The Anthropology Of The Alien
George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin The bliss of man could pride that blessing find Is not to think or act beyond mankind. Alexander Pope Our title, the anthropology of the alien, sounds like a contradiction in terms. Anthropos is man, anthropology the study of man. The alien, however, is something else alius, other than. But other than what Obviously man. The alien is the creation of a need man's need to designate something that is genuinely outside himself, something that is truly nonman,...
Effing the Ineffable
Their light of pocket-torch, of signal flare, Licks at the edge of unsuspected places, While others scan, under an arc-lamp's glare, Nursery, kitchen sink, or their own faces. Kingsley Amis There is probably no more fundamental theme in science fiction than the alien. The genre reeks of the desire to embrace the strange, the 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...
The Alien in Our Minds
The only universal message in science fiction is as follows There are minds that think as well as you do, or better, but differently. They don t have to be interstellar visitors. They could be the next generation of computers or computer programs. They could be apes or dogs or dolphins after we ve fiddled with their brains. They could be human beings shaped by a strange environment, or altered by genetic experiments, or mutated, or given new tools such as computer implants. I tend to...
Alien Aliens
Recently, I read a German translation of Thousand Years on Venus, a novel by the Hungarian writer Gyorgy Botond-Bolics. One of his characters expressed the following opinion We are human beings, Demeter, and we cannot figure out the world around us except through the eyes of the human being, through the brain of the human being. There has never been a writer, neither a major one nor a minor one, who could or dared write about beings from another world without human, earthly connections....
Border Patrols
An essay on the alien and its anthropology recalls to us the critical fact that the story of the alien is always the story of borders and of the institutional forces that try to neutralize and control those borders in the name of a certain political economy. Those forces manifest themselves in various ways, but their power can be localized in the figures of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and of its most physical representative, the Border Patrol. These two political entities most...