Science fiction: In the mirror of the aliens

“The maximally alien” – that’s what Noah Sproß and Andreas Anton call the alien characters in science fiction stories, who are described in as different a way as can be imagined. But since they were invented by humans, these creatures may not be so strange after all. Perhaps they are more like projection surfaces of ourselves and what moves us deep inside. The two sociologists from Freiburg see them as “reflections of social discourses, collective emotions and self-descriptions”. Fears and hopes typical of the time manifest themselves in the aliens.

Sprout and Anton examined the depictions of aliens in nine science fiction classics from 1898 to 1985. They dissected the stories and counted how the aliens were portrayed narratively and how the characters in the novel responded to them emotionally. The two researchers also analyzed the historical and cultural context of the works. In this way, they extracted three basic types of aliens.

1. Enemy conquerors

Here we are dealing with technically superior intelligences, threatening and “morally decoupled”. Human concepts of good and evil do not apply to them. “These creatures,” say Spross and Anton, “show an extraordinarily aggressive, hostile and colonialist attitude towards people.” Humanity is threatened with subjugation, enslavement or worse.

Enemy conquerors of this sort enter HG Wells’ 1898 The War of the Worlds the stage. There are man-eating tentacle creatures who, having barely landed in Victorian England, set out on a global campaign of destruction with their huge, spider-like fighting machines. They see people more as a crowd than as a counterpart; Communication is pointless, not to mention resistance.

In Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers from 1959, the Cold War is the historical backdrop. The “highly militarized” humanity is waging a defensive battle against the “bugs”, a collectivist species in which the individual counts for nothing – greetings from the Soviet Union.

If Heinlein celebrates soldierly virtues and military preparedness, Joe Haldemans does The Forever Warpublished in 1974, is a kind of counter-proposal: the “Taurians,” against whom humans have been waging war for a whopping 1,100 years, are “not misanthropic per se,” but “beings with strange motives and ways of thinking.” Misunderstandings and failures in communication characterize the conflict. “Heavily influenced by his experiences in the Vietnam War, Haldeman addresses the alienation and loss of identity that arise from prolonged warfare.”

Fear and “existential shock” are the predominant emotions in all stories in this category. With Wells the fear is paralyzing, with Heinlein it is overcome with determination, and with Haldeman that fear is fueled less by the aliens themselves than by the logic of the arms race.

2. Superior Fiends

“Cosmic horror” reigns in this category because the beings who appear here are not only technically superior to humanity, but above all biologically. They are also “radically alien” in their appearance. They are extremely resilient, able to survive in almost any environment. “They threaten Homo sapiens’ dominant position.” And last but not least, they threaten him physically, like a predator does its prey.

In HP Lovecraft’s story The Call of Cthulhu (1928), the horror comes from an unimaginably ancient being with properties “beyond human comprehension” who “thinks in cosmic dimensions” and therefore doesn’t give a damn about human concerns. In Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell (1938), a creature causes panic and paranoia that perfectly imitates everyone who crosses its path, physically and psychologically. In which was filmed in multiple sequels Alien by Alan Dean Foster (1979), humanity is faced with almost invulnerable killer creatures that use our bodies to lay eggs.

Sproß and Anton see the background of this martial genre in a social Darwinist reading of the theory of evolution, which flourished horribly in the 20th century. In Alien The horror vision is enriched with the new possibilities of genetic “optimization”. The dominant emotion is again fear, coupled with deep insecurity. According to the two sociologists, this narrative conveys “the feeling of human insignificance in the face of the immensity – and in a double sense, inhumanity – of the universe.”

3. Benevolent leaders

These benevolent and well-disposed beings are a kind of counter-model to the biological fighting machines of the second category. They derive their superiority from their technical dominance, but above all from their moral integrity and their spiritual wisdom.

In Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953), the “Overlords” bring peace and prosperity to divided humanity and benevolently pull the strings in the background until their protégés are ready for transformation to greater things. Also in Arthur C. Clarke’s A Space Odyssey (1968), a superior civilization controls human development via mysterious monoliths. And in Contact by Carl Sagan (1985), the aliens communicate with people from a distance and lead them to new spiritual insights – greetings from the New Age zeitgeist of the eighties, right up to the dubious blessing of “transhumanism”. The guiding emotions of these stories of redemption are hope and transcendence.

But the two researchers identified another emotion across all three categories and in all nine stories: shame, fueled by a “feeling of inadequacy”. By imagining the aliens as all-around superior, we as humans become aware of our limitations: our weakness, fragility, mortality; the limits of our knowledge and cognitive capacity. According to Sproß and Anton, it is “man’s shame in the face of himself”.

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