| Sumario: | This article surveys three iconic 1960s texts in order to show how popular authors appropriate Frantz Fanon's notion of "psychic decolonization" for the advantage of privileged male subjects. Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Frank Herbert's Dune (1968), and Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) each offer a superficial critique of imperial expansion and colonial occupation; despite this, however, all three portray inward psychic voyages in imperial terms, and each text replaces or augments the conquest of outer space with a central focus on the conquest of inner space. Inner space explorations offer a way of freeing the racially unmarked male subject from the repressive internal colonization of the mind; in this sense, Fanon's notion of psychic decolonization is appropriated in the service of the Western privilege it opposes in its intended context.
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