judicial. The home is real. The consent to live inside its rules is not.

And The Matrix takes the metaphor to its most extreme conclusion — pods, wires, a simulated world sold to human beings as reality, because a docile population living inside a comfortable illusion is easier to extract value from than a population that knows what's actually happening to them.

What all four of these stories share is a single, sharp point: when someone else controls the conditions of your home — what it costs, what you're allowed to say inside it, whether you can leave — home stops being a right and becomes a leash. Housing is a human right. The moment someone with power gets to decide who deserves a stable, dignified place to live and who doesn't, "home" has already been weaponized.

This is where sci-fi stops being hypothetical. We see these attitudes throughout housing policy, homelessness, high barrier shelters, about landlord power, about the myth that renters are somehow less invested in their spaces than owners. It's the same myth every one of these stories is quietly arguing against: the idea that only the people in charge of a place actually care about it.

Home is hope

And still — after all of that — the genre keeps insisting that home is reachable. That's the part I actually want to leave you with.

E.T. wants only one thing across the entire film: to phone home. It's the most elemental longing in the story, and it runs in both directions — the alien reaching for the home he left, and the home he unexpectedly builds with Elliott in the meantime. The Martian is the same structure with the science turned up: Mark Watney, alone on a planet that will kill him the moment he stops paying attention, survives by refusing to let go of the idea that Earth is still out there, still reachable, still worth the absurd effort of getting back to.

Battlestar Galactica stretches that same hope across an entire fleet and years of story: a scattered, exhausted, grieving population, chasing a rumour of a planet called Earth because the alternative to hope is simply giving up, and the fleet refuses to do that. Doctor Who gives us something gentler but no less durable — a home that isn't a place at all, but a box that travels with you, and companions who come and go.

This spring I read Anton Hur's Toward Eternity, in one day. Toward Eternity asks the hope-for-home question in its strangest form yet. Its characters don't just move or lose a house — they are replaced, cell by cell, by nanites, until the question of whether "they" still exist becomes genuinely unclear. And yet the novel's structure is a single notebook, passed hand to hand across centuries, carrying memory, poetry, and love forward through bodies and minds that are, technically, no longer the ones that started the story. If home can survive that — if something worth calling you can find its way home across that much transformation — then I don't think the rest of us have much of an excuse to give up on it.

Hope, in all five of these stories, isn't naive. It's a discipline. It's choosing, again and again, to believe that home is still buildable, even from exile, even from a body or a self that keeps changing shape underneath you.

Home is what you make it

I started this post by telling you I'm moving in a few weeks. Here's the rest of it.

I'm moving toward more community — toward the people and the neighbourhood where my ties already run deep, rather than away from them. After writing this post, that shouldn't surprise you. Every story above that gets home right treats it as something built in relationship, not something you wait to be handed.

I also want to say this plainly: housing is a human right. Full stop. And within that right, home can look different for absolutely everyone — a ship, a notebook passed hand to hand, a rented apartment, a walled compound you eventually have to leave — but people deserve the freedom to define what home means for themselves, and not be forced to accept the version of home that The Silo or The Matrix hands down from the top. Oppressive conditions dressed up as shelter are not home. They're containment.

I’m leaving my current home for a multitude of reasons, but was pushed to the edge by a dispute between the condo board and my landlady about whether I as a tenant can access the terrace attached to my unit. That I’ve used and taken care of for years. I’m friends with the other family who has access to it, we all hang out. The building pays almost zero attention to the maintenance of the space, but I’m out there weeding the flagstones, rescuing window stunned birds, and following every condo bylaw and building rule. Underneath the aggressive letters from management, the surveillance (literally looking in my window, taking photos of me), and rude comments are a not subtle message: this is not your home. It’s not the Silo, but watching season 3 right now as I pack certainly strikes a nerve.

I don't own the place I'm about to live in, and I want to push back on a myth that follows renters around: that not owning a place means not caring for it. In my experience, it's often the opposite. Renters — people whose housing situations are inherently more precarious — are frequently some of the most organized, most community-minded people I know, precisely because precarity teaches you that stewardship and care can't wait for a deed. You take care of a place, and the people in it, because it's yours in every sense that matters except the legal one. That's not a lesser form of home. It might be a more honest one.

Home is change, tested and survived. Home is the community you build on purpose. Home is vulnerable to power, and worth protecting from it. Home is the thing hope keeps reaching toward, even when the shape of "you" keeps changing along the way.

Home is what you make it.

Let me know what home means to you below, answers are anonymous: