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Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction PDF

177 Pages·1987·2.34 MB·English
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www.GetPedia.com *More than 150,000 articles in the search database *Learn how almost everything works Aliens The Anthropology of Science Fiction Page 1 ALTERNATIVES is a series under the general editorship of Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander which has been established to serve the growing critical audience of science fiction, fan- tastic fiction, and speculative fiction. Other titles from the Eaton Conference are: Bridges to Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser, George R. Guffey, and Mark Rose, 1980 Bridges to Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, 1982 Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, 1983 Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film , edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, 1985 Hard Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, 1986 Storm Warnings: Science Fiction Confronts the Future, edited by George E. Slusser, Colin Greenland, and Eric S. Rabkin, 1987 Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, 1987 Aliens The Anthropology of Science Fiction Page 2 Aliens The Anthropology of Science Fiction Edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville Aliens The Anthropology of Science Fiction Page 3 Copyright © 1987 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Edited by Yvonne D. Mattson Designed by Quentin Fiore Production supervised by Natalia Nadraga 90 89 88 87 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aliens: the anthropology of science fiction. (Alternatives) Includes index. 1. Science fiction—History and criticism. 2. Life on other planets in literature. 3. Monsters in literature. I. Slusser, George Edgar. II. Rabkin, Eric S. III. Series. PN3433.6.A44 1987 809.3’0876 87-4721 ISBN 0-8093-1375-8 Superman, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen are trademarks of DC Comics Inc. and are used with permission. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Aliens The Anthropology of Science Fiction Page 4 CONTENTS Introduction: The Anthropology of the Alien George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin Part One Searchings: The Quest for the Alien 1. The Alien in Our Minds Larry Niven 2. Effing the Ineffable Gregory Benford 3. Border Patrols Michael Beehler 4. Alien Aliens Pascal Ducommun 5. Metamorphoses of the Dragon George E. Slusser Part Two Sightings: The Aliens among Us 6. Discriminating Among Friends: The Social Dynamics of the Friendly Alien John Huntington 7. Sex, Superman, and Sociobiology in Science Fiction Joseph D. Miller 8. Cowboys and Telepaths/Formulas and Phenomena Eric S. Rabkin 9. Robots: Three Fantasies and One Big Cold Reality Noel Perrin 10. Aliens in the Supermarket: Science Fiction and Fantasy for “Inquiring Minds” George R. Guffey 11. Aliens ‘R’U.S.: American Science Fiction Viewed from Down Under Zoe Sofia Aliens The Anthropology of Science Fiction Page 5 Part Three Soundings: Man as the Alien 12. H. G. Wells’Familiar Aliens John R. Reed 13. Inspiration and Possession: Ambivalent Intimacy with the Alien Clayton Koelb 14. Cybernauts in Cyberspace: William Gibson’s Neuromancer David Porush 15. The Human Alien: In-Groups and Outbreeding in Enemy Mine Leighton Brett Cooke 16. From Astarte to Barbie and Beyond: The Serious History of Dolls Frank McConnell 17. An Indication of Monsters Colin Greenland Notes Biographical Notes Aliens The Anthropology of Science Fiction Page 6 INTRODUCTION: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OFTHE ALIEN George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find) Is not to think or act beyond mankind. —Alexander Pope Our title, the “anthropology of the alien,” sounds like a contradiction in terms. Anthropos is man, anthropo- logy the study of man. The alien, however, is something else: alius, other than. But other than what? Obviously man. The alien is the creation of a need—man’s need to designate something that is genuinely out- side himself, something that is truly nonman, that has no initial relation to man except for the fact that it has no relation. Why man needs the alien is the subject of these essays. For it is through learning to relate to the alien that man has learned to study himself. According to Pope, however, man who thinks beyond mankind is foolishly proud. Indeed, many aliens, in SF at least, seem created merely to prove Pope’s dictum. For they are monitory aliens, placed out there in order to draw us back to ourselves, to show us that “the proper study of Mankind is Man.” But this is merely sho- wing us a mirror. And many so-called alien contact stories are no more than that: mirrors. There are two main types of this contact story: the story in which they contact us, and the story in which we contact them. Both can be neatly reflexive. The aliens who come to us are, as a rule, unfriendly invaders. And they generally prove, despite claims to superiority, in the long run to be inferior to man. This is the War of the Worlds sce- nario, where the invasion and ensuing collapse of the Martians serves as a warning to man not to emphasize (in his pride) mind at the expense of body—not to abandon a human, balanced existence. The aliens we con- tact, on the other hand, tend to be friendly, to respond with grace to our overtures. They are