In Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary, the arrival of an alien at the American Northwest of the 1870s offers us a window into the lives of socially marginalized characters at that particular time period, including Chinese immigrants, mental patients, proto-feminists, Civil War veterans, and Native Americans. The nameless woman, a Dickinsonian character who gets named Sarah Canary in a mental asylum, is the central force that links these traumatized characters together. The violence and oppression suffered by this group of “aliens” is keenly observed by the Chinese railroad worker Chin Ah Kin, who is clearly a member of the “alien” group and has gone through various adventures because of Sarah. Although the novel is generally believed to focus on the differences of personal perception within the context of the first encounter with an extraterrestrial life form, the fact that the narrative is framed by Chin's feelings and observations indicates that his “alien-ness” can best represent people of marginal status in the nineteenth-century America. Thus, Fowler's fiction offers an alternative counter-discourse to the official history that tends to erase and silence marginal figures. Moreover, Fowler inserts a catalogue of global, historical facts of the late twentieth century, which are seemingly unconnected to the main storyline, to highlight the continued practices of oppression and racism in the contemporary society. In the final analysis, by deploying a unique hybrid form—a combination of speculative fiction and historical novel—Fowler's first novel can be read as a historical speculative fiction that effectively interrogates the existing power structure and social stratification that collectively produce a nation of “aliens.”