Alien sizes

I am sure the fact that "Pacific Rim" is a tongue-in-cheek remake of "Godzilla" with steampunk costumes will not have escaped the attention of even the laziest moviegoer. So instead of pointing out the obvious, I want to ask a very different question: what is the relationship between size and intelligence in SF?

Most fictional and cinematic aliens I can think of are of human size. Even those that are not humanoid in shape, are commensurate with us: a little bigger, a little smaller but that's about it. In movies especially, while alien machines are often huge (to do as much damage as possible), the aliens themselves, with tentacles or not, could shop in Gap. I can think of some texts where aliens are giants but very few where they of a size either so big or so small that we would not perceive them as beings at all but rather as a part of landscape. The Strugtasky brother's Roadside Picnic and Little One (Malysh) explore this possibility and so does Lem's Solaris. Not surprisingly, the aliens in these texts are impossible to communicate with.

So does it mean that size matters more than shape in identifying a creature as intelligent? I don't know the answer but suspect this is the case. Dolphins have been the subject of many studies in animal intelligence but whales not so much, even though they are at least as sentient.

Even in "Pacific Rim" where the Kaiju are improbably big, too big to move on land, let alone fly as one of them does (!), the monsters' adversaries are giant human-shaped machines piloted by teams of two. If the alien is to big, we have to make ourselves commensurate with it in size.

So perhaps it is our cognitive biases that make us seek out Earth-size planets for intelligent life. Perhaps intelligence is right under our noses, in gas giants, clouds of dark matter or collapsed stars. It is just too big for us to notice.

 

Follow-up on "Man of Steel"

I just discovered this piece on CNN and thought it was relevant to the issue of religion and SF.  http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/14/superman-coming-to-a-church-near-you/

Christ imagery is not surprising, of course, but I was put off by the fact that the studio was so blatant in marketing the movie as a Christian allegory. To my mind, there is a profound difference between religious symbolism (employed in many great SF novels, such as Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" and Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris") and religious propaganda. The former employs the vocabulary of the numinous and the sacred to ask profound questions about man's role in the universe. The latter is anti-scientific, anti-rational and politically dangerous. So now I have a justifiable reason to dislike the movie!

I have to confess, however, that Superman IS a Christ-figure. What were those Jewish creators of him thinking? Well, the same question applies to the Jews who wrote the Gospels...  I guess we're our own worst enemy. 

Man of Kleenex?

I have to confess: I have not read many Superman comics. I have not read many comics, period (may my students forgive me!) So when I went to see "Man of Steel" yesterday, it was not a reunion with a beloved character from my childhood as it was for my husband who grew up in Iowa, on a farm similar to that of Clark Kent's adoptive parents (where, as he told me, you learned to fly out of sheer boredom). So I watched Zack Snyder's newest reincarnation of the American Savior as if it were just another SF movie. In that capacity, it sucked. The plot made no sense, the special effects were impressive at first but grew repetitive, and when Metropolis was being destroyed, I reached for my popcorn, only to remember that I don't touch the stuff, ever.

But even for my superheroes-blank mind, it was clear that there is something wrong with the American mythos. It was not dark, as in Batman movies. It was pathetic. The invasion from Krypton represented nothing at all except nostalgia for yesterday's enemies (one evil Krypton lady spoke with a sexy Russian accent and the general's rotating eyebrows reminded me of Brezhnev but it was probably unintentional). Superman stared blankly into the distance as if trying to summon some worthier adversary, Godzilla perhaps. Or else he was hungover from the beer he drunk at his minimum-wage job at IHOP. The corn farm was plowed under by Monsanto; the "Daily Planet" is now a website and employs a staff of one; and Louis Lane is - or should be - dieting and applying for a position as a waitress.

Superman was invented by two Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, as an American answer to the Nazi Ubermensch in 1938. But the Ubermenschen are long gone; and the echoes of eugenics debate in the movie, unattached to anything in the real world, sound as quaint as the idea of a full-time, secure job. Reinventing its mythos is necessary if American culture is to remain vital. But the Man of Steel is not it. Toss him into the waste-basket of history and start anew.

Just another family romance...

 Why does it take an apocalypse to mend a broken family?

American SF is famous for killing gnats with a hammer: destroying worlds to bring together estranged spouses or separated lovers. In Greg Bear's Blood Music, for example, people are eaten by their houses (read the book), our planet is draped in bloody rags - and it all ends with a couple lounging at the lakeside. But that book was written in more innocent times when couples mattered. Nowadays, only parents and children matter. Especially fathers and sons. Especially black fathers and son, considering that the proportion     of single mothers in the black community is around 70%

"After Earth" could have been a great movie. The premise - a boy's odyssey on an alien planet - is timeless. The fact that the alien planet is Earth is very attractive. I have always loved the alien Earth trope, and the fact that the movie was apparently shot close to home - in the redwoods of California - does not hurt. The redwoods are beautiful, and populated by strange mutated animals, even more so (they could add more animals, by the way). The slimy alien who tracks you by the scent of your fear is a great idea.

But it was all lost in the endless close-ups of the  father (Will Smith) and son (Jaden Smith), apparently meant to express profound emotion but only inducing boredom. The fact that the actors ARE father and son is very commendable but does nothing to dispel the impression that each of them has had more than enough of the other before the film even began.

The bigger question it all raises for me is: why can't SF be about ideas? Why can't it just be satisfied with evoking wonder? Why do we need to tack on "human interest" to the genre which is not supposed to be about humans at all? Instead of unleashing ecological apocalypse

to bring black fathers back to their children, maybe we should try family tax breaks first.      

