Ruchita Machal
Ruchita Machal is
currently working on conceptualising mythopoeic nature of Indian Science
Fiction for her doctoral research from School of Letters at Ambedkar
University, Delhi. She has been working as an Assistant Professor for the past
seven years and is currently employed in the Department of English at Motilal
Nehru College, University of Delhi.
Abstract
The
concept of extra-terrestrial life has been a subject of much contemplation and
speculation. Science Fiction has given its readers a glimpse into what this
alien life can be in the sense that it has given a palpable materiality to the
physiognomy of alien race. Some of the new developments in the construction of
aliens have moved away from the bug-eyed monstrous figure to an idiosyncratic
sentient being different from the human race. Many Science Fiction stories have
given a dialogic complexity to the interspecies contact and its repercussions
for human beings. Alien life in these stories has been analysed through human
mannerisms. They pique the curiosity by trying to understand the alien and
further encourage a mean to propagate the human agenda of benefitting from the
alien technology.
The posthuman fundamentals challenge the
continuity of humanist tendencies which establish human life at the apex of
understanding what is essentially not human. Recent works in SF have given
prominence to reconstruction/deconstruction of alien life thereby changing the
modalities of conception of these sentient beings. Moreover, the real challenge
lies in the anatomy of these alien bodies which address the aporia of human
imagination.
The objective of this research paper is to
examine some of these anthropomorphic characteristics that homo sapiens employ
in deciphering the alien race as means of understanding their behaviour and
their degree of intelligence. Through the paper I am investigating a
quantifiable expression for these anatomically different alien lives and their
cataclysmic contact with the human race. In this diachronic study, I have
traced the changing schema around the alien bodies and its possible absence in
some of the recent SF.
Keywords:
science fiction, extra-terrestrials, posthumanism, anthropomorphism.
The concept
of extra-terrestrial life has been a subject of much contemplation and
speculation. The inexhaustible montage of space adventures in SF reveals the
magnitude of the relationship humans share with the unexplored. Science Fiction
has given its readers a glimpse into what this alien life can be in the sense
that it has given a palpable materiality to the physiognomy of alien race.
Furthermore, the representation of alien race has always held a tacit meaning
for human beings. SF induces the critical faculties to rethink the nature of
life forms other than our own. However, the bigger challenge has not been the abstract
hypotheses of alien life, but the implications of this nonhuman entity on our
world. Needless to say, that some of the early science fiction had pivoted
towards the horrifying invasion of our world by the aliens in an attempt to
enslave the human race, or worse, annihilate earth and our existence with it.
This fascination with the introduction of other exobiological life forms in science-fictional
universe and the plausible interpretation of this novum phenomena is the
central issue of this paper.
The
science-fictional alien has always implied towards its inherent otherness – it
is what humans are not. The desire to reach the stars and establish contact
with other life forms has been the product of evolving human consciousness and
the nature of our being. Science fiction became the medium of sustenance to
this phenomenon which gave shape to our desires and fantasies in a remote
setting without giving away much of the inhibitions. In the essay “Some Things We
Know About Aliens”, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. writes that the aliens in SF are
variants of mythological beasts and monsters from the adventure genre of pulps.
They occupy the same literary space as angels and demons did in mythical models.
He further extrapolates that aliens are evolutionary beings just like humans,
but more importantly the existence of humans is related to the former since
“aliens are our shadows, and we are theirs” (1). The aliens acquire their
meaning through a system of lack, they represent the human desire for the
unknown and unexplored so as to give a sense of wholeness to our existence. The
dialectic of alien figure works through a binary - the monstrous alien is
destroyed in the plot or the peaceful alien resorts to operate as modus vivendi
with their human counterparts. The cosmic isolation of human civilization is
questioned in SF through the imagist reproduction of other evolutionary forms
in disparate galaxies. They subvert our laws of the world and surprise us by
their invasion into the human territory. Since homo sapiens revel in their sole
existence, the image of an alien figure is necessary to challenge this
existential predicament in the universe. They exist not for themselves, but for
human subjects as they are symbolic entities in the conceptual framework of
human imagination.
