Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule

241 Pages·2014·4.24 MB·English

by  Elana Gomel (auth.)

Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the
Ethics of Posthumanism
Also by Elana Gomel
POSTMODERN SCIENCE FICTION AND TEMPORAL IMAGINATION (2010)
THE PILGRIM SOUL: Being Russian In Israel (2009)
BLOODSCRIPTS: Writing the Violent Subject (2003)
Science Fiction, Alien
Encounters, and the Ethics
of Posthumanism
Beyond the Golden Rule
Elana Gomel
Assoiciate Professor, Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University, Israel
© Elana Gomel 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-36762-4
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-47453-0 ISBN 978-1-137-36763-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137367631
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by MPS Ltd, Chennai, India.
For my sons Ariel and Eliran. You will see the future!
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Why Do We Need Aliens? 1
Part I Confrontation
1 “The Force that Gives us Meaning”: Alien Invasion
and Search for Redemption 37
2 Idylls of the Same: Soviet SF, Cosmic Humanism, and
Escape from History 69
Part II Assimilation
3 The Contagion of Posthumanity: Alien Infestation
and the Paradox of Subjectivity 95
4 Human Skins, Alien Masks: Allegories of
Postcolonial Guilt 117
Part III Transformation
5 The Human Trinity: What Makes Us Other? 149
6 Stanislaw Lem and the Holocaust of Humanism 187
Postscript 211
Notes 214
Works Cited 219
Index 230
vii
Preface
When I was a child, my father told me we were Martians, exiled from
our home planet, condemned to forget its red deserts and blue canals,
and duped into thinking of ourselves as mere humans. I did not quite
believe him, though I wanted to. Growing up on a steady diet of literary
science fiction, from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to Stanislaw Lem and
the Strugatsky brothers, I had no problem accepting that aliens were
real. But all the aliens I loved were non-humanoid: Wells’ tentacled
invaders, Lem’s strange creatures and stranger robots, the Strugatskys’
mysterious Wanderers. I could not quite see myself in this company;
and much as I admired Wells’ Martians, I did not want tentacles for
myself.
Only later did I realize that my father was obliquely referring to the
alienation that intellectuals and Jews experienced in the increasingly
xenophobic atmosphere of the decrepit Soviet Union. Our family was
both and though I was not much troubled by social issues at the age
of seven, I felt the pressure – but also the privilege – of being different,
being other.
Many years and many countries later, I see an increasing number of
people like me: global nomads, living across cultures and languages;
aliens to those who want to be surrounded by carbon copies of them-
selves. The process of cultural mixing and interpenetration that we call
globalization cannot be stopped. It has brought a great deal of violence
and enmity but also an astounding enrichment of human knowledge
and experience.
The question of how to relate to the alien, the Other, is no longer a
science-fictional one. From the pages of alien-encounter novels it has
migrated to the news headlines. The Martians are here: people who
have strange customs and beliefs, who speak incomprehensible lan-
guages, whose ways of thinking are different and opaque. And beyond
the wave of cultural alienness looms the tsunami of animal rights move-
ments, biotechnologies that are rewiring our brains, AIs that may one
day be truly intelligent. What we loosely call posthumanism encom-
passes all these disparate trends, converging on the same question that
science fiction has been asking for more than a hundred years: how do
we confront the Other? And an even scarier question is implicit in my
father’s tale: what if the Other is myself?
viii
Preface ix
And so in this book I am going to revisit the answers that SCIENCE
FICTION has given to these question in the hope that they will have a
wider implications for the post-Communist, postmodern, posthuman
world. The impetus for its writing came from the strange disconnect in
our political and ethical discourse between the reality of difference and
the ideal of sameness. The current political orthodoxy of human rights
is based on humanism: the notion that we all share the same nature
and therefore have to treat each other fairly. This notion underpins the
Golden Rule: do not do unto others what is hateful to you. But what if
some others like what is hateful to you? What if they are so different
that your own preferences cannot be a guide to theirs? What if the oth-
ers, the ethical agents who require your response, are aliens?
Humanism has been philosophically demolished (see Introduction).
But it remains a default ethical position, especially when issues of fair
treatment and universal rights are raised. So instead of recapitulating
the many philosophical and political arguments against humanism,
which have been more than adequately marshalled by other scholars
and philosophers, I have chosen a different tack. This book is about
narratives: fictions that represent, in a concrete and palpable form, the
many scenarios of encounter with the alien who is beyond the reach of
the human-centered Golden Rule. These scenarios range from violent
xenophobia to selfless acceptance. But the most challenging and hope-
ful of them invite us to envision a situation, in which we transcend
the cognitive and cultural limitations of what we define as human in
order to embrace an open-ended future. Such narratives are not policy
prescriptions or moral sermons; most often than not, they end on a
note of uncertainty and ambiguity. But they force us to examine our
most cherished assumptions, confront and exorcise our deepest fears.
Is it really so bad to clone and/or genetically engineer humans? Should
we automatically condemn violence, even if we do not understand its
causes? What is it that we really value about ourselves and is this quality
shared by other animals?
In writing this book, I hoped to raise such questions rather than to
provide specific answers. It is the greatness of good science fiction that
it makes one think rather than emote and that it respects the reader’s
capacity to buckle the book’s argument and to come up with alterna-
tives of his/her own. I tried to imitate this in my study of the genre. But
there is one question that will inevitably be asked and that I find hard
to escape: do I think that extraterrestrial intelligent aliens actually exist?
I could evade it by pointing out that this book is about fictional aliens
and that the fact that Mars is uninhabited has no bearing on the value