Tracing the origins of the word “science” from the Latin “scientia,” or “knowledge,” illuminates the stakes of science fiction as a genre that offers insight into multiple competing, even contradictory, forms of knowing. I begin here to underscore how this Latin root makes perceptible the boundaries that have been constructed around what constitutes “science” and, by extension, science fiction. It throws into relief the violent legacies out of which Enlightenment conceptions of humanity, science, and knowledge developed through the subjugation and colonization of purportedly savage, unknowing “others.”