SF stories
about alien invasion could perhaps hint at the progressive growth of scientific
technology masking the inherent fear of the unknown and unchartered horizons.
It would not be wrong to assume that H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds
(1897) was the first to popularise the theme of alien invasion in the SF literary
canon. The trend of attributing monstrous characteristics to personify the
nonhuman alien race has pervaded the popular imagination. Even though Wells’s
vision may not have been prophetic but it symbolizes the end of British Empire,
and the impending dread of being subjected to colonisation by a far more
superior race. It features mankind facing an unmediated attack from the aforementioned
superior Martian race who is emboldened by the possession of their advanced
weaponry like the heat ray and the poison gas. This catastrophe unleashed on
the human civilisation bears the undertone of an evolutionary struggle in the Darwinian
sense of ‘survival of the fittest’ in dangerous circumstances. The imminent war
on Europe and the instruments of war were few of the predictions in War of
the Worlds which proved to be far too realistic than fiction in the coming
years. The novel ends on a rather interesting note that no matter how advanced
the Martians were, they were eventually destroyed by the opulent
micro-organisms in the Earth’s ecosystem. The novel seems to assert that the
natural selection expunges the unfit, and since sapiens have adapted and
evolved in accordance with Earth’s ecosystem, they are at an obvious advantage
than their nemesis. Another note could be made on the anatomy of the alien body
– the unnamed protagonist in the novel points out in Book Two that these
Martians were essentially just an enlarged head with no olfactory system but
dark and protruding eyes, and tentacles which could be an appendage for limbs. Alien
life in this novel appears to be an assortment of various animalistic
characteristics; the large head could symbolise towards its advanced mental
capacity than humans. But what particularly stands out is the lack of olfactory
system which may indicate at the absence of a determinant in its psychological perception[1]. To
put it simply, the sense of smell functions as one of the qualitative factors
in representation/misrepresentation. This could imply that the Martians may
visually perceive human as representational objects but not as experiential
entities and hence lack the subjectivity in their judgement towards human race.
John
Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938) is a fan favourite which has been imprinted
in the popular memory by John Carpenter’s directorial rendition in The Thing.
The novella was firstly published in Astounding Science Fiction and has
garnered much respect among the fans because of its horrific representation of
the alien in the eeriness of an isolated backdrop. The alien in the novella is
discovered by a group of scientists on an expedition to Antarctica and
subsequently the alien is named as the Thing. The alien spaceship and its
original occupant are found frozen in ice, the scientists decide to bring the
alien back to the base camp and thaw it in order to study its curious anatomy.
Once defrosted the alien escapes and the nature of the story changes from a stereotypical
science fiction to one that belongs to horror. It is soon discovered that the
alien can mutate itself into any organic form as some of the expedition dogs
and few of the scientists are later revealed to be its myriad manifestations.
In this generic amalgamation, Campbell’s story acquires a stylistic rendition
similar to that of horror and of detective fiction since the scientists are
acutely paranoid by the Thing’s unexplainable existence ensuing the search for
its imitations. Certainly, the alien is not just the figure from outer space
but also an imposter amongst the human beings. The Thing in “Who Goes There?”
is a peculiar alien since it lacks a distinct body, the only feature of its
original form is the head. The alien discovered by the scientists has a
tentacled head and three bulbous eyes red in colour which seems to echo the
characteristics of the fabled Medusa’s head. The lower half of the alien’s body
resembles that of a husky dog which it may have partially ingested but was
frozen in the process of metamorphosis. Its alien biology is understood to be
protoplasmic since each cell component of the alien’s anatomy has a mind of its
own. The alien is also intelligent and skilled since it is able to create
atomic energy in the sub-zero temperature at Antarctica. Perhaps, psychic
abilities could be attributed to it since the explorers begin to have
nightmares whenever they are in close proximity with the alien. Such distinct
characteristics make the Thing a creature straight out of nightmares, but also
an interesting figure.