perhaps superior to man, but humble, and man is both flattered and chastened by this contact. He finds a role model in this alien, one that shows him that advancement comes, once again, from balance. For these creatures do what man is always told to do: they know themselves. But are these aliens really anthropological? Are they not rather what we would call “anthropophilic”? For even the most hostile of them are, finally, beneficial to man. Remember, they seek man out, and in contacting him, do help him, in whatever devious ways (a mighty maze but not without a plan), to be content to be him- self. These aliens are confirmed by the fact that there are “anthropophobic” aliens on the other extreme. These are beings that simply will not contact us. They are creatures of the void rather than of the mirror. But the alien that will not contact us is also a limit, a warning sign placed before the void that turns us back to our sole self. In the final scene of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, for instance, the protagonist Kelvin reaches out to touch the elusive alien. It takes shape around his hand, as if to define his limits, but never touches that hand. Alien noncontact then, just as surely, reinforces man’s position at the center of his universe. Aliens The Anthropology of Science Fiction Page 7 These indeed are anthropocentric aliens, and their existence betrays man’s fear of the other. But our question remains: is there such a thing as an anthropological alien? The question causes us to rethink the problem. Anthropology is a science, the study of man. Before there was an alien, however, there was no need for such a science. For the other, as something outside man, provides the point of comparison needed for man to begin even to think to study himself. So first we must know when man acquired this alien sharer in his space. Surely by the time of Pope, for he is clearly reacting against this outreaching on the part of man. The word “alien” is not an old one: it is a modern derivation of a Latin root. Neither the classical nor the Christian mind thinks in terms of aliens. In their world view, each being is unique, and each has its destined place in a great “chain of being.” On this chain, everything interconnects, but nothing overlaps. Thus man could ‘’communicate” with animal and angel alike, provided he respected the order of the connections. Even in the Renaissance, this vision persists. As one commentator put it, “there are no grotesques in nature; nor anything framed to fill up empty cantons and unnecessary spaces” (cited in E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture [London: Chatto & Windus, 1960], p. 29). If there were spaces in the structure, they were simply accepted as empty. And they were unnecessary; they had no function in the system, certainly no human function. Our modern sense of the alien comes to nest in the spaces; it peoples the void with presences now related to man becau- se they are other than man. What is more, this creation of the alien appears to be simultaneous with man’s sense of alienation from natu- re. This is a sense of the chain breaking, and it is amply recorded. Hamlet for example, in his “what a piece of work is man” speech, can raise his subject to angelic, even infinite rank, then see him plummet far below his old position. Man becomes a grotesque: the quintessence of dust. Sixty years later Blaise Pascal, now seeing man through God’s eyes, describes a similar hybrid: “If he exalt himself, I humble him; if he humble himself, I exalt him . . . until he understands that he is an incomprehensible monster.” Pope, in seventy more years, can call man openly ‘’the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.” Man is no longer a link, even the cen- tral one, in a chain. He has become a median, an interface between two realms: Pascal’s two infinites, the infi- nitely small and the infinitely large. In this comparison with man, these have become alien realms. As such they oblige man, in order to confirm his own position, to people these realms with aliens—creatures tures that are themselves incomprehensible and monstrous. Creating these aliens, man becomes a riddle, not to God, but to himself, a stranger in his own land. Indeed man, in a very real sense, knocked himself out of the great chain of nature through his own horizon- tal movements. The Renaissance in Europe saw not only a rebirth of classical learning but actual on-the- ground exploration of new worlds. Old herbaria and bestiaries were taxed by the discovery of exotic flora and fauna. Spenser’s Garden of Adonis is no classical place, for “infinite shapes of creatures there are bred / And uncouth forms which none yet ever know.” More troubling were sightings of humanoid creatures reported in works like Peter Martyr’s De novo orbe. Some of these were beings of classical lore, sea monsters and the like. But others were new and disturbing hybrids: cannibals, savages, degraded forms of men which, by their very existence, violated man’s sense of having a fixed place in the universe. In Chrétien de Troyes’thirteenth- century Yvain, there is a beast-man. We see immediately, however, the standard by which his deformities are measured. His head is described as “horselike,” his ears like those of an elephant. This makes his response all the more fantastic when, asked what manner of thing he is, the creature replies with civility: “I am a man.” There is nothing fantastic about the Renaissance