The New Aliens of Science Fiction

by Nicola Griffith

This essay originally appeared in Nebula Awards 30 in May 1996.

American and British science fiction reflects American and British culture. At any given moment, if we want to know which particular group of people is disturbing the rest of society, all we have to do is take a look at the kind of alien with which the genre is currently preoccupied. Science fiction has always been concerned with exploring the Alien, the Not Self, the Other. Let me take you on a tour of the history of that alien, show you the broad trends (there will always be the occasional writer, like Lem, who puts a spike in my nice neat theories, sigh), and then come back to what SF considers The Alien today. The first aliens of pulp SF were slimy bug-eyed monsters from the nether regions of the solar system. Nothing like us, supposedly, except they were always recognizably and rather adolescently male: they were war leaders, they had no kids hanging around to spoil the fun, and (if the cover illustrations of the pulps are to be believed) they often abducted good looking and scantily clad human women for nefarious purposes. In the thirties and forties, during the grim years of the depression and just before the second world war, the green slime monsters turned into androids and robots. These metal men (some of these robots had female names, but we weren't fooled) were smooth, emotionless and rather, well, Teutonic. Then came the McCarthy era. In keeping with the paranoia of the time, aliens became those who looked like us, who pretended to be us in order to take over the world. Aliens were vegetable beings grown in pods in the back garden who took the place of Mom and Dad; or amoeboid extra-terrestrials who rode invisibly on the backs of their unsuspecting hosts. And then came the sixties. During this era of pot and peace we felt a bit more kindly disposed towards the alien. In John Wyndham's THE CHRYSALIDS, post-holocaust radiation led to minor mutations such as six toes, or telepathy. Those who deviated from the norm, even those who looked normal--perhaps especially those who looked normal--were hunted down and killed. The interesting thing about THE CHRYSALIDS, of course, is that the story is told from the viewpoint of a mutant. As far as the reader's sympathies were concerned, there was no longer that clear dividing line between *Us*, humanity, and *Them*, the monstrous enemy. For the first time, we were being asked to imagine ourselves as and to identify with The Other. During the civil rights marches, while our ears rang with Martin Luther King's dream, science fiction was telling us that The Other was human, too. The idea of alieness had suddenly become one of degree. The next tentative step down that road was the portrayal of aliens who were normal humans, biologically speaking, but who were raised by aliens and therefore not quite Establishment. If you're raised by weirdos and foreigners, where do your sympathies lie? A prime example comes from Heinlein: Valentine Smith, the STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. (In Hollywood, a similar process was occurring in another genre, Westerns. Take for example all those films where a pregnant white woman is abducted by Apache. Mother dies in childbirth. White boychild grows up behaving and believing in himself as Apache...at least until the cavalry come along and tell him, hell no, he's a *real* man, not a savage.) So. By the sixties our aliens had progressed from green slimy *Non*-Mankind, to robotic *Fake*-Mankind, to the muties and pod-people of *Twisted*-Mankind. They were now hovering on the fulcrum between maybe-maybe-not Mankind. Where were the women? In early SF, female characters served as the scientist's ignorant girlfriend, or the hero's reward for a job well done. By the fifties and sixties, women were allowed to be heroic as long as they did it in their own sphere--courageous mothers defending their children, or human housewives who set up coffeeklatches with alien housewives thereby achieving world peace. Most of these women (not all, of course--remember, I'm discussing broad trends only) were shining fictional examples of socialization. But in the 1960s, in the real world, women began to protest this socialization. We stood up and said: "That's *not* who we are!" And so male SF writers, a bit puzzled, but game for the challenge, turned to an examination of who women might be. This examination manifested itself largely through writings about women-only societies: the "sex-battle texts," to use Russ's term. The women in these books were not fully human. We were portrayed as being bereft of sexual feeling; or we had plenty of sexual feeling but were frustrated and embittered by having no men to express those feelings with; we did not understand Art; we did not understand science and so were invariably technologically backward. Women-only societies were often portrayed as static, hierarchical and insect-like (see, for example, Wyndham's CONSIDER HER WAYS). This kind of fiction operated very much out of traditional cultural assumptions--often nothing