Alien bodies
and human interactions with the alien are essentially self-reflexive. The alien
is an embodiment of what the human imagination conceptualises as the other. But
in Campbell’s story, the alien may be a violent monster but it is not one who
is xenopsychozoic[2].
Most the alien figures in SF are revealed to possess intelligence but the
historical traces of their intelligence and their idea of being is different
from that of humans. But in Campbell’s story, the alien does not retain its
original form but mutates itself as a clone of the human species or any other
living being it encounters. In this sense the alien is not a creature from
outer space, the alien is us. This literal metamorphosis of the alien works as
a metaphorical mirror for the human subject. In Lacanian terminology, the
concept of “I” or the “ego” is developed in the mirror stage which later adds
to the symbolic order of identity formation. The process of identification with
the mirror image adds to the experience of human existence in the ontological
sense. The complex association in Lacanian discourse is foundational to the
psychical concepts of “self” and “other”. This relational modality between the
self and the other foregrounds the relationship between human and the alien.
The Thing from “Who Goes There?” is the dissociative split between the
narcissistic human and the hostility of a monstrous figure. Apart from the
relational metonymy not much about the alien is revealed in the story. By the
end, the Thing evolves from a neuter pronoun “it” to a personal pronoun “he”
connoting the humanization of the alien.
The creative
faculties in the writers of speculative fiction have pushed the limits of
imagination to spawn a meta-human projection in the conceptualisation of alien
species. The famous American anthropologist Loren Eiseley rightly complains
that the aliens in SF are not necessary alienated from human beings; “alien”
exemplifies human traits, their unfamiliarity can only be understood through the
familiar – they signify what human consider alien which is not far removed from
human imagination[3].
The introduction of alien in SF fulfils the role of an actant to the story
wherein the human could discover more about the self by exploring the horizon of
what we conceptualise as the “other”. Since it is impossible for man to
understand what is absolutely alien, the human imagination inadvertently
creates the alien figure who receives its meaning through humanist terms.
Similarly, Elana Gomel in her seminal work Science Fiction, Alien
Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism (2014) posits an argument that
the alien pushes the boundaries of humanism and anthropocentricism. She
proclaims that “a certain degree of anthropomorphism in imagining alien intelligence
is inevitable. We are cognitively hard-wired to ascribe agency to other beings
and since the only intelligence we know is our own, fictional aliens are likely
to mirror their creators to some degree” (11).
Orson Scott
Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) is a staple for alien encounter in SF since
it strictly adheres to the formula of alien invasion and humans battling the
vicious aliens to emerge as valiant warriors and protectors of mankind. The
alien race in the novel “Formics” are also called “buggers” because of their
insect-like characteristics controlled by the Queen of their hive who commands
the alien species. The basic premise of the novel mirrors the law of the
jungle, similar to that of War of the Worlds – destroy the alien before
it destroys us. The possibilities of establishing a relationship with the alien
are never explored and the directive for communicating with the alien is
inevitably spoken through war. The young protagonist of the novel Ender Wiggin
is the prodigal son and a product of utilitarian principles set in futuristic
Earth. He is the ultimate war machine cultivated by the war tycoons to end the
alien race. Surprisingly, the protagonist is unaware of the attacks he commands
as a leader of his platoon since he has been made to believe that he is
training via a game simulation. In the end he grieves for the genocide he
committed when he parleys with the truth of his (mis)adventures and decides to
make amends by helping to find a new home planet for the survivors of the war.
