Aliens

Elana Gomel and Simon Bacon

Introduction

The possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe is not a new concept. Briefly entertained by Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century, the idea came into its own in the Age of Enlightenment, when the grasp of Christian theology on the intellectual life of the West weakened.¹ Initially, however, it was used as a satirical device rather than a serious speculation on the possibility of a genuinely different form of intelligence. Voltaire, in “Le Micromégas” (1752), pokes fun at human follies by describing them through the eyes of a giant visitor from Sirius. Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835), hoaxes his gullible audience by a supposedly genuine manuscript of a journey to the Moon which has intelligent inhabitants. But neither Voltaire nor Poe can be seen as the true precursors of the trope of the alien in contemporary science fiction (SF). This honour belongs to H. G. Wells.

Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) is not just a literary masterpiece, grimly foreshadowing the horrors of the century to come, from poison gas to refugee crises. It is also the first novel to entertain the possibility of nonhuman entities which are neither demonic nor divine but, as the opening lines of the novel put it, “intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own” (Wells 1978: 3). This naturalisation of radical alterity constitutes the foundational insight of SF, along with the concept of defamiliarisation, in which human nature is explored through alien eyes: “[A]‌s men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water” (ibid). The alien was born: different from humanity and yet alike in its materiality; more powerful than humans but equally subject to the laws of nature; intelligent but not in the same way we are. Neither a spirit nor a beast, the alien joined the cultural vocabulary of (post)modernity as a quasi-scientific metaphor of alterity.

Throughout the last century, aliens competed with vampires and zombies for the title of popular culture’s most popular monster. However, as opposed to the supernatural origin of the undead, aliens had the imprimatur of science, strengthened by the persistent attempts to prove their actual existence. The subsequent evolution of aliens generated a new vocabulary of collective fears and desires. Aliens became the staple of SF but also spread into films and TV shows and eventually became the focus of quasi-religious cults that managed to combine the cosmic Darwinism of Wells with a slew of New Age beliefs.

In the science fiction of the so-called Golden Age (roughly between the 1920s to the 1950s), aliens ran the gamut from the cruel invaders as in John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953), to the benevolent visitors eager to save humanity from itself, as in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The Cold War paranoia generated the persistent trope of alien possession, epitomised by John Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1954) and the series of movies based on the novel.² Invisible and implacable, these alien possessors took over human bodies and minds, becoming a trope for the ideological contamination by communism. In the oeuvre of H. P. Lovecraft, monstrous alien gods merged with Gothic narrative conventions to create the sub-genre of “cosmic horror” (and not incidentally, articulate their creator’s racial anxieties).

While these disembodied and/or malevolent entities skirted close to the supernatural terror of ghosts and demons, another cultural trend brought back the materiality of aliens with a vengeance. The 1947 brash of the pilot Kenneth Arnold with what was then termed “flying saucers” has generated an immense subculture of supposed alien encounters of first, second, third and so-on kinds, which bridged the gap between reality and fiction, belief and make-believe, and science and religion.³ While UFO sightings have somewhat abated with the widespread use of mobile phones (as alien spacecraft apparently does not like being captured on camera), the alien subculture is not only alive and well but has also spread outside the Anglo-American world, becoming a truly global phenomenon. In American Cosmic (2019), D. W. Pasulka, a scholar of religion, describes how the Phenomenon, as communication of supposed alien entities is known today, has become intertwined with the techno-culture of the Silicon Valley, inflecting (or infecting) global techno-trends, such as biotechnology or generative AI.

In the 1980s and 1990s, UFO cults, research groups, conventions, sightings and discussions proliferated even before the Internet and aliens continued to be a dominant topos in SF. However, their representation mutated to reflect the clashing cultural and political trends of the period. It was especially obvious in the sharp divergence between humanoid and non-humanoid aliens and their contrasting cultural functions,

On the one hand, the unparalleled commercial success of Star Trek and Star Wars introduced the concept of aliens to a wide public beyond the relatively narrow science fiction “ghetto”. These aliens, however, were basically humans in a not-so-elaborate disguise. Star Trek and Star Wars aliens, whether warlike Klingons or cuddly Ewoks, were instantly understandable. They were user-friendly in the sense of not taxing their audiences with a sort of philosophical or ethical issues raised by The War of the Worlds, whose Martians remain an enigma throughout the novel. Instead of defamiliarisation, cinematic aliens offered the comfort of familiarity. Soviet science fiction had its own version of cosmic anthropocentrism, insisting that the concept of non-humanoid aliens was a capitalist ploy.

On the other hand, however, as science fiction became more mature and sophisticated, its representation of aliens shifted toward a more challenging exploration of radical alterity. Epitomised by the oeuvre of the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, the author of Solaris (1961) and Fiasco (1986), the nonhuman aliens explore the limits of what Nietzsche called “human, all too human”. In contemporary science fiction by such writers as Ted Chiang, Cixin Liu and Jeff Vandermeer, aliens epitomise the encounter with the obdurate and incommunicative presence of what the philosopher of the Anthropocene Timothy Morton called “hyperobjects”: material forces outside humanity’s power or comprehension.

A separate strand in (particularly cinematic) science fiction has been successfully mining the invasion scenario. While in the 1950s invasion movies, the aliens often stood for the Soviets, this easy allegory has shifted after the end of the Cold War into a more diffuse expression of political paranoia. Films such as The Independence Day (1996), Skyline (2010) and Edge of Tomorrow (2014) perform the restorative work of shoring up the battered military pride of the US, functioning almost like a Freudian wish-fulfilling dreams for a traumatised nation. The Alien franchise (1979–today), on the other hand, harkens back to Lovecraftian cosmic horror to explore the intersection of xenophobia, misogyny and fear.