more than a reversal of male/female roles. The female characters were only alien because they weren't "proper" women. In the late sixties and early seventies, women writers took over the job of talking about the alien. Writers like James Tiptree, Jr., Joanna Russ, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Suzy McKee Charnas examined the alienation felt by women in western society. Starting in the sixties and continuing throughout the seventies and early eighties, a few writers turned away from the sex-battle text, the idea of "men" versus "women," and more towards an examination of the entire notion of gender. The best of these include the work of Russ, Tiptree, Theodore Sturgeon, Octavia Butler, and--perhaps the most well-known--Le Guin's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. But even the Le Guin book posits a "genderless" society in which all characters are referred to as "he" unless they become specifically female for the purposes of sex with another character, who has become specifically male. It could be argued that THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS is really about men and gender, and that it is the potential (and, more to the point, the willingness) to assume "non-male" gender that makes the characters so alien. At this point, a lot of male writers began pumping out dreadful, reactionary stuff: Edmund Cooper was guilty of this, as was Heinlein. (There are always exceptions. Among those who at least tried hard were John Varley and Samuel R. Delany.) Then, it seems to me, SF writers looked up, saw the inevitable nature of the next aliens on the horizon--the aliens of sexuality as well as gender--and panicked. In the eighties, then, there was a sudden renewed interest in high-concept SF: hard science, action-adventure, the re-emergence of famous Golden Age work (and the attendant phenomenon of "sharecropping"). There was also, of course, cyberpunk. Cyberpunk, at its most cliched and derivative (and there is of course much cyberpunk that *isn't* either cliched or derivative), seems to be merely a revisiting of film noire ideas and a regression to the Nerd Triumphant school of literature. In this guise, it is often nothing more than a hybrid of nihilism (all those grey, raining mean streets where no one cares and nothing makes a difference) and the shop-and-fuck novel (brand names, the lust for consumer durables, descriptions of women's clothes..=2Eusually tight, black, spike-heeled and shiny). At its best, cyberpunk does discuss ideas of alienation, particularly in the relationship between people and machines, but generally (Pat Cadigan is a shining exception to this rule) this occurs within the context of those same old traditional cultural tropes about men and women. As this eighties backlash eased off, sex, sexuality and gender again became hot topics. Many women writers--mainstream as well as SF--emerged for the first time, or re-emerged. Writers like Margaret Atwood and Marge Piercy, Gwyneth Jones and Joan Slonczewski, Suzette Haden Elgin and Eleanor Arnason were all writing novels looking at how women have become or remain Other. Many of their fictional characters were lesbian or bisexual. Men were reading these books, too, of course, and then--rather startlingly--began to write them. See, for example, Geoff Ryman's THE CHILD GARDEN. There is a group of twenty- and thirty-something straight white boys--particularly in England, I'm not sure why--who have started writing novels and short stories with lesbian or bisexual women protagonists: I can think of Simon Ings, Colin Greenland and Eric Brown off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are many more. And now, in the nineties, American men seem to have got in on the act: Allen Steele's latest novel has a dyke protagonist; one of Mark Tiedemann's short stories, "Rust Castles," mentions two lesbians. In fantasy, too, men are happily writing about women who love women: Charles de Lint's MEMORY & DREAM is one example, Cole and Bunch's THE WARRIOR'S TALE. There are many more, in both genres. So. Why are straight men writing about dykes? I think some are doing what Wyndham did with THE CHRYSALIDS: genuinely trying to explore the alien, trying hard to understand--and to make understood--women who love women in a male-centered world. It's difficult not to applaud these attempts, even when the authors make the occasional appalling blunder about the nature of Lesbian Woman. But some, whom I do not applaud, are simply exploiting what they perceive of as being the political climate. Today's young male writers think of themselves as hip, cool, feminist kind of guys. They know that it's not cool to have Big John the manly man save the world all on his own and, along the way, pilot anything that flies, drink anything that pours and hump anything in a skirt. They change Big John to Big Joan. But that's all they change: we end up with a Dyke Heroine who saves the world and, along the way, pilots anything that flies, drinks anything that pours, and humps anything in a skirt.... This, the writers tell themselves (and everyone else), is not an adventure