savage, however. He cannot say he is a man. His deformi- ties are all the more troubling because he cannot compensate for them. Because he cannot speak, he must be caged, brought back to be studied. For the first time, created by this alien encounter where the alien is an image of himself, man has need of an “anthropology.” Aliens The Anthropology of Science Fiction Page 8 The Renaissance is the source for two major attitudes toward the alien encounter: call these the excorporating and the incorporating encounter. They are important, for they set parameters still valid today for assessing SF’s meditations on the alien. The first major expression of the excorporating vision is Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals.” Montaigne introduces the “cannibal,” or savage, into the Renaissance debate between art and nature. To reject the savage for lacking “art,” Montaigne contends, is to embrace a static vision, and one that is “artificial,’’for it holds man back from openly exploring the abundance nature offers us. The savage is not a degraded man, but rather another version of man, a version to be studied. To refuse to study him, for Montaigne, is the backward attitude. Montaigne goes so far, in this encounter between European and canni- bal, to accuse the former, the so-called “civilized’’man, of being the true savage: man dehumanized by the “artificial devices” of his culture to the point where he cannot embrace the bounty of nature, its new forms and changes. Acritic like Lovejoy sees Montaigne’s essay as the “locus classicus of primitivism in modern literature” (Essays in the History of Ideas [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1948], p. 238). Primitivism, however, is a later term, and one that reflects an interesting reversal of poles, in which Montaigne’s vision has been co-opted by positivistic science. Here is Pope on the savage: “Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind / Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; / His soul proud Science never taught to stray / Far as the solar walk, or milky way.” Montaigne’s savage is not this Indian, this earth-hugging creature so artfully integrated into a nature neatly regulated by human rhythms. His savage is the lure of the unknown, the impulsion to explore. And here in Pope, that lure has been transposed to the “solar walk.” The old savage has given rise to the modern scientist, to Newton sailing on strange seas of thought alone. This open search for the alien can, perhaps must, result in man interacting with the alien to the point of alte- ring his own shape in the process. This is a literal excorporation of the human form divine. In a work like Shakespeare’sTempest, however, we have the opposite. For here we experience the incorporation of the same Renaissance savage into, if not man’s exact form, at least into his body politic. In his play, Shakespeare returns the explorer’s “uninhabited island” to old-world waters. By doing so, he makes the alien encounter less a question of discovery than of property rights. The “savage and deformed” Caliban claims to be the island’s original denizen and owner. When the courtiers are shipwrecked on the island, however, they find that claim already abrogated by the presence of Prospero and Miranda, who have taken control of both Caliban and his island. Caliban says that he is dispossessed of his island, just as Prospero is dispossessed of his kingdom. There is a difference between these claims though, and the difference is immediately seen in their situation on the island. Caliban is “slave,” while Prospero is master. There are two successive senses in which “natural” is used here. The island is a natural, that is, neutral, dehumanized place. As such, it is a place where alienated creatures meet and should be able to form new relationships. But here they do not. The old, “natural’’ order of the chain of being holds sway. Prospero immediately regains his rightful status, and Caliban his. Prospero’s natural rights have been taken from him unrightfully, hence temporarily. Caliban has never had those rights, and never will. Caliban’s name echoes “cannibal” and “Carib.” He is that dangerous Indian Elizabethan society compared to the Cyclops—the humanoid monster whose one eye signified lawless individuality and alien singularity. Shakespeare, however, does not give us direct confrontation of savage and civilization. His island is a diffe- rent sort of neutral ground. But this time its neutrality is one not of nature, but of high artificiality. For this is the world of romance. Here, though a Caliban can never be civilized, he can, against the very condition of his birth and shape, be miraculously incorporated into a polity by Prospero. Prospero has been seen to operate as a scientist would. But he is neither a Faustus, nor a prototype for Pope’s reacher for the stars. With Prospero, what is a potentially excorporating search for knowledge proves mere artifice. His “magic” merely gives him, in the end, an excuse for repentance, thus a cause for tempering something even more dangerous than the Indian per se: the drive to explore nature openly, to meet a Caliban on his own ground, not on the carefuly prepared romance terrain of The Tempest. Prospero’s craft, finally, is not science but art. As art, it invokes divine sanction in order to guarantee permanent control over the natural world and its potential aliens.

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