But aliens today are not limited to literary science fiction or movies. Ubiquitous in video games, online forums, specialised Facebook groups, and even cults, aliens have become a cultural force unparalleled by any other imaginary monster. Although there is no conclusive proof that intelligent life exists outside our planet, aliens are everywhere, from Hollywood blockbusters to academic volumes. Our culture is saturated by their absence.

In July 2022, the US Defense Department created a special task force to analyse UAPs that “could potentially pose a threat to US national security”, a move enthusiastically greeted by many current and former lawmakers. UAPs are a more official-sounding name for UFOs; UAP stands for “unidentified aerial phenomena”.⁴ The task force has not come up with any conclusive proof of alien existence, but this is hardly necessary. The consensus that aliens exist and have been visiting our planet is probably the only point of agreement in the polarised field of American politics and culture. According to Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans believe intelligent aliens exist and a smaller majority are convinced that they have been flying around in the recently re-christened UAPs.⁵

A cultural and social phenomenon of such magnitude deserves scholarly attention, and this one has certainly had it. However, all-too-often the discussion of aliens deviates into the fields of social psychology and/or conspiracy studies. From the 1998 classic study by Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, to the recent book by David Robertson, UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age: Millennial Conspiracism (2016), aliens are treated as populating the same cultural netherworld as QAnon and the New World Order.

But aliens are different from other conspiracy theories in several important respects. First, separate from the community of UFO true believers, aliens are an important topos in science fiction which, by definition, is fiction. In other words, aliens straddle the all-important boundary between fact and make-belief, the referential and the ludic, truth and fictionality. As opposed to clearly imaginary monsters, such as zombies and vampires, aliens at least have the possibility of physical existence. But on the other hand, they often function much like other monsters: as metaphors of alterity, representations of social, cultural or racial difference, ciphers of the Other.

Second, aliens have an intellectual cachet missing from, say, Pizzagate.⁶ The possibility of intelligent life somewhere in the Universe is a serious scientific issue, especially prominent in light of the recent discoveries of exoplanets. Project SETI has been looking for signs of intelligent life in the cosmos for decades and, while the search has proven fruitless so far, the SETI Institute, endorsed by prominent scientists such as the late Carl Sagan, is quite different from the conspiratorial subcultures bubbling up on the internet.⁷

And finally, aliens pose complex philosophical and ethical questions beyond the reach of conspiracy theories. As one of us argued in her book on the topic, aliens in SF often act as a pretext for exploring “the ontological, epistemological and especially ethical issues raised by the possibility of the existence of alien intelligence” (Gomel 2012: 3). Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris (1961) or Denis Villeneuve’s movie Arrival (2016) are profound challenges to human complacency and anthropocentrism, not UFO mongering.

All these factors combine to give aliens a unique place in the contemporary popular-culture ecosystem. They bridge the gap between reason and irrationality; science and suspicion; fact and fiction; and “high” and “low”. Like zombies and vampires, aliens are often used as representations of culture’s hidden fears and repressed desires. But they can also be deployed as a rebuke to the anthropocentric hierarchies and a challenge to human-centred thinking in the age of the Anthropocene. Like ghosts and demons, aliens can be creatures of malevolent evil. But they can also be a conduit for quasi-religious transcendence. While UFO “abductees” are paralysed by the fear of aliens showing up in their bedrooms, SETI scientists successfully solicit multi-million-dollar donations for issuing an invitation for aliens to visit. No other cultural icon is as versatile, polysemic, multifaceted and resistant to analysis as the alien.⁸

Moreover, aliens are one of the most prominent hallmarks of globalism. While originally UFOs seemed to be exclusively an Anglo-American phenomenon, they quickly caught on in the USSR, which had its own tradition of quasi-mystical alien speculations epitomised by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), one of the founders of the Soviet aerospace industry and a space visionary. Soviet and Eastern European science fiction engaged with alien contact in ways significantly different from their Western counterparts, focusing either on the communication barrier between human and nonhuman (the Strugatsky brothers, Stanislaw Lem) or on the anthropomorphic similarity between various alien societies as specified by orthodox Marxism (Ivan Efremov).

Today, alien encounters are central to global science fiction. Afrofuturism engages with the problematic of the Other in ways informed by the historical experience of colonialism (Nnedi Okorafor). Aliens also feature in Indian, Chinese, Greek, Russian and Egyptian SF, creating a polysemic and multilingual field of cultural tensions and global dialogue.

In this Companion, we want to reflect this polysemy, while venturing beyond the Anglocentric focus of most other studies of alien culture. Such studies, as we have already indicated, either focus on the conspiratorial mindset of UFO believers or on the subset of science fiction dealing with alien contact. Both, however, are limited either in their methodological framework or in the corpus. In this Companion, we want to offer a panoramic view of the alien phenomenon across the globe. This volume ranges from Star Wars to religious cults; from conspiracy theories to deep-space explorations; from video games to literary masterpieces. It addresses various aspects of the alien phenomenon through a range of representative texts. The Companion is unique in its global reach, with articles referencing the alien phenomenon in China, India, Latin America and the Middle East, just as it is unique in tracing similarities and differences in the use of aliens across media: from literary texts to video games to movies.

Such a broad focus necessarily limits what can be covered. The reader may be surprised that some well-known, even classic, texts of alien encounters, such as Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke or even H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, are not covered in any detail. Precisely because these texts are so famous, they have accrued a significant body of criticism. We have included a list of Recommended Reading that comprises both primary texts (novels and movies) and theoretical explorations of both specific SF novels and of alien culture in general. This list indicates additional areas of inquiry and offers the reader an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the issues raised by our contributors. We believe that bringing new texts to the attention of the academic audience is more important than engaging with the familiar corpus of alien-encounter science fiction.