skiffy yarn but cutting-edge, slipstream SF. "Look," they say, "we're exploring all these, like, alienated groups: women and (ooh, kinky shudder) lesbians." Men, of course, are not the only culprits. Women who lack imagination are making the same mistakes of cliche with their gay male characters. For some reason, this seems to be happening more in fantasy than science fiction. Before anyone leaps to any conclusions, I am *not* saying that men should not write about women or vice versa, or that straights should not write about gays. I just want people to avoid cliches, to think a little before they commit their well-intentioned atrocities to paper. And most of the writers in our genre *are* well-intentioned. There are others who are not. 1994 marked the publication of a nasty little book entitled COLORADO 1998. It was written by a man called Mark Olsen, the communications director for Colorado for Family Values--those nice people who tried to enshrine into law discrimination against lesbians and gay men. [Thank you, thank you, the Supreme Court for the recent decision cutting CFV off at the knees.] This book purports to describe how America would really look if queers ruled the world. (I have to admit that I find it mildly embarrassing that it took a small-minded fundamentalist to get around to imagining in print what the world would be like if dykes and gay men were in charge. Why haven't any of *us* imagined this? I really hope someone reading this will go off and write a queers-rule-the-universe story. I'd love to read it.) COLORADO 1998, with its bestial portrayal of lesbians (we grunt all the time, walk strangely, like badgers, and have terrible table manners), is a classic role-reversal tale where the writer gives away his prejudices. In attempting to show how awful lesbians are, Olsen simply holds up a mirror to the kind of persecution and hatred happening today *against* queers. There is no essential difference between this book and the sex-battle texts of the fifties, sixties and seventies. Like most tourists in the genre (P.D. James is another), Olsen is about thirty years behind the rest of us. 1994 saw the emergence of something called Lesbian Chic. (Cindy and k.d. making out on the cover of Vanity Fair, etc. etc.) Not coincidentally, that year there was also a resurgence of women writing about women. Melissa Scott, in TROUBLE AND HER FRIENDS, was explicit about the alieness of being queer, and female, in the future. Carrie Richerson's short fiction was chilling, and exciting, and different: her women were not only dykes, but dead, too--a double whammy. Suzy McKee Charnas's THE FURIES took a brave and unflinching look at how women and men can be utterly alien to each other; at the difference in their violence; and at the ways in which women and men might try (or not, as the case may be) find common ground. We know that these issues--sex, sexuality, gender--are here to stay in SF because there is a prize, the Tiptree. We know the *award* is here to stay because not only has the SF community rallied magnificently to fund the award, but the award has sparked controversy--mainly from those who did not win, and were a bit disgruntled about it. Any number of writers, from old SF hands like David Brin to recent tourists such as the aforementioned P.D. James, have postulated futures in which women are the dominant sex. While such fiction may be role-reversing, it is not necessarily role-expanding. So. Here we are in the mid-nineties. SF writers have this vast history of the examination of the alien on which to draw: slimy bug-eyed monsters, robots, muties and pod people, women, lesbians and gays. 1996 is an election year. I think the rights of lesbians and gay men--particularly with regard to queer marriage--will be one of the most intensely fought over and intently watched battlegrounds. As the war hots up, I suspect that much, much more SF with queer protagonists will roll off the presses. But lesbians and gay men are not the only political hot potato. Look at what's happening in California and Florida--the growing fear and resentment of immigrants. I think we might soon see some science fiction about immigrating aliens and how they upset the fabric of society by coming to *our* world and using up *our* resources and why don't they just go back to where they came from? Another hot spot is affirmative action--discussions about whether or not to take away set-asides and other help for racial minorities and those with disabilities. I wouldn't be surprised to see the new aliens of SF being sick and disabled, and demanding that humanity pay attention to them and treat them with dignity and respect. Whatever happens, I'm certain that as science fiction matures it will continue to play more with the *Us* end of the Us-Them spectrum. It will continue to examine the alien, and to make the alien understood. Or it will continue to try. Return to the Nicola Griffith Home Page Last modified on June 3, 1996 by Dave Slusher

[email protected]

The New Aliens of Science Fiction

by Nicola Griffith

This essay originally appeared in Nebula Awards 30 in May 1996.