The dehumanisation of the alien in this novel perhaps finds a resolve at the
end when the protagonist uncovers the reality by acquiring a perspective on the
existential reality of the other, in this case tapping into the consciousness
similar to the one deployed by Queen of the hive. He is able to understand that
the buggers were an intelligent life too, and they had no intention of
destroying humankind once they understood that the earthlings were not a
threat. But on Earth, it is the war-hungry commanders who used Ender to inflict
genocide on the alien race. Orson Scott Card subtly circumvents his
predecessors’ works about alien invasion by offering a means of communication
to the aliens to plead their case with the homo sapiens. This idea establishes
a familiarity with the alien and makes it difficult to portray them as the evil
extra-terrestrials as done by most of the SF during the age. Since the other
(alien) has often been the enemy, Orson Scott Card implies that an
introspection in the mind of the subaltern née alien could effectively alter
the perspective of the self. The ethical issues raised in the work resonate
strongly towards the end when the marginalised other has been given the agency
of power which shifts the paradigm of human self-centredness.
SF stories
have had a heuristic approach while giving a form to the alien; since there is
an obvious dearth of real-life aliens to borrow from, SF has seen alien life as
successive links in the evolutionary process. Carl Sagan’s political critique
in Contact (1985) may be an unfitting example to understand alien
anatomy, but it’s certainly a worthy contender foremost in theorizing the
existence of an advanced civilisation billions and billions of galaxies away
from us. Apart from the popular series Cosmos, Sagan was also directly
involved with SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) and was
convinced that we are not alone in this universe. The idea that an alien
species much advanced than us should contact Earth not for invasion but
possibly to share their technology could only by be conceived by a sceptic
astrophysicist like Sagan. The protagonist, Ellie Arroway in the novel becomes
Sagan’s mouthpiece when she argues that it would be preposterous of human
beings to think that we are the only life form in a universe filled with
countless galaxies and celestial objects. Also, the alien in the novel never
reveals its true form or home planet but appears as a human so as to not
perturb the human explorer. Many critics have pointed at theological underpinnings
in Contact’s alien, however, I wish to point at one specific detail
which suggests the changing topology of the non-human life. The alien
materializes itself in a human form, and not just any human, but someone from
our memory who may have had a profound impact on our life. This makes the alien
cognitively advanced than our race as they are able to understand our complex
unconscious and the repressed to simulate surroundings based on the receptors’
degree of consciousness. As the novel indicates, the sole motive of their
contact is to educate the earthlings of pre-existing wormholes in our universe
which are portals to other life sustaining planets in the universe. The nature
of alien intelligence in Contact bears heavy undertones of the God
phenomenon offering redemption to humans but through mathematical applications.
This kind of benevolent and introspective alien is a stark contrast from the
Wellsian model of a violent extra-terrestrial race. Moreover, this friendly
neighbourhood alien is also a manifestation of the human psychosis preaching
humanist ethics.
The physical
matter of alien anatomy is reciprocated in a short story by Marion Zimmer
Bradley in “The Wind People” published by the magazine Worlds of If in
1959. In this experimental story, the woman protagonist decides to cohabit the
alien planet with her unborn son as she cannot withstand the propulsion of the
hyper jump to planet Earth. The story refrains from giving a corporeal body to
the alien race. Rather, the alien could be perceived through the rustling of
the wind. The alien of the story belongs to the symbolic realm as it comes to
connote the latent sexual desires in the mother for her adolescent son. The
alien also befits the modalities of denying knowledge to the human subjects; as
the mother is reluctant in believing in alien life so she cannot “see” the
alien figure. The metaphorical alien in the story is a transgression into the
fear of unknown desires and tabooed territories. The mother’s desire for the
unknown and her constant repression of these desires are expressed through the
alien who remains unseen in the story. Moreover, the oedipal resonances of the
son replacing the partner underpin the alien characteristics in the story.
