Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  [I wish to thank John Carroll of San Diego State University and Howard Davidson of Sun Microsystems for discussing the draft version of this paper with me.]

  Notes

  1. Moravec, Hans, Mind Children, Harvard University Press, 1988.

  2. Platt, Charles, Private Communication.

  3. Bear, Greg, “Blood Music”, Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact, June, 1983. Expanded into the novel Blood Music, Morrow, 1985.

  4. Ulam, S., Tribute to John von Neumann, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May 1958, pp. 1-49.

  5. See Stent, Gunther S., The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, The Natural History Press, 1969.

  6. Good, I. J., “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” in Advances in Computers, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds, pp. 31-88, 1965, Academic Press.

  7. Vinge, Vernor, “Bookworm, Run!,” Analog, March 1966, pp. 8-40. Reprinted in True Names and Other Dangers, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

  8. Alfve’n, Hannes, writing as Olof Johanneson, The End of Man?, Award Books, 1969 earlier published as “The Tale of the Big Computer,” Coward-McCann, translated from a book copyright 1966 Albert Bonniers Forlag AB with English translation copyright 1966 by Victor Gollancz, Ltd.

  9. Vinge, Vernor, First Word, Omni, January 1983, p. 10.

  10. Bear, Greg, “Blood Music,” Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact, June, 1983. Expanded into the novel Blood Music, Morrow, 1985.

  11. Stapledon, Olaf, Star Maker, Berkley Books, 1961 (originally published in 1937).

  12. Vinge, Vernor, “True Names,” Binary Star Number 5, Dell, 1981. Reprinted in True Names and Other Dangers, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

  13. Penrose, Roger, The Emperor’s New Mind, Oxford University Press, 1989.

  14. Searle, John R., “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol 3, Cambridge University Press, 1980. The essay is reprinted in The Mind’s I, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic Books, 1981 (my source for this reference). This reprinting contains an excellent critique of the Searle essay.

  15. Thearling, Kurt, “How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks,” a workshop at Thinking Machines Corporation, August 24-26, 1992. Personal Communication.

  16. Moravec, Hans, Mind Children, Harvard University Press, 1988.

  17. Conrad, Michael et al., “Towards an Artificial Brain,” BioSystems, vol 23, 1989, pp. 175-218.

  18. Rasmussen, S. et al., “Computational Connectionism within Neurons: a Model of Cytoskeletal Automata Subserving Neural Networks,” in Emergent Computation, Stephanie Forrest, ed., pp. 428-449, MIT Press, 1991.

  19. Stent, Gunther S., The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, The Natural History Press, 1969.

  20. Herbert, Frank, Dune, Berkley Books, 1985. However, this novel was serialized in Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact in the 1960s.

  21. Drexler, K. Eric, Engines of Creation, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986.

  22. Asimov, Isaac, “Runaround,” Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942, p. 94. Reprinted in Robot Visions, Isaac Asimov, ROC, 1990. Asimov describes the development of his robotics stories in this book.

  23. Minsky, Marvin, Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1985.

  24. G. Harry Stine and Andrew Haley have also written about metalaw as it might relate to extraterrestrials: G. Harry Stine, “How to Get along with Extraterrestrials . . . or Your Neighbor,” Analog Science Fact- Science Fiction, February, 1980, pp. 39-47.

  25. Cairns-Smith, A. G., Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

  26. Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, Summit Books, 1986.

  27. Sims, Karl, “Interactive Evolution of Dynamical Systems,” Thinking Machines Corporation, Technical Report Series (published in Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life, Paris, MIT Press, December 1991.

  28. Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, Summit Books, 1986.

  29. Anderson, Poul, “Kings Who Die,” If, March 1962, pp. 8-36. Reprinted in Seven Conquests, Poul Anderson, MacMillan Co., 1969.

  30. Vinge, Vernor, “Bookworm, Run!,” Analog, March 1966, pp. 8-40. Reprinted in True Names and Other Dangers, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

  31. Kovacs, G. T. A. et al., “Regeneration Microelectrode Array for Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, v 39, n 9, pp. 893-902.

  32. Swanwick Michael, Vacuum Flowers, serialized in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1986 - February 1987. Republished by Ace Books, 1988.

  33. Dyson, Freeman, “Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” Review of Modern Physics, vol 51, 1979, pp. 447-460.

  34. Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford University Press, 1986.

  35. Niven, Larry, “The Ethics of Madness,” If, April 1967, pp. 82-108. Reprinted in Neutron Star, Larry Niven, Ballantine Books, 1968.