American and British science fiction reflects American and British culture. At any given moment, if we want to know which particular group of people is disturbing the rest of society, all we have to do is take a look at the kind of alien with which the genre is currently preoccupied. Science fiction has always been concerned with exploring the Alien, the Not Self, the Other. Let me take you on a tour of the history of that alien, show you the broad trends (there will always be the occasional writer, like Lem, who puts a spike in my nice neat theories, sigh), and then come back to what SF considers The Alien today. The first aliens of pulp SF were slimy bug-eyed monsters from the nether regions of the solar system. Nothing like us, supposedly, except they were always recognizably and rather adolescently male: they were war leaders, they had no kids hanging around to spoil the fun, and (if the cover illustrations of the pulps are to be believed) they often abducted good looking and scantily clad human women for nefarious purposes. In the thirties and forties, during the grim years of the depression and just before the second world war, the green slime monsters turned into androids and robots. These metal men (some of these robots had female names, but we weren't fooled) were smooth, emotionless and rather, well, Teutonic. Then came the McCarthy era. In keeping with the paranoia of the time, aliens became those who looked like us, who pretended to be us in order to take over the world. Aliens were vegetable beings grown in pods in the back garden who took the place of Mom and Dad; or amoeboid extra-terrestrials who rode invisibly on the backs of their unsuspecting hosts. And then came the sixties. During this era of pot and peace we felt a bit more kindly disposed towards the alien. In John Wyndham's THE CHRYSALIDS, post-holocaust radiation led to minor mutations such as six toes, or telepathy. Those who deviated from the norm, even those who looked normal--perhaps especially those who looked normal--were hunted down and killed. The interesting thing about THE CHRYSALIDS, of course, is that the story is told from the viewpoint of a mutant. As far as the reader's sympathies were concerned, there was no longer that clear dividing line between *Us*, humanity, and *Them*, the monstrous enemy. For the first time, we were being asked to imagine ourselves as and to identify with The Other. During the civil rights marches, while our ears rang with Martin Luther King's dream, science fiction was telling us that The Other was human, too. The idea of alieness had suddenly become one of degree. The next tentative step down that road was the portrayal of aliens who were normal humans, biologically speaking, but who were raised by aliens and therefore not quite Establishment. If you're raised by weirdos and foreigners, where do your sympathies lie? A prime example comes from Heinlein: Valentine Smith, the STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. (In Hollywood, a similar process was occurring in another genre, Westerns. Take for example all those films where a pregnant white woman is abducted by Apache. Mother dies in childbirth. White boychild grows up behaving and believing in himself as Apache...at least until the cavalry come along and tell him, hell no, he's a *real* man, not a savage.) So. By the sixties our aliens had progressed from green slimy *Non*-Mankind, to robotic *Fake*-Mankind, to the muties and pod-people of *Twisted*-Mankind. They were now hovering on the fulcrum between maybe-maybe-not Mankind. Where were the women? In early SF, female characters served as the scientist's ignorant girlfriend, or the hero's reward for a job well done. By the fifties and sixties, women were allowed to be heroic as long as they did it in their own sphere--courageous mothers defending their children, or human housewives who set up coffeeklatches with alien housewives thereby achieving world peace. Most of these women (not all, of course--remember, I'm discussing broad trends only) were shining fictional examples of socialization. But in the 1960s, in the real world, women began to protest this socialization. We stood up and said: "That's *not* who we are!" And so male SF writers, a bit puzzled, but game for the challenge, turned to an examination of who women might be. This examination manifested itself largely through writings about women-only societies: the "sex-battle texts," to use Russ's term. The women in these books were not fully human. We were portrayed as being bereft of sexual feeling; or we had plenty of sexual feeling but were frustrated and embittered by having no men to express those feelings with; we did not understand Art; we did not understand science and so were invariably technologically backward. Women-only societies were often portrayed as static, hierarchical and insect-like (see, for example, Wyndham's CONSIDER HER WAYS). This kind of fiction operated very much out of traditional cultural assumptions--often nothing more than a reversal of male/female