Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  First Contact

  The alien encounter is at the heart of most science fiction, and the encounter’s most typical expression is the “first contact” story. The first contact story is frequently driven by anxiety, paranoia, and fear, mostly of the unknown: This is grippingly captured in the classic story by Murray Leinster which coined the now familiar SF phrase. The Earthship Llanvabon and an alien spaceship surprise one another in the Crab Nebula. Both ships have come to the nebula to study it, but are now faced with a dilemma: is the other ship hostile or friendly? “The first contact of humanity with an alien race,” the skipper of the Llanvabon reflects,

  was a situation which had been foreseen in many fashions, but never one quite so hopeless of solution as this. A solitary Earth-ship and a solitary alien, meeting in a nebula which must be remote from the home planet of each. They might wish peace, but the line of conduct which best prepared a treacherous attack was just the seeming of friendliness. Failure to be suspicious might doom the human race—and a peaceful exchange of the fruits of civilization would be the greatest benefit imaginable. Any mistake would be irreparable, but a failure to be on guard would be fatal. (89)

  Each race is understandably cautious, but also curious. After some tentative communications in which one of the Llanvabon’s crew, Tommy Dorst (who provides the story’s central point of view) determines that the aliens are not quite as different as their appearances suggest, the two crews come to a creative solution to their quandary: switch ships. In that way, each race can learn much about the other, being sure to remove any information that would reveal the locations of their homes, and should the two “alien” groups decide to continue communications, they will return after an agreed upon time to the neutral Crab Nebula.

  Leinster’s own neutral treatment of the intense first contact, recognizing the shared concerns of each race and emphasizing the similarities between them, is sharply contrasted by the more common presentation of first contact, in which the suspicion of one group (and sometimes both) is soon verified. While Leinster’s treatment is rather atypical of this story type, his story tells the reader much the same that the frequent portrayal of aliens as bloodthirsty menaces does: Fear of the unknown continues to pervade. However, not every first contact is doomed to violence or failure, as long as cooler heads prevail. If they do not, humanity may miss out on unimaginable gifts, like “immortality under the stars,” as the aliens in Frank Belknap Long’s “Invasion” reveal to Earth after humanity has failed to show trust and openness to their automaton representative (727).

  Bug-Eyed Monsters and Little Green Men

  Upon shedding his “Edgar suit” that has allowed him to pass as human, the alien villain of the 1997 science fiction comedy Men in Black reveals his true form: a huge cockroach, complete with drooling mandibles. In his two forms, the alien, known simply as the “Bug,” represents the two most typical representations of the alien in science fiction, both on screen and on the page: the humanoid and the non-humanoid (typically either reptilian or insectlike). While non-humanoid aliens can, and do, take on other forms, such as the Golans in Leslie Stone’s “The Conquest of Gola”—circular bodies with hand and foot pads, covered in golden coats, able to take in food and drink through any part of the body—the reptilian and insect bodies frequently assigned to the non-humanoid alien serves a dual purpose: to present the Other in a somewhat familiar form, and, by casting them as reptiles or enormous bugs, the non-humanoid alien is immediately positioned as, at the very least, physically inferior to humanity, even if their technology is not. This type of alien flourished particularly during what is considered the “Golden Age” of science fiction (roughly the 1930s to the 1950s) in the form of pulp magazine stories, and gained a rather endearing name: the bug-eyed monster. With the word “monster” there was no question what the motives of this kind of alien were, and from that point on, bug-eyed monsters (or BEMs) have regularly been depicted as hostile aliens, with few exceptions (such as the bug-eyed, but hardly monstrous E.T.).

  Being humanoid, however, has never guaranteed benevolent purpose. The alien pantheon of the various Star Trek television series and films abound with hostile humanoid aliens, perhaps the most terrifying being the cybernetic humanoids known as the Borg. Likewise, while “little green men” are sometimes the stuff of abduction nightmares and twisted governmental cover-up plots (like the central plotline of The X-Files), they are also the incredibly helpful Asgaard of Stargate: SG-1, or the ethereal beings of James Cameron’s 1989 film The Abyss, who, in an alternate version of the film’s ending, choose to spare humanity based on the self-sacrifice of one of the main characters. What this brief exercise shows, then, is that physical form is never a guarantee of an alien’s intent, and thus it is more useful to focus on that intent and what it means for humanity.

  As such, the peacebringer/peacekeeper alien, like those depicted in the classic science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, represents quite simply mankind’s desire for peace, a desire that some aliens, such as those in Damon Knight’s classic short story “To Serve Man,” exploit to their own ends. Under the auspices of the peacebringer alien, the Kanamit are actually an example of one of the sub-types of the hostile alien: the invasion force, the most popular representation of alien life. In Knight’s story invasion is presented as peace: the Kanamit offer humanity longer, healthier lives, unlimited power, and a device that protects countries from weapons, such as missiles and bombs. What a few humans discover to their great horror, however, is that the Kanamit are merely protecting their newfound food source: humanity itself. The Kanamit’s outward benevolence belies their malevolent intent, thus making them on some level more terrifying than the outwardly hostile alien, such as the Martians in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.