  36. Vinge, Vernor, To Appear [ :-)]

  37. Dyson, Freeman, Infinite in All Directions, Harper & Row, 1988.

  27

  Aliens in the fourth dimension

  Gwyneth Jones

  When two worlds collide

  The aliens can always speak English. This is one of those absurdities of pulp fiction and B movies, like saucer shaped spaceships and hairdryer machines that track your brain waves,1 that might well come true—suppose the visitors avoid those disconcerting forms of long haul space travel, that whisk you across the galaxy and dump you in the concourse of Lime Street station before you have time to say “Non Smoking.” If they come in slowly they’ll spend the latter part of their journey travelling through a vast cloud of human broadcasting signals, which they’ll easily pick up on the alien cabin tv. They’ll have plenty of time to acquire a smattering of useful phrases. Or so the current received wisdom goes. By now it’s not completely inevitable that they’ll speak English, and with a United States accent, in the traditional manner. They might get hooked on Brazilian soap opera. But whatever formal, articulate language our visitors may use in real life, all the aliens we know so far speak human. They speak our human predicament, our history, our hopes and fears, our pride and shame. As long as we haven’t met any actual no kidding intelligent extraterrestrials (and I would maintain that this is still the case, though I know opinions are divided) the aliens we imagine are always other humans in disguise: no more, no less. Whether or not hell is other people, it is certainly other people who arrive, in these fictions, to challenge our isolation: to be feared or worshipped, interrogated, annihilated, appeased. When the historical situation demands it science fiction writers demonise our enemies, the way the great Aryan court poet2 who wrote the story of Prince Rama demonised the Dravidian menace, in India long ago. Or we can use imaginary aliens to assuage our guilt. I think it’s not unlikely that our European ancestors invented the little people who live in the hills, cast spells and are “ill to cross”—who appear so often in traditional fiction north of the mediterranean and west of Moscow—to explain why their cousins the Neanderthals had mysteriously vanished from public life. I see the same thing happening today, as science fiction of the environmentally-conscious decades becomes littered with gentle, magical, colorful alien races who live at one with nature in happy non-hierarchical rainforest communities. Even the project of creating an authentically incomprehensible other intelligent species, which is sporadically attempted in science fiction, is inescapably a human story. Do we yet know of any other beings who can imagine, or could care less, what “incomprehensible” means?

  More often than not, the aliens story involves an invasion. The strangers have arrived. They want our planet, and intend to wipe us out. We have arrived. The native aliens—p
oor ineffectual technologically incompetent creatures—had better get out of the way. The good guys will try to protect them: but territorial expansion, sometimes known as “progress,” is an unstoppable force. This pleasant paradigm of intra-species relations obviously strikes a deep chord. We, in the community of science fiction writers and readers at least, do not expect to co-exist comfortably with other people. Which ever side is “ours,” there is going to be trouble, there is going to be grief, when two worlds collide. And whatever language everyone is speaking, there is definitely going to be a break down in communications.

  When I invented my alien invaders “The Aleutians” I was aware of the models that science fiction offered, and of the doubled purpose that they could serve. I wanted, like other writers before me, to tell a story about the colonisers and the colonised. The everlasting expansion of a successful population, first commandment on the Darwinian tablets of stone, makes this encounter “the supplanters and the natives,” an enduring feature of human history. Colonial adventure has been a significant factor in the shaping of my own, European, twentieth-century culture. I wanted to think about this topic. I wanted to study the truly extraordinary imbalance in wealth, power, and per capita human comfort, from the south to the north, that came into being over three hundred years or so of European rule in Africa, Asia and the Indian subcontinent: an imbalance which did not exist when the Portuguese reached China, when the first British and French trading posts were established on the coasts of India; when European explorers arrived in the gold-empire cities of West Africa.3 I also wanted—the other layer of the doubled purpose—to describe and examine the relationship between men and women. There are obvious parallels between my culture’s colonial adventure and the battle of the sexes. Men come to this world helpless, like bewildered explorers. At first they all have to rely on the goodwill of the native ruler of the forked, walking piece of earth in which they find themselves. And then, both individually and on a global scale, they amass as if by magic a huge proportion of the earth’s wealth, power and influence, while the overwhelming majority of those native rulers are doomed to suffer and drudge and starve in the most humiliating conditions. But why? I wondered. How did this come about? Why do most of the women get such a rough deal?

  I felt that my historical model would be better for throwing up insights, mental experiments, refutable hypotheses about sexual politics, than popular “alien invasion” narratives based on United States cultural history. The possibilities of an outright lebensraum struggle between settlers and natives would soon be exhausted; while a situation involving any extreme division between master race and slave race would be too clear cut.4 I needed something in a sense more innocent. A relationship that could grow in intimacy and corruption: a trading partnership where neither party is more altruistic than the other, whichever manages to win the advantage. Most of all, I needed something slow. I needed to see what would happen to my experiment over hundreds of years: over generations, not decades. So, the Aleutians appeared: a feckless crew of adventurers and dreamers, with only the shakiest of State backing, no aim beyond seeing life and turning a quick profit; and no coherent long-term plans whatever.