roles. The female characters were only alien because they weren't "proper" women. In the late sixties and early seventies, women writers took over the job of talking about the alien. Writers like James Tiptree, Jr., Joanna Russ, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Suzy McKee Charnas examined the alienation felt by women in western society. Starting in the sixties and continuing throughout the seventies and early eighties, a few writers turned away from the sex-battle text, the idea of "men" versus "women," and more towards an examination of the entire notion of gender. The best of these include the work of Russ, Tiptree, Theodore Sturgeon, Octavia Butler, and--perhaps the most well-known--Le Guin's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. But even the Le Guin book posits a "genderless" society in which all characters are referred to as "he" unless they become specifically female for the purposes of sex with another character, who has become specifically male. It could be argued that THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS is really about men and gender, and that it is the potential (and, more to the point, the willingness) to assume "non-male" gender that makes the characters so alien. At this point, a lot of male writers began pumping out dreadful, reactionary stuff: Edmund Cooper was guilty of this, as was Heinlein. (There are always exceptions. Among those who at least tried hard were John Varley and Samuel R. Delany.) Then, it seems to me, SF writers looked up, saw the inevitable nature of the next aliens on the horizon--the aliens of sexuality as well as gender--and panicked. In the eighties, then, there was a sudden renewed interest in high-concept SF: hard science, action-adventure, the re-emergence of famous Golden Age work (and the attendant phenomenon of "sharecropping"). There was also, of course, cyberpunk. Cyberpunk, at its most cliched and derivative (and there is of course much cyberpunk that *isn't* either cliched or derivative), seems to be merely a revisiting of film noire ideas and a regression to the Nerd Triumphant school of literature. In this guise, it is often nothing more than a hybrid of nihilism (all those grey, raining mean streets where no one cares and nothing makes a difference) and the shop-and-fuck novel (brand names, the lust for consumer durables, descriptions of women's clothes..=2Eusually tight, black, spike-heeled and shiny). At its best, cyberpunk does discuss ideas of alienation, particularly in the relationship between people and machines, but generally (Pat Cadigan is a shining exception to this rule) this occurs within the context of those same old traditional cultural tropes about men and women. As this eighties backlash eased off, sex, sexuality and gender again became hot topics. Many women writers--mainstream as well as SF--emerged for the first time, or re-emerged. Writers like Margaret Atwood and Marge Piercy, Gwyneth Jones and Joan Slonczewski, Suzette Haden Elgin and Eleanor Arnason were all writing novels looking at how women have become or remain Other. Many of their fictional characters were lesbian or bisexual. Men were reading these books, too, of course, and then--rather startlingly--began to write them. See, for example, Geoff Ryman's THE CHILD GARDEN. There is a group of twenty- and thirty-something straight white boys--particularly in England, I'm not sure why--who have started writing novels and short stories with lesbian or bisexual women protagonists: I can think of Simon Ings, Colin Greenland and Eric Brown off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are many more. And now, in the nineties, American men seem to have got in on the act: Allen Steele's latest novel has a dyke protagonist; one of Mark Tiedemann's short stories, "Rust Castles," mentions two lesbians. In fantasy, too, men are happily writing about women who love women: Charles de Lint's MEMORY & DREAM is one example, Cole and Bunch's THE WARRIOR'S TALE. There are many more, in both genres. So. Why are straight men writing about dykes? I think some are doing what Wyndham did with THE CHRYSALIDS: genuinely trying to explore the alien, trying hard to understand--and to make understood--women who love women in a male-centered world. It's difficult not to applaud these attempts, even when the authors make the occasional appalling blunder about the nature of Lesbian Woman. But some, whom I do not applaud, are simply exploiting what they perceive of as being the political climate. Today's young male writers think of themselves as hip, cool, feminist kind of guys. They know that it's not cool to have Big John the manly man save the world all on his own and, along the way, pilot anything that flies, drink anything that pours and hump anything in a skirt. They change Big John to Big Joan. But that's all they change: we end up with a Dyke Heroine who saves the world and, along the way, pilots anything that flies, drinks anything that pours, and humps anything in a skirt.... This, the writers tell themselves (and everyone else), is not an adventure skiffy yarn but cutting-edge, slipstream SF. "Look," they say, "we're exploring all these, like, alienated groups: women and (ooh, kinky shudder) lesbians." Men, of course, are not the only culprits. Women who lack imagination are making the same mistakes of cliche with their gay male characters. For some reason, this seems to be happening more in fantasy than science fiction. Before anyone leaps to any conclusions, I am *not* saying that men should not write about women or vice versa, or that straights should not write about gays. I just want people to avoid cliches, to think a little before they commit their well-intentioned atrocities to paper. And most of the writers in our genre *are* well-intentioned. There are others who are not. 1994 marked the publication of a nasty little book entitled COLORADO 1998. It was written by a man called Mark Olsen, the communications director for Colorado for Family Values--those nice people who tried to enshrine into law discrimination against lesbians and gay men. [Thank you, thank you, the Supreme Court for the recent decision cutting CFV off at the knees.] This book purports to describe how America would really look if queers ruled the world. (I have to admit that I find it mildly embarrassing that it took a small-minded fundamentalist to get around to imagining in print what the world would be like if dykes and gay men were in charge. Why haven't any of *us* imagined this? I really hope someone reading this will go off and write a queers-rule-the-universe story. I'd love to read it.) COLORADO 1998, with its bestial portrayal of lesbians (we grunt all the time, walk strangely, like badgers, and have terrible table manners), is a classic role-reversal tale where the writer gives away his prejudices. In attempting to show how awful lesbians are, Olsen simply holds up a mirror to the kind of persecution and hatred happening today *against* queers. There is no essential difference between this book and the sex-battle texts of the fifties, sixties and seventies. Like most tourists in the genre (P.D. James is another), Olsen is about thirty years behind the rest of us. 1994 saw the emergence of something called Lesbian Chic. (Cindy and k.d. making out on the cover of Vanity Fair, etc. etc.) Not coincidentally, that year there was also a resurgence of women writing about women. Melissa Scott, in TROUBLE AND HER FRIENDS, was explicit about the alieness of being queer, and female, in the future. Carrie Richerson's short fiction was chilling, and exciting, and different: her women were not only dykes, but dead, too--a double whammy. Suzy McKee Charnas's THE FURIES took a brave and unflinching look at how women and men can be utterly alien to each other; at the difference in their violence; and at the ways in which women and men might try (or not, as the case may be) find common ground. We know that these issues--sex, sexuality, gender--are here to stay in SF because there is a prize, the Tiptree. We know the *award* is here to stay because not only has the SF community rallied magnificently to fund the award, but the award has sparked controversy--mainly from those who did not win, and were a bit disgruntled about it. Any number of writers, from old SF hands like David Brin to recent tourists such as the aforementioned P.D. James, have postulated futures in which women are the dominant sex. While such fiction may be role-reversing, it is not necessarily role-expanding. So. Here we are in the mid-nineties. SF writers have this vast history of the examination of the alien on which to draw: slimy bug-eyed monsters, robots, muties and pod people, women, lesbians and gays. 1996 is an election year. I think the rights of lesbians and gay men--particularly with regard to queer marriage--will be one of the most intensely fought over and intently watched battlegrounds. As the war hots up, I suspect that much, much more SF with queer protagonists will roll off the presses. But lesbians and gay men are not the only political hot potato. Look at what's happening in California and Florida--the growing fear and resentment of immigrants. I think we might soon see some science fiction about immigrating aliens and how they upset the fabric of society by coming to *our* world and using up *our* resources and why don't they just go back to where they came from? Another hot spot is affirmative action--discussions about whether or not to take away set-asides and other help for racial minorities and those with disabilities. I wouldn't be surprised to see the new aliens of SF being sick and disabled, and demanding that humanity pay attention to them and treat them with dignity and respect. Whatever happens, I'm certain that as science fiction matures it will continue to play more with the *Us* end of the Us-Them spectrum. It will continue to examine the alien, and to make the alien understood. Or it will continue to try. Return to the Nicola Griffith Home Page Last modified on June 3, 1996 by Dave Slusher

[email protected]