  At its root, the threat that hostile aliens pose speaks to mankind’s deep fears of powerlessness and mortality, just as the promise of a peaceful future represented by friendly aliens reflects our wish that the kinder side of the human spirit will one day be triumphant. That the former can be found more readily in science fiction than the latter suggests several possible, equally plausible conclusions about the state of humanity. First, mankind’s fear of the other, here on in earth and beyond, remains strong. Second, mankind’s visions of interstellar interaction, and the future such interaction may be bring, is based in violence and suspicion, not unlike how mankind’s dealings with itself continue to play themselves out. And when mankind is the hostile alien, as in the 2009 film Avatar, that fear of difference is used as a rationale for suppression and preemptive aggression, as well as economic and physical gain.

  There are, however, aliens that do not fit into either category: hostile or friendly. Take, for example, the strange oceanic planet Solaris, from Stanislaw Lem’s novel of the same name. Solaris is both an alien world and a sentient being. Because communication with the planet has yielded no discernible sense of the planet’s motives or intent, and there has been no clearly hostile or benign actions on the part of the planet, Solaris is an alien outside of the traditional dichotomy, and as such serves as an uncomfortable reminder that mankind’s attempts to know and quantify the other has its limits. For the humans in Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild,” the intent of the aliens, the Tlic, a race of large, sentient insects, is clear: they desperately need the Terrans, specifically males, in order to reproduce. Humans are kept on a “Preserve;” these humans are those who have been “adopted” by a Tlic family for reproductive purposes. In exchange, the humans who have come to the Tlic homeworld to escape the violence of Earth are given homes and longer lives. This seemingly symbiotic relationship is hardly ideal, however: some of the humans resent the Tlic and the treatment of humans as little more than animals, while the Tlic are ever fearful of the humans revolting, as such an act could mean the end of the Tlic race. Butler’s story raises a very difficult question about alien motives and the alien encounter: what if one’s very survival is dependent on the other, but must be achie
ved through less than appealing methods? Not surprisingly, when it is difficult to discern a clear motive on the part of an alien, such as the “prawns” in the 2009 film District 9, humanity invariably chooses to believe that the aliens are a threat; this is even true of the oddly cuddly E.T., whose only desire, like the prawns, is to go home. Neither alien has any expressed interest in man, but mankind’s interest in them and what dangers (real or imagined) they pose dictates in turn how the aliens are defined and treated.

  Strange New (and Old) Worlds

  But what of alien worlds? How do they function both within the allegorical paradigm as well as outside of it? To start, let us consider Earth as an alien world. Early science fiction, such as Jules Vernes’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and H. G. Wells’s Time Machine, locate the alien on Earth. For Vernes, the “alien” is a remnant of humanity’s prehistoric past, a massive twelve-foot tall half-human, half ape man living far beneath the Earth’s surface. In The Time Machine, the “alien” is mankind’s far-distant future: after millennia of evolution, humanity has separated into two races—the Eloi, physically smaller and intellectually inferior to their ancestors, and the subterranean Morlocks, covered in gray fur and built along the lines of apes. As Wells’s story progresses, it becomes abundantly clear that rather than evolve, humanity has degenerated. What both stories do, though, is situate the “alien within” far away, whether in the past or a future so far away it is almost impossible to contemplate, let alone be truly afraid of what is to come.

  One of the most famous alien worlds has to be Mars, which occupies a special place in the science fiction imagination, serving as both setting to stories of, for example, intergalactic imperialism (War of the Worlds), swashbuckling adventure (the planetary romance series by Edgar Rice Burroughs about Barsoom, or Mars), or corporate greed (the 1990 film Total Recall), and the planet itself offering humanity a new home (as in The Martian Chronicles, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, and the 2000 film Red Planet). The 2000 film Mission to Mars goes even further: the explorers discover that the ancient inhabitants of Mars long ago seeded the Earth, thus making possible the development of organic life on the planet. In essence, humans are the “children” of Mars. No other alien world in the science fiction pantheon offers so much hope, such tantalizing possibility. Indeed, science fiction depictions of Mars have long since moved away from the “Mars as threat” focus to more nuanced treatments that revolve around considerations of what Mars may mean for Earth’s future, a focus echoed and supported by scientific research on the planet itself.

  Let us turn, then, to one such example of Mars as Earth’s future. In the haunting last story of The Martian Chronicles, “The Million-Year Picnic,” a young family, refugees from Earth’s last atomic war, explore their new home. The year is 2026, and Mars has known close to thirty years of Terran exploration, which has rendered the Martian population and culture extinct. The family visits several cities as they seek out a place to call home, quickly rejecting the second city because it was a human settlement, and choosing the sixth, a beautiful Martian city still largely intact. Having already blown up the rocket they used to reach Mars, the father then proceeds to burn Earth documents—government bonds, legal documents, scientific periodicals—and lastly, a map of the Earth, forever severing their bonds to Earth, whose “way of life proved wrong and [which] strangled itself with its own hands” (180). Instead, the father tells his sons, they will, along with the other refugees on Mars, “turn away from all that on Earth and strike out a new line” (180). Having promised his children that he would show them the Martians they so eagerly wish to meet, he takes his family to a silent Martian canal, and bids them look down, where they see their own reflections looking back at them.