Speculative
fiction has been a product of the reaches of human imagination, and alien life
has been the mirror-image of what the deontological humans are not. But what is
constituent in these representations is how the alien figure operates in the
human ecosystem. This heuristic approach only hints at alternative discussions
but does not challenge the social normativity which is subtly applied to the
alien species. It is rather an extension of domination and normativity for
which the human protagonist is the primary signifier. Sonya Dorman’s short story
“When I was Miss Dow” is a replication of these normative tendencies that
circumscribe alien existence. The story navigates through familiar by-lanes of
scientific exploration narrated by the alien protagonist. The alien planet is
colonised by human beings and their offices are infiltrated by alien beings who
wish to benefit from the technology that their visitors seem to possess. The
alien civilisation propounds on singularities: one cerebral brain, one sex,
amorphous protean forms which could take the shape of any being. Dorman
purports a similar argument even as she subverts the nature of self and the
other in the plot. The self in the story (the alien) acquires meaning and
identity once it enters the human domain of semiology. The alien protagonist
subsumes to the dichotomies of self/other as it fulfils the role of a female
secretary to a male scientist/lover. In a series of stereotypical plotlines,
the alien forgoes its alien-ness and appropriates to the human world without
challenging the social normativity of its inherent nature vis-à-vis its
acquired reality. The agency of power in the story lies in the ideological
dynamic of the human system reaffirming the dominance of humans as the superior
race.
Carl D.
Malmgren writes in the essay “Self and the Other in SF: Alien Encounter” that
“these alien actants explore the limitations of being human and suggest the
possibility of transcending those limits. They examine what we are not, in so
doing intimating what we could become” (17). Similarly, Donna Haraway’s
‘cyborg’ or cybernetic organism marks the confrontation between human and
animal, human and machine, and human and non-human. In her seminal essay “A
Manifesto for the Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the
1980s” she explicates that the “…[cyborg] is a creature of social reality as
well as a creature of fiction” (149). Haraway argues in her essay that human
subject takes centre stage in scientific treatises and the culmination of a
cyborg pushes the limitations of technological inference in a capitalist
society. Haraway’s cyborg challenges the appropriated dichotomies of
human/animal or human/non-human, her creature is a hybrid machinic organism who
transcends these dichotomies and operates independently in our social systems.
She writes, “a cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck
with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other
seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers
of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in
the Western sense” (150). The cyborg is a product of Post-War militarised and
political institutions reflecting the hierarchical domination of the scientific
discourse. It is a splice of human consciousness with human interests at the
core as it attempts to redefine the concepts of bodies and identities.
Haraway’s work is a resistance on seeing the monsters as teleological aberrant
but rather an augmentation of a new phenomenon in our lived social reality and
human subjectivity in reading displaced identities. In her third instalment of
the Posthumanities series When Species Meet (2008), Haraway questions
the limits of anthropocentric entitlements in understanding species other than
the human beings. She begins her work by offering the anecdote of Derrida’s cat
from the lecture “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, the cat
Derrida mentions is more akin to Carroll’s Cheshire Cat[4]
rather than be an allegorical example of profundity. The question Haraway asks
through this Derridean analogy is not what the cat represents, but what it
means for the cat to respond. In essence, the cat is independent in its
ontological sense, but the way its behaviour is interpreted rests on human
phenomenology, and it connotes nothing on what the cat “speaks”[5].
Haraway argues that Derrida propounds his hypothesis on a philosophical plane
of understanding the “gaze of the other” for a subject who is obviously at a
vantage[6].
Under this hypothesis Derrida fails to acknowledge the “behavioural semiotics”
of this cat-human interface. She further extrapolates that to untangle the
mystery behind this cat would have meant to develop an argument on the
non-linguistic communication between species of different kinds. But Derrida
turns introspective in his philosophical debate battling the shame of his
nakedness in the presence of another species.
The
posthumanist impulse to speculate what the other speaks has been the core of
research pertaining to alien worlds. Haraway’s work is a classic example of
animalographies wherein the posthuman subjectivity controls what the
animals/non-human speaks. No matter how different the alien anatomy may be, but
most of formulaic SF would create an alien who behaves similar to its human
counterpart. The ethical and cultural characteristics of human life naturally
find allegorical representation through alien forms. But the question remains,
how to challenge the normativity if the only available language system is our
own? Anthropomorphic principles have guided the psychological model of the
alien life. But lately, recent criticisms on SF writings have slandered this
peculiar intention towards the representation of extra-terrestrial life. Robert
G. Pielke notes in his essay “Humans and Aliens: A Unique Relationship” that
...the
evolutionary history of every species is unique, and it is related to a given
planetary environment. This latter fact makes species that evolve within the
same environment related to each other in ways extra-planetary species cannot
be. A planetary environment, in other words, creates a family setting from
which others are necessarily excluded (30).
