Introduction Gregory Benford There is probably no theme in science fiction more fundamental than the alien. The genre reeks of the desire to embrace the strange, exotic, and unfathomable nature of the future. Often, the science in SF represents knowledge—exploring and controlling and semisafe. Aliens balance this desire for certainty with the irreducible unknown. A lot of the tension in SF arises between such hard certainties and the enduring, atmospheric mysteries. And while science is quite odd and different to many, it is usually used simply as a reassuring conveyor belt that hauls the alien on stage. By alien I don’t merely mean the familiar ground of alienation that modern lit- erature has made its theme song. Once the province of intellectuals, alienation is now supermarket stuff. Even MTV knows how commonly we’re distanced and estranged from the modern state, or from our relatives, or from the welter of cul- tural crosscurrents of our times. Alienation has a spectrum. It can verge into the fantastic simply by being over- drawn, as in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which describes a man who wakes up one morning as an enormous insect. Only one step beyond is Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban, in which a frog-man simply steps into a kitchen, with minimal differ- ences from ordinary humans. He is a puppet representing the “good male” and can be read as a figment of the protagonist’s imagination. The novella isn’t about aliens it’s a parable of female angst. We don’t describe our neighbors as alien just because they drive a Chevy and we have a Renault. What SF does intentionally, abandoning lesser uses to the mainstream, is to take us to the extremes of alienness. That, I think, is what makes it interesting. I deplore the Star Trek view, in which aliens turn out to be benign if you simply talk to them kindly this fits into a larger program of some SF, in which “friendly alien” isn’t seen for the inherent contradiction it is. Friendliness is a human cate- gory. Describing aliens that way robs them of their true nature, domesticates the strange. Yet much early SF was permeated with the assumption that aliens had to be like us. In Aelita, or The Decline of Mars by Alexei Tolstoi (1922), the intrepid Soviet explorers decide even before landing that Martians must necessarily be manlike, for “everywhere life appears, and over life everywhere man-like forms are supreme: it would be impossible to create an animal more perfect than man—the
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