  This poignant end to the Chronicles, a collection of short stories in which Bradbury not only delves into anxieties about atomic annihilation, but America’s history of racial tension, as well as the consequences of unthinking colonization, all reflect the deeply allegorical function of the text itself and the planet Mars. At once a setting for ruminations about the high costs of imperialism for both the colonizer and the colonized, Mars is also that second chance, perhaps last chance for humanity to get it right.

  Other worlds, of course, have captured the science fiction imagination. Most tend to represent some topographical and/or meteorological extreme of Earth itself, from the frozen planet aptly named “Winter” in Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness to the desert planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s 1965 masterpiece Dune. Even the planet Solaris is modeled after Earth—an ocean planet—but its difference resides not only in the material of the ocean (rather than water, the liquid covering, indeed, comprising the planet itself, is a colloidal substance), but the fact that the planet itself is the alien: It is sapient. By literally presenting a planet as the alien, Stanislaw Lem further intensifies the stakes of the alien encounter: There is no way to productively communicate with the alien planet, perhaps because the planet is not interested in communication, or mankind lacks the necessary development to communicate with such a vast and strange intelligence. Instead, mankind must guess at the planet’s motives (indeed, if Solaris even has motives), and like the ever shifting surface of the planet itself, attempts to categorize the planet remain hollow shows, neither advancing knowledge of the planet nor fully dispelling previous theories.

  As stages for mankind’s economic, ecological, racial, and ideological dramas, the alien world, like the alien itself, is as much a reflection of humanity’s imagination and desires as it is a reflection of its failings, both to imagine beyond those desires, and to see the alien and his/her world as more than just mere extensions of ourselves. It is, finally, the possibilities that both represent, that there is more “out there”—new worlds, new species, new ideas—that the endeavor to know ourselves is always a worthy one, if flawed at times in its methods, which continue to draw us into the crowded multiplexes and to crack open that book. Somehow, as we always knew, they are us, and we are them.

  Works Cited

  Bradbury, Ray. “The Million-Year Picnic.” The Martian Chronicles. The Grand Master Editions. New York: Bantam, 1979. 172–81.

  Butler, Octavia. “Bloodchild.” Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 1996.

  Jones, Gwyneth. “The Icons of Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 163–173.

  Knight, Damon. “To Serve Man.” The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Garyn G. Roberts. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001. 140-45.

  Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1969.

  Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1970.

  Lipschultz, Ronnie D. “Aliens, Alien Nations, and Alienation in American Political Economy and Popular Culture.” To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links Between Science Fiction and World Politics. Ed. Jutta Weldes. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 79–98.

  Stone, Leslie. “The Conquest of Gola.” The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Garyn G. Roberts. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001. 515–24.

  Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. London: J.M. Dent/Everyman, 1993.

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  Ericka Hoagland is an assistant professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University where she teaches classes on world literature, travel writing, science fiction, and postcolonial literature and theory. She co-edited, with Reema Sarwal, the 2010 anthology of critical essays Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the Third World published by McFarland, and has contributed pieces to Greenwood’s Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2008), and Gender and Sexuality in African Literature and Film (Africa World Press 2007).

  RICHARD MATHESON

  (1926– )

  While his horror-edged science fiction has been overshadowed by his enormous succ
ess in writing for television and films, Richard Matheson’s fiction has had a significant influence on the field as well. And it continues to have an influence today: his most recent novel, Other Kingdoms (2011), was written more than sixty years after this “Born of Man and Woman,” which was Matheson’s first published story.

  Matheson was born in New Jersey and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Norwegian immigrants. His father installed floors for a living, but Matheson showed early signs of a writing career, including stories and poems published in the Brooklyn Eagle. After serving as an infantryman in World War II, Matheson earned a BA in journalism from the University of Missouri. The next year, “Born of Man and Woman” appeared in F&SF, followed by dozens of stories over the next two decades. His first novel, Someone Is Bleeding, was published in 1953.

  In 1951, Matheson moved to California, where he has lived and worked ever since, and found astonishing success both as a screenwriter and as the author of books and stories that were readily adapted to film. His 1954 novel I Am Legend was filmed as The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007). The Shrinking Man (1956) was filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, winning Matheson a Hugo Award. Other Matheson novels turned into notable films include Stir of Echoes (1958), Hell House (1971, as The Legend of Hell House), Bid Time Return (1975, as Somewhere in Time), and What Dreams May Come (1978). Three of his short stories were filmed together as Trilogy of Terror (1975), and short story “Button, Button” was filmed as The Box in 2009 (after being previously adapted for a 1986 episode of The Twilight Zone).