This implies
that any other intelligent life form in the universe cannot evolve in the same
manner as the human genome has evolved over the past years. However, alien life
can only be represented through human expressions in a rhetoric available for
use. The aporia of extra-terrestrial life challenges the limits of imagination,
of which human protagonist is the centre. Nevertheless, few SF writings have
challenged the anthropocentric normativity in establishing alien existence.
Solaris (1961) by Stanislaw Lem
offers a subversive situation in which the human explorers encounter a sentient
life unresponsive to any of the human experiments, or better yet, responds in a
manner which is incomprehensible to the terran scientists. The ocean-planet
Solaris is perceived as an intelligent alien life, but due to their enormous
difference material communication between the two species never takes place.
Lem’s fictional alien is beyond human perception and control since its
behavioural patterns are incongruous to our capacities. The ocean-planet bears
no visceral anatomy which could be compared to any species on Earth. The
visitors which later haunt the human hosts are similar to the symmetrical and
asymmetrical mimoids which erupt in the ocean’s myriad formations beneath its
plasmic surface.
The
scientists aboard the space mission resolve to comprehend the “ocean” through
symbolic language as they are “visited” by their erotic and guilt fixations. The
ocean possesses the psychical ability to read the unconscious human mind and
clone these poignant electrical impulses into a corporal human manifestation.
The consistency in Lem’s narratorial rendition is the behaviour of the sentient
alien life which opposes the anthropocentric claims of other extra-terrestrial
renditions in other science-fictional adventures. The interspecies barrier in Solaris
is more pertinent since neither of the two species are able to comprehend the
other’s activity, inasmuch the imprints that the ocean transforms in a human
body do not alleviate the communication between the two. In relation to this
interspecies communication Pielke argues that
…we might
not ever be able to get to know each other. There is more than a difference of
degree involved here… further, this possible ignorance could very well extend
to a mutual inability to know what, if anything, would cause or allow harm to
occur. If mutual ignorance were to be so extensive that a knowledge of harm
were not possible for either human or moral, it would then be precisely the
situation beyond morality that Lem describes. (34)
The
synthesis of harm and non-harm could only be established if the two species are
able to comprehend the existence of their counterpart. But in the case of
Solaris, it becomes increasingly certain for the humans to understand that the
ocean is beyond these human principles and may not understand the complex
dichotomy of morally defined right or wrong precedent.
The
determinism in anthropocentric laws does not bridge the interspecies gap
between the human scientists and the ocean-planet Solaris. The expedition turns
from a scientific exercise in understanding alien mannerism to an introspective
moral coda of human psyche. These augmented visitors are manifestations of
repressed but powerful emotions in the human unconscious; they are not
necessarily reproduced by the ocean-planet to perturb the human hosts. They
could be emanations of the ocean as an attempt to establish contact with human
subjects through a semiotics comprehensible to human system. Furthermore, these
ambiguous “assimilations”[7] seem
like an embodiment of Freudian Id to the self-centred human conscious. The
other in this case is not the sentient alien but the projection of the
repressed self which becomes precursory in breaking the barrier of the logical
and empirical realities of the human value system. By coming into contact with
the alien, the protagonist Kelvin is able to conceive a reality which could not
be explained through rational tautology. His cognition of alien activity rests
entirely on his decision to abandon his home planet and his sense of humanity
with it. Kelvin abandons the egoism of humanity and embraces alien-ness which
supplants his non-rational relationship with Solaris.