Droning on: "Oblivion" and globalism

Yesterday The New York Times published an article about a surprising drop in the popularity of Hollywood movies in China.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/business/media/hollywoods-box-office-heroes-proving-mortal-in-china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Yesterday I saw "Oblivion"

There is no necessary connection between the two events. Nevertheless, in my mind they are linked. "Oblivion" demonstrates why the world may be getting tired of Hollywood. It also demonstrates why America may be getting tired of the world.

First of all, "Oblivion" is a terrible movie. It is incoherent, Tom Cruise's acting is cringe-worthy, and even special effects are no better than an average video game. This is a pity because the premise is intriguing: an amnesiac clone who gradually rediscovers his prototype's past. It is not new - writers like John Varley have done it to death - but it can still be the basis for an interesting movie. The second component - the aliens who siphon off the Earth's resources - is also an old hat, but the idea that one may unwittingly become their collaborator is a promising one. Unfortunately, the script makes a mishmash of all these ideas to the point where clones, aliens, and freedom fighters flicker in and out of the viewer's consciousness in a fog of boredom.

The only strong screen presence is that of the drones. Tom Cruise and the two female leads fade into insignificance as these malevolent robots with blinking red eyes and toothy mouths shoot down everything that moves, pursuing the ragged freedom fighters who hide in caves. They are sent on their mission by a superior power robbing the natives of their resources. Eventually, the only recourse against the drone power is suicide bombing.

What?

No, I don't accuse the makers of the movie of Taliban sympathies. As opposed to such SF films as "District 9", in which the political subtext is deliberate, I believe "Oblivion" is simply trying to engage topical memes - drones, suicide, cloning - in order to make an action flick. The fact that the result is a mess simply indicates that American culture has no coherent narrative, in which to represent its own role in the world. Now, the world may love or hate powerful narratives but it reacts with a yawn to the absence of such. Which is why I suspect the eventual fate of "Oblivion" is sufficiently indicated by its title.               

Second-hand divinity

Well, I finally saw "Prometheus". I dutifully paid the exorbitant ticket price, put on the uncomfortable 3-D glasses...and came out knowing for sure what I have long suspected: if you like SF, seek it in books, video games, graphic novels or your friends' blogposts. Leave movies alone.

In 1979, "Alien" made history. The sequel "Aliens" was, from my point of view, even better. The third movie was foregttable but I loved the fourth one. I have to confess I did not watch the Alien versus Predator franchise.

"Alien" had it all: a tense plot, stunningly innovative visuals (designed by the renown surrealist artist Hans Giger), serious thematic concerns (mostly having to do with gender and definition of humanity), and that cool, distancing, emotionless affect, which is one of the main reasons I love SF. "Estrangement", to use the technical phrase: making strange, making different, making one think, contemplate and wonder. There are enough soppy "human interest" stories overflowing the trash-cans of daytime TV, if this is what you need. Give me one genre that appeals to the human mind and imagination rather than jerking at our tear glands.

And here, 30 years later, is "Prometheus". It is supposed to solve the mystery of the Alien series: the origin of the aliens themselves. It only solves it in the sense that by the end of the movie you no longer care. It piles one preposterous idea upon another, bringing in a little creationism, a little "spirituality", and a little love story, with the female lead who is to Sigourney Weaver as Kim Kardashian is to Marlene Dietrich. The sly creationist hints in the movie set my teeth on edge. Make a straight religious SF if you want; there are many precedents for this. But "Prometheus" tries to have its cake and to eat it, to be "spiritual" and to be scientific at the same time and ends in a sorry little puddle of compromise.

And the entire movie, despite the millions that were undoubtedly spent on its production, has the same shabby, sly, second-hand feel. The best parts of it seem recycled; the worst - reconstituted. The tag-line, "We want to meet our makers", is borrowed from "Blade Runner" where theological echoes are used to great philosophical and cinematic effect. But in "Prometheus", the only conclusion I could draw was that humanity's makers are too embarrassed by their failure in creating an intelligent species to want to meet their botched product.

As for the so-called New Age-y "search for meaning" that "Prometheus" is trying to drag in, the only good scene in the movie occurs when David the android asks another crew member why humanity has created his kind. The answer is: "Because we could". This would be God's answer too. No need for interstellar travel to find this out; just read the Book of Job.

Aliens? Really?

Max Ernst, Eye of Silence

Aliens don't exist. Or do they?

The SETI Institute (founded in 1984) has spent almost 3o years searching for signs of extrterrestrial intelligence. Despite being endorsed by such luminaries as Carl Sagan, the search, so far, has been futile.

http://www.seti.org/about-us

Millions of people report seeing UFOs every year. Some report talking to, or even being abducted by, aliens. No credible evidence exists of this being anything but mass hysteria.

The famous Fermi paradox is still as pertinent as ever. The paradox, proposed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, basically asks, "Where are they?". Considering a large number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy and the age of the universe, we should be awash in alien visitors. Clearly, we are not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

And yet, popular culture and popular science alike are obsessed with aliens. A superficial glance at the history of Hollywood shows the perennial appeal of the idea of alien contact: "The War of the Worlds" (1953, 2005), "Alien" (1979) and all its sequels, "E.T." (1982) , "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977), "Avatar" (2009) etc, etc. Science fiction's most enduring masterpieces: H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" (1896), The Strugatski brothers' "Roadside Picnic"(1977), Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" (1961) and "Fiasco" (1986), evoke the magic of meeting creatures who are intelligent like ourselves, and yet in some profound sense, very different from us.

This blog will be about this magic. Not about the question of whether aliens actually exist but about the burning desire to know that they do. What is behind this desire? Why has our culture become so fascinated with such a huge hypothetical? What is missing in us that we hope to find in the Other?

Teaching a course on science fiction and writing a book about the ethics and aesthetics of alien encounters, I want to share my thoughts on these subjects. This is a work in progress. Hopefully it will be completed before the actual aliens show up and make it all redundant.