  Interview with the alien

  Some stories about meeting the aliens are recruiting posters for the Darwinian army. Explicitly, we’re invited to cheer for the home team, or to enjoy the pleasurably sad and moving defeat of the losers. Implicitly, we’re reminded that every encounter with “the other,” down to office manoeuvring and love affairs, is a fight for territory: and the weak must go to the wall. Some people invent aliens as a Utopian or satirical exercise, to show how a really well-designed intelligent species would live and function, and how far the human model falls below this ideal. I confess to adopting elements from both these approaches. But above all, I wanted my aliens to represent an alternative. I wanted them to say to my readers It ain’t necessarily so.5 History is not inevitable, and neither is sexual gender as we know it an inevitable part of being human. I didn’t intend my aliens to represent “women,” exactly; or for the humans to be seen as “men” in this context. Human women and men have their own story in the Aleutian books. But I wanted to make the relationship suggestive of another way things could have turned out. I planned to give my alien conquerors the characteristics, all the supposed deficiencies, that Europeans came to see in their subject races in darkest Africa and the mystic East—“animal” nature, irrationality, intuition; mechanical incompetence, indifference to time, helpless aversion to theory and measurement: and I planned to have them win the territorial battle this time. It was no coincidence, for my purposes, that the same list of qualities or deficiencies—a nature closer to the animal, intuitive communication skills and all the rest of it—were and still are routinely awarded to women, the defeated natives, supplanted rulers of men, in cultures north and south, west and east, white and non-white, the human world over.6

  They had to be humanoid. I didn’t want my readers to be able to distance themselves; or to struggle proudly towards empathy in spite of the tentacles. I didn’t want anyone to be able to think, Why, they’re just like us once you get past the face-lumps, the way we do when we get to know the tv alien goodies and baddies in Babylon 5 or Space Precinct 9. I needed them to be irreducibly weird and, at the same time, undeniably people, the same as us. I believe this to be a fairly accurate approximation of the real-world situation—between the Japanese and the Welsh, say, or between women and men: or indeed between any individual human being and the next. Difference is real. It does not go away. To express my contention—that irreducible difference, like genetic variation, is conserved in the individual, not in race, nationality or reproductive function, I often awarded my Aleutians quirks of taste and opinion belonging to one uniquely different middle-aged, middle-class, leftish English woman. And I was entertained to find them hailed by US critics as “the most convincingly alien beings to grace science fiction in years.” Now it can be told. . .

  Since they had to be humanoid I made a virtue of the necessity, and had someone explain to my readers that all those ufologists can’t be wrong. The human body plan is perfectly plausible, for sound scientific reasons. This would lead me into interesting territory later on. Whether or not it’s true that other planets are likely to throw up creatures that look like us, I don’t know. No one knows. But humanoid aliens certainly make life easier for the science fiction novelist. The control our physical embodiment has over our rational processes is so deep and strong that it’s excruciating trying to write about intelligent plasma clouds, if you’re in the least worried about verisimilitude. It’s a trick, it can be done. But the moment your attention falters, your basic programming will restore the defaults of the pentadactyl limb, binocular vision and articulated spine. You’ll find your plasma characters cracking hard nuts, grappling with sticky ideas, looking at each other in a funny way, scratching their heads, weaving plots and generally making a chimpanzees’ tea-party of your chaste cosmic emanations.

  They had to be humanoid and they had to be sexless. I wanted a society that knew nothing about the great divide which allows half the human race to regard the other half as utterly, transcendently, different on the grounds of reproductive function. I wanted complex and interesting people who managed to have lives fully as strange, distressing, satisfying, absorbing, productive as ours, without having any access to that central “us and themness” of human life. I realised before long that this plan created some aliens who had a very shaky idea, if any, of the concept “alien,” especially as applied to another person. Which was a good joke: and like the cosmic standard body plan, it lead to interesting consequences. But that came later.

  Once my roughly humanoid aliens reached earth, interrogation proceeded along traditional lines. I whisked them into my laboratory for intensive internal examination, with a prurient concentration on sex and toilet habits. In real life (I mean in the novel White Queen) the buccaneers resisted this proposal. They didn’t know they were aliens, the
y thought they were merely strangers, and they didn’t see why they had to be vivisected before they could have their tourist visas. The humans were too nervous to insist, but a maverick scientist secured a tissue sample. . . With this same tissue sample in my possession, I was able to establish that the Aleutians were hermaphrodites, to borrow a human term. (I considered parthenogenesis, with a few males every dozen or so generations, like greenfly. But this was what I finally came up with.) Each of them had the same reproductive tract. There was an external organ consisting of a fold or pouch in the lower abdomen, lined with mucous membrane, holding an appendage called “the claw.” Beyond the porous inner wall of this pouch, known as “the cup,” extended a reservoir of potential embryos—something like the lifetime supply of eggs in human ovaries, but these eggs didn’t need to be fertilised. When one or other of the embryos was triggered into growth—not by any analogue of sexual intercourse but by an untraceable complex of environmental and emotional factors—the individual would become pregnant. The new baby, which would grow in the pouch like a marsupial infant until it was ready to emerge, would prove to be one of the three million or so genetically differentiated individuals in a reproductive group known as the “brood.” (I should point out that I’m going to use the human word “gene” and related terms throughout, for the alien analogues to these structures.) These same three million people, each one a particular chemically defined bundle of traits and talents, would be born again and again. In Aleutia you wouldn’t ask of a newborn baby, “Is it a boy or a girl?” You’d ask, “Who is it?” Maybe there’d be a little heelprick thing at the hospital, and then the midwife would tell you whether you’d given birth to someone famous, or someone you knew and didn’t like, or someone you vaguely remembered having met at a party once, in another lifetime.