The hominid
alien in Michael Bishop’s novella “Death and Designation Among the Asadi”
reimagines the creatures of high sentience and their interaction with human
explorers. The novella first appeared in the 1973 edition of the SF magazine Worlds
of If and was later included as a prequel to the novel Transfigurations
in 1979. The novel follows the field notes of Egan Chaney, a xenologist who is on
an expedition to study the sundry population of Asadi race on the alien planet,
BoskVeld. The Asadi bear a mane like a lion and seem to communicate with a
change in the colour of their eyes. The protagonist, Chaney presumes that Asadi
population have similarities with the primeval tribal groups but changes his
opinion since he cannot find any evidence of what constitutes as folk culture
in human systems. He enters the Asadi clearing with a shaved head to be akin to
a pariah in the alien culture, and later befriends The Bachelor who becomes a
proprietor in his adventure. The Asadi population gather during the day for gesticulation
which seem mundane to the protagonist and disperse to their individual stations
at dawn to continue the cyclical function next day.
“Death and
Designation” is an unsettling story since it showcases the alien race indulging
in strange practices which easily transcend to profanity. These alien forms
practice cannibalism as a right to passage in becoming a leader. Moreover,
their actions are not carried out as acts of free will, they are
psychologically connected to a bat-like homunculus who is integral in
transfiguring the Asadi male into a leader. Bishop’s novella is an appropriate
extension to Lem’s Solaris in conceptualising an alien life form which
is truly alien. The grotesque behaviour of Asadi questions the empirical tools
of anthropology through an eccentric protagonist who interpellated the alien
jurisprudence. The protagonist strives to understand the unnatural behaviour of
Asadi as their society does not function as a collaborative unit. They are
chaotic and possess no “group consciousness” which does not ascribe to the
anthropological definition of a society. Bishop’s Asadi is a transgression in
the classification of the science fictional alien from a symbolic presence
analogue to the human perceiver into a grotesque form which presents an anomaly
in the evolutionary process. The design of this grotesque alien upholds the
laws of the human world as it obstructs further contemplation on its
ontological existence. The discerning factor in the social activities of the
Asadi is amiss since it requires a preconception of indeterminacy in the
limited horizon of human imagination. The Asadi ritual on death is a continuum
of the organic transmutations in the evolution of life forms in the universe.
The
fictional alien in scientific narratives has been a pertinent aid in the
exploration of the anthropological territories of terran species. The deep-seated
interspecies differences cause tension in the conceptualised framework of the
human cosmos. The alien figure transcends from the clutches of being an
allegorical phantom to a stimulating projection of the humanist tendencies
imposed on other species. The invention of alien in SF is fundamental in
reiterating the fragmentary ideals of the existing order. It is meant to
unsettle its readers and inspire awe by evaluating the ethical modalities of
human systems. The prognosis of alien contact in SF conspicuously incorporates
varieties of ontological dilemma within the human traditions. Moreover, these
alien sentients mediate an examination in the socio-historical complexities of
the human morphology. The artistic consciousness of SF in the formation of a
new evolutionary ideal juxtaposes the desire to delimit the territorial
dominion of the infinitesimal human species in the vast universe.
Works
Cited
Batty, Clare. “A Representational Account of Olfactory Experience.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol.
40, no. 4, 2010, pp. 511-538. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41302107.
Bishop, Michael. Transfigurations.
Gollancz, 2013.
Blanchard,
Jay S. “Anthropomorphism in Beginning Readers.” The Reading Teacher,
vol. 35, no. 5, 1982, pp. 586–591. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20198047.
Bradley,
Marion Zimmer. “The Wind People.” Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories
by Women About Women, edited by
Pamela Sargent, Penguin, 1978, pp 100-118.
Campbell, John W. Who Goes There?. Gollancz, 2011.
Card, Orson S. Ender's Game, Tor.com.
2017.
Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Istvan. “Some Things We Know about Aliens.” The
Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1–23. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/20479299.
---. “On the Grotesque in Science
Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 2002, pp.
