Aliens

 

Throughout speculative literature and film, aliens have been depicted in countless ways: from pointy-eared pseudo-humans, to massive planet-sized jellyfish, and everything in between. The aliens in this week’s readings continue the trend – they are wildly varied in appearance, and completely and utterly bizarre. In Feather Tigers, they are described as soft, blue, child-sized rabbits. In The Mountains of Sunset, the Mountains of Dawn, they turn up as winged, clawed creatures, with large eyes, triangular faces, and short, patterned fur. The aliens in High Weir (or their statues, at least) appear to be bug-eyed refugees from a 1950s sci-fi film. And in Strange Wine, they are vaguely described as many-legged creatures that reside on a distant green planet.

Yet despite the wildly disparate looks of these assorted aliens, they all have something in common: their human origins are abundantly clear. In High Weir, both the stock-concept Martians and their ancient, Greek-like temples have an obvious foundation in human culture. In Feather Tigers, the rabbits function with a human being’s innate curiosity, and speak with a clarity and rationality that could easily be mistaken as human. And one wonders how the vicious, clawed progenitors of the aliens in The Mountains of Sunset ever managed to construct an interstellar vessel (my guess: creative license). None of these aliens are particularly realistic constructions – most of them act like humans dressed up in alien costumes (or, in the case of Strange Wine, humans dressed up in alien costumes, dressed up in human costumes).

But then, maybe these aliens are not supposed to be realistic in the first place (this is, after all, speculative fiction – so does reality even apply?). They are walking, talking metaphors, presenting (however dressed up) the best and worst of humanity – our foibles and insecurities, our loneliness and frustration, our optimism, our hope. Sci-fi stories are cautionary tales, allegories, parables – written by humans, reflecting human thoughts and ideas and emotions, intended for a distinctly human audience. Their messages may vary from story to story, but the underlying significance is always the same: by presenting their ideas in the realm of the extreme, the creators of these stories are able to teach us just a little more about ourselves.

That brings us to Margaret Atwood’s beautiful little Homelanding. While many writers of speculative fiction strive to make aliens seem human (but not too human, mind you), Atwood has, through the unconventional use of words and language, done the exact opposite – she has made human beings seem more alien than we could ever imagine. With a simple two-page story, Atwood has turned the conventions of the sci-fi genre inside out. She forces us to look at something old in a new way, and (as is the case with even the most bizarre science fiction) we learn something about ourselves in the process. So maybe, in the end, the story isn’t so different after all.

Samuel R. Delany, High Weir
Gene Wolfe, Feather Tigers
Vonda N. McIntyre, The Mountain of Sunset, the Mountains of Dawn
Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine
Margaret Atwood, Homelanding

The Winter Flies

The old electric clock on the mantle struck 11, and said in a loud voice “Confusion, confusion, confusion.”

 

I sat in the leather-upholstered chair in my living room. In my left hand was The Norton Anthology of Science Fiction. On the coffee table beside me was a glass of pink lemonade, weakened by melting ice but still somewhat pinker than expected. I closed the book, took a sip of the lemonade, and turned to the large black blob sitting on the couch. After a few seconds of quiet reflection, I sculpted the black form of Fritz Leiber with my eyebeams.

LUKE: Hello Leiber.

BLACK LEIBER: Hello MacNeill.

LUKE: You look well.

BLACK LEIBER: I’ve lost some blob since last we met.

(Uncomfortable silence.)

BLACK LEIBER: Well?

LUKE: Hmm.

BLACK LEIBER: What do you want?

LUKE: I’ve read “The Winter Flies.”

BLACK LEIBER: And?

LUKE: Well…

BLACK LEIBER: I suppose you want me to explain it to you?

LUKE: That’s right.

BLACK LEIBER: And why should I do that, after what happened last time?

LUKE: And what happened last time?

BLACK LEIBER: You asked me to explain Our Lady of Darkness, and right after I finished you killed me with your damned cutting rays.

LUKE: This time I won’t. I swear.

(Black Leiber considers.)

LUKE: Perhaps…

BLACK LEIBER: Yes?

LUKE: If you’ll explain the story…

BLACK LEIBER: Yes?

LUKE:  I’ll sculpt a shapely, nubile “Black Mrs. Leiber” for you…

BLACK LEIBER (salivating): Very well. It’s really quite simple, you see. The Adler family is isolated from any sense of reality, and turn inward to escape from the dissatisfaction in their lives. The father, for instance, seeks adventure, intrigue, and sexual excitement – things that impose him in real life, but which offer the potential for self-gratification in the privacy and comfort of his living room chair. The mother, meanwhile, cannot connect with her child, and thus spends her evenings drawing picture after picture of happy childhood bliss – the closest that she can get to forming any sort of bond with her son. And in the absence of any sort of meaningful relationship with his self-involved parents, the child himself seeks entertainment in the furthest reaches of the (imaginary) cosmos; unfortunately for him, space turns out to be merely an extension of his home life – lonely, empty, and vacant. Thus whether they are drawing, sculpting with imaginary eyebeams, or crafting an adventure of the mind, each member of the Adler family is escaping through their art, using their imagination.

LUKE (considering): So they’re escape artists?

BLACK LEIBER: Only in a literal and metaphoric sense.

LUKE: That’s all well and good, Fritz Leiber. But what about the ending?

BLACK LEIBER: At the end of the story, when the family is most in danger of becoming irretrievably lost to one another, they manage to pull each other back to reality, thus staving off the void – for the time being at least.

LUKE: I see. (He doesn’t.)

BLACK LEIBER: There’s some other stuff in there too, about Jung and the Anima and the Shadow and the flies – most importantly the flies, but I doubt that you would comprehend any of it, even if you spent over two and a half hours looking it up in the frigging encyclopaedia. (What a waste of a night.)

 

 

Satisfied with Black Leiber’s explanation of the story, I sent several cutting rays towards him. He promptly screamed and jumped behind the Ottoman, where he covered his head and cowered in a vaguely foetal position. From behind the sofa, Black Shakespeare (?) rose and pointed an accusatory finger towards me.

BLACK SHAKESPEARE: 

MacNeill, the hate I bear thee can afford

No better term than this: thou art a villain. 

Black Shakespeare let loose a long and oddly poetic scream, and proceeded to chase me around the room. In his hands he wielded a great black quill, and he sliced it back and forth through the air as we ran. I had the distinct impression that he wished to compose an English sonnet on the skin of my back. 

BLACK LEIBER (still cowering behind the Ottoman):
What’s wrong with me? I find my speech measured,                       
And words flow from my lips like soft sweet breath.
LUKE (still running around the room):
Dammit Shakespeare, now you have us speaking                        
In iambic pentameter – you wretch!            

Wishing to get a better look at the developing scene, Black Leiber stood up from behind the Ottoman. Black Shakespeare saw him, and immediately redoubled his screams, criticizing Leiber’s “Bastardization of the Dramatic Form.” In an uncharacteristic show of both courage and physics, Leiber pulled a sword from his mouth and began dueling with Shakepeare and his quill.  

BLACK LEIBER: 
Listen Shakespeare, and listen good:                            
Hamlet was a masterpiece, Macbeth                            
Beyond reproof; King Lear gave me shivers,                             
Romeo and Juliet made me weep;                             
And so, my dear poet, I ask you this:                             
What the hell happened with The Winter’s Tale?
(Black Shakespeare screams as before, but more loudly, and agonized.)
LUKE: Quiet Lieber! You aggravate his rage!            

After another five minutes or so, I decided that my fantasy was getting a little too ridiculous, even for the purposes of this blog. I sat down in my chair, finished my glass of lemonade, and melted Black Leiber and Black Shakespeare with my eyebeams, until they were reduced to pathetic little puddles of black sludge, creeping out of the living room to God knows where, hopefully never to be seen again. And that was that.           

The old electric clock on the mantle struck 12, and said “Good night.” 

The Chrysalids

 

A storm’s a-brewin’, a storm’s a-brewin’. It’s the Rapture, ladies and gentlemen, and everyone’s invited: a time of repentance, of penitence, of lamenting and religion and death. It’s what the more ambitious among us have always dreamed of – a chance to wipe the slate clean, to shed the past, to start fresh, to build anew. Who needs the old civilization, when the next one is new and improved and right around the corner?

In The Chrysalids, we are presented with a post-apocalyptic society based on purity and moral uprightness. The atomic purging of the Tribulation has wiped out a bloated and excessive civilization, leaving behind a blank (if somewhat irradiated) slate for mankind to start again. The trouble with Tribulation is that it hasn’t just transformed the physical landscape, it has left a far worse mutation in its wake – the perverted morals and standards that order a little wedge of the world called Labrador. 

Indeed, a storm is brewing. Or maybe just a Strorm. As David rebels against his traditional religious upbringing, he brings the novel’s heavy-handed condemnation of religion to the forefront. Yet is scientific enlightenment really any better? The “advanced” humans of Sealand (or Zealand; this is, after all, a book about mutation, so why should language be immune) kill at a whim, a regrettable but “ultimately necessary” act in the name of science. For such a sophisticated people, their condescension wears a bit thick. The Labradoreans, at least, have the pity to let their genetic aberrations live.

Over the past several years, I’ve read a broad smattering of John Wyndham’s work: The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955), The Midwich Cuckoos (1957, filmed as the fantastic Village of the Damned in 1960, with a fantastically unfantastic remake in 1995), Trouble with Lichen (1960), and Chocky (1968). Wyndam’s trademarks are distinctive and unmistakable. A dry English sensibility; everyday characters coping with extraordinary circumstances; the fall of order and civilization as-we-know-it. His writing is quaint, or deceptively so – by dressing down his radical ideas, Wyndham imbues them with the appearance of everyday plausibility. There is little sense of the spectacular in Wyndham’s world – whether dealing with telepathic children or carnivorous plants, his work bears the distinctive mark of rationality. It is speculative fiction, presented in the most logical way possible.