Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  So much for reproduction, but I needed to account for evolution. How could my serial immortals, born-again hermaphrodites, have come to be? How could they continue to adapt to their environment? It was a major breakthrough when I discovered that the brood was held together by a living information network. Every Aleutian had a glandular system constantly generating mobile cell-complexes called “wanderers” which were shed through the pores of the skin, particularly in special areas like the mucous-coated inner walls of the “cup.” Each wanderer was a chemical snapshot of the individual’s current emotional state, their status, experience, their shifting place in the whole brood entity: a kind of tiny self. The Aleutians would pick and eat “wanderers” from each other’s skin in a grooming process very like that which we observe in real-life apes, baboons, monkeys. To offer someone a “wanderer” would be a common social gesture: “Hello, this is how I am—.” Once consumed, the snapshot information would be replicated and shuttled off to the reproductive tract, where it would be compared with the matching potential embryo, and the embryo updated: so that the chemical nature of the person who might be born was continually being affected by the same person’s current life. It was a Lamarkian evolution, directly driven by environmental pressure, rather than by the feedback between environment and random mutation, but it looked to me as if it would work well enough. Nothing much would happen from life to life. But over evolutionary time the individual and the whole brood entity would be changing in phase: growing more complex, remembering and forgetting, opening up new pathways, closing down others. I noticed, when I was setting this up, that the environment to which my Aleutians were adapting was the rest of Aleutian society, at least as much as the outside world. But that’s another story. . .

  I had done away with sexual gender. But if I wanted a society that seemed fully developed to human readers, I couldn’t do without passion. I had no wish to create a race of wistful Spocks, or chilly fragments of a hive-mind. The Aleutians must not be deficient in personhood. Luckily I realised that the wanderer system gave me the means to elaborate a whole world of social, emotional and physical intercourse. The Aleutians lived and breathed chemical information, the social exchange of wanderers was essential to their well-being. But they would also be drawn, by emotional attachment, infatuation, fellow feeling or even a need to dominate, to a more intense experience: where the lovers would get naked and lie down together, cups opened and fused lip to lip, claws entwined, information flooding from skin to skin, in an ecstasy of chemical communication. They would fall in love with another self the way we—supposedly—fall in love with difference. Romantic souls would always be searching for that special person, as near as possible the same genetic individual as themselves, with whom the mapping would be complete.

  More revelations followed. The whole of Aleutian art and religion, I realised, sprang from the concept of the diverse, recurrent Self of the brood. Their whole education and history came from studying the records left behind by their previous selves. Their technology was based on tailored skin-secretions, essentially specialised kinds of wanderers. Their power to manipulate raw materials had grown not through conscious experiment or leaps of imagination, as ours is held to have developed, but by the placid, inchworm trial and error of molecular evolution. Arguably there was only one Aleutian species—if there had ever been more—since this process of infecting the physical world with self-similar chemical information had been going on for aeons. The entire Aleutian environment: buildings, roads, furniture, pets, beasts of burden, transport, was alive with the same life as themselves, the same self.

  Once I’d started this machine going, it kept throwing up new ideas. I realised their society was in some ways extremely rigid. Any serial immortal might be born in any kind of social circumstances. But no one could take on a new adult role in society or even retrain for a new job except over millennia of lifetimes. An Aleutian couldn’t learn to become a carpenter; or to be generous. You were either born with a chemically defined ability or it was not an option. Aleutians, being built on the same pattern as ourselves but with a highly conservative development programme, revert easily to a four-footed gait. This is good for scaring humans, who see intelligent alien werewolves leaping at them. The obligate cooks use bodily secretions to prepare food: a method quite acceptable in many human communities, where teeth and saliva replace motorised food mixers; and Aleutians use toilet pads to absorb the minor amount of waste produced by their highly processed diet. I made up this because I liked the image of the alien arriving and saying “Quickly, take me somewhere I can buy some sanitary pads. . .”; but then I noticed this was another aspect of the way they don’t have a sense of the alien. They don’t even go off by themselves to shit. Aleutians live in a soup of shared presence, they are the opposite of Cartesians. They have no horror of personal death (though they can fear it). But things that are intrinsically not alive—like electrons, photons, the image in a mirror or on a screen, they consider uncanny . . . I could go on, but I won’t. We’d be here forever. I believe the elaboration, the proliferation of consequences, could be continued indefinitely. It all goes to show, if anyone needed another demonstration, how much complexity, and what a strange illusion of coherence within that complexity, can be generated from a few simple, arbitrary original conditions.

  It’s said that the work of science fiction is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. I often find that what we do is to take some persistent fiction of contemporary human life, and turn it into science. By the time I’d finished this phase of the interrogation my Aleutians had all the typical beliefs and traditions of one of those caste-ridden, feudal, tropical societies doomed to be swept away by the gadget-building bourgeois individualists from the north. They were animists. They believed in reincarnation. They had no hunger for progress, no use for measurement or theory, no obsession with the passage of time. They were, in short, the kind of people we often wish we could be, except we’d rather have jet transport and microwave pizza.7 But in the Aleutians’ case, everything worked: and their massively successful ambient-temperature biotechnology was exactly tailored—as if by a malignant deity—to blow the mechanisers away. They were on course to take over a world, although they didn’t know it: not because they were sacred white-faced messengers from the Sun God or what have you, but because they were not weird. By chance they had arrived at the historical moment when that jaded mechanist paradigm was giving out, and they had the goods that everybody on earth was beginning to want. They could do things the locals could do themselves, they had skills the locals could well understand, and they were just that crucial half a move ahead of the game.

  Speech and silence

  I interrogated my aliens in the language of science, looking for differences that would work. Eventually I became uneasy about this process. If the Aleutians were in some sense “supposed to be women,” it was disquieting to note that I’d treated them exactly the way male-gendered medicine has treated human women until very recently indeed—behaving as if their reproductive system was the only interesting thing about them. I approached Aleutian speech and language with more humility, deliberately trying to remove the division between experimenter and experiment. I had travelled, fairly widely. I had been an alien in many contexts. Not least as a girl among the boys. I had observed that though the color of my skin and the shape of my chest would always be intriguing, I could often be accepted and treated like a person, as long as I made the right gestures. Wherever you go there will be bus-fares, light switches, supermarkets, airports, taps, power sockets, street food, tv cartoons, music cassette players, advertising hoardings, motorway landscape. Watch what the locals do, and you’ll soon adjust to the minor variations in the silent universal language.

  One can look on the sameness of the global village as an artefact of cultural imperialism, another bitter legacy of White European rule in all its forms. But I felt that these narrative signs of a single human life, repeated the world over, must be connected
to that animal-embodiment we all share, or they would not survive. I had invented new forms of difference, now I wanted to celebrate sameness. I made my Aleutians silent, like dumb animals, for many reasons, but first of all because I knew that I could pass for normal in foreign situations as long as I didn’t speak. And I made human body-language intelligible to them, on the grounds that just as our common humanity makes and