71–99. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4241045.
---. “The Book Is the Alien: On Certain and Uncertain Readings of Lem's
‘Solaris’ (Le Livre Est L'extraterrestre: à Propos De Lectures Certaines Et
Incertaines Du ‘Solaris’ De Lem).” Science Fiction Studies, vol.
12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 6–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4239658.
Chernyshova, Tatiana. “Science
Fiction and Myth Creation in Our Age.” Science Fiction Studies,
vol. 31, no. 3, 2004, pp. 345–357. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4241282.
Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More
to Follow).” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, pp.
369–418. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1344276.
Dorman,
Sonya. “When I Was Miss Dow.” Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women
About Women,
edited by Pamela Sargent, Penguin, 1978, pp 141-154.
Gomel, Elana. “Posthuman Voices: Alien Infestation and the Poetics of
Subjectivity.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2012, pp.
177–194. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.39.2.017.
---.“Gods like Men: Soviet Science Fiction and the Utopian Self.” Science
Fiction Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2004, pp. 358–377. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4241283.
---.Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the
Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds. Classics
Illustrated, 2013.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. University
of Minnesota Press, 2008.
---.
“A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, And Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,
Routledge, 1991.
Huff,
Cynthia, and Joel Haefner. “His Master’s Voice: Animalographies, Life Writing, and
The Posthuman.” Biography, vol. 35, no. 1, 2012, pp. 153–169. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/23540938.
Leane, Elizabeth. “Locating the Thing: The Antarctic as Alien Space in
John W. Campbell's ‘Who Goes There?".” Science Fiction Studies,
vol. 32, no. 2, 2005, pp. 225–239. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4241345.
Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. Faber And Faber,
2014.
Malmgren, Carl D. “Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters.” Science
Fiction Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 1993, pp. 15–33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4240211.
Pielke, Robert G. “Humans and Aliens: A Unique Relationship.” Mosaic:
A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 13, no. 3/4,
1980, pp. 29–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24780259.
Rieder, John. “Embracing the Alien: Science Fiction in Mass Culture (Le
Baiser à L'extraterrestre: La Science-Fiction Dans La Culture De Masse).” Science
Fiction Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 1982, pp. 26–37. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4239454.
Sagan, Carl. Contact: A Novel. Simon and
Schuster, 2009.
Endnotes
[1]
Clare Batty proposes an argument in her article “A Representation
Account of Olfactory Experience” that olfactory perception adds to the visual
experience of representational objects rather than remain purely sensational.
[2] Istvan Csicsery-Ronan, Jr. mentions in the article
“Some Things We Know About Aliens” that “the paradox of ‘alien’ is that it
designates a creature at the line of the near (the house of ‘uncanny’) and the
distant (the space of ‘xenopsychozoic’).
[3] The anthropologist complains in The Immense Journey,
“In modern literature on space travel I have read about cabbage men and bird
men; I have investigated the loves of lizard men and tree men, but in each case
I have labored under no illusion. I have been reading about a man, Homo
sapiens, that common earthling, clapped into an ill-fitting coat of
feathers and retaining all his basic human attributes…”.
[4]
Derrida finds the cat in his room symbolically similar to Carroll’s Cheshire
Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
[5] Donna Haraway in When Species Meet writes, “He
[Derrida] identified the key question as being not whether the cat could
“speak” but whether it is possible to know what respond means and how to
distinguish a response from a reaction, for human beings as well as for anyone
else”.
[6] Derrida refers to the phrase as “gaze of an animal” in
the lecture. He writes, “I often ask myself, just to see, who I am – and
who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze
of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time
overcoming my embarrassment”.
[7] A conversation between Kelvin and Snow in Solaris. The
two characters are giving their hypotheses on the visitors. “Perhaps it used a
formula which is not expressed in verbal terms. It may be taken from a
recording imprinted on our minds (…) ‘It’ removed the deepest, most isolates
imprint, the most ‘assimilated’ structure, without necessarily knowing what it
meant to us.”