Bewildering Stories discusses...
What Are Space Aliens?
[Reader 1] “In the Shadow of the Stars” avoids the template of all the Star Trek spinoffs that aliens must uniformly be humans with funny bumps or blue wattles stuck on their faces. The story tries to give us some actual alienness, although its palette is of necessity limited to terrestrial forms. What else have we got? The strangest stuff any of us has ever seen is right here on Earth.
[Don Webb] The discussion “What Are Spaceships?” in issue 903, made it apparent that real and fictional spaceships serve two different functions. Real spaceships transport people, robots or instrumentation to interplanetary or even interstellar space. Fictional spaceships are narrative devices that allow characters to move rapidly from one setting to another in a story.
The rule of forbidden anachronism applies to both kinds of spaceships. Real ones can be built only with the scientific and engineering principles known at the time. Fictional spaceships do the opposite; they may anticipate future engineering, but they may not use real technology that has become outdated. Thus, Isaac Asimov’s “Trends,” written in 1939, could not have used the same technology if it had been written in 1969.
Can the same distinction be applied to space aliens? No, because we know of no “real” space aliens. If any do eventually manifest themselves, they will probably resemble today’s human scientists who attempt to decipher the songs of birds and whales or other patterns of communication in non-human species.
What models, then, does science fiction have for space aliens? Any life on Earth. We needn’t bother trying to imagine a new form of life; any possible life-form that anyone can imagine very likely exists in some form on this planet already.
Accordingly, we are not talking about “alienness”; everybody and everything is “alien” to somebody or something else. Marion J. May’s “Inga’s Persuasion,” in this issue, hammers the principle home: the story depicts two human sisters who are as alien to each other emotionally and morally as any beings from outer space could possibly be. The question is not: “What do space aliens look like?” Rather it’s: “What is the role of the non-human in literature?”
Our reader notes that the well-known filmed dramas of Star Trek depict space aliens as humans in funny costumes. Quite so. Who — or what — other than human actors can play the roles? Animation is a whole other genre. No, give the actors funny make-up and let them go on stage.
Science fiction is, by definition, literature. And literature is, by its nature, always and only about human beings. The science part is incidental; that’s why the formal term for it in French is la littérature d’anticipation. It’s set in a future or an alternate past, both of which are necessarily imaginary.
Are science fictional space aliens therefore human beings in costume? Yes. And, as our article “Space Aliens as Metaphor” points out, invaders from outers space routinely but with rare exceptions incarnate the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, namely everything human beings fear in themselves: war, famine (or environmental destruction), disease and death.
But what if our space aliens are friendly or at least not hostile? Then they parody various human traits. Science fiction, then, is actually an ancient literary genre that has been updated to modern times: it’s the classic fable.
In the mid-17th century, La Fontaine and Cyrano were writing in practically the same place at the same time. La Fontaine retains the ancient form of the fable by depicting animals that talk and think like human beings but are constrained to act like animals, as in “The Cricket and the Ant.”
In contrast, Cyrano goes to The Other World, where human beings, Moon-beings, and his friend the Sun-being discuss modern and ancient culture while having fun with new technology, such as the fast-food rifle.
Does science fiction bring us anything new and different? Sometimes a new cultural perspective. But a cautionary example: the Star Trek of the 1960’s was culturally innovative in its day; some fifty years later, it had become quaint, especially in comparison with later versions of itself.
Such is the fate of such dramas that are, as actor and director Jonathan Frakes once called them: “20th-century morality plays.” What can we do but conclude by paraphrasing another classic fable in modern dress, Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “We have met the space aliens, and they are us.”
[Postscript] Other readers would like to discuss what space aliens might look like and what they might do. The characterization of space aliens in literature is a different topic, but it is perfectly valid, quite interesting... and endless. As part of such a discussion, we can recommend a former Review Editor’s review of Michael E. Lloyd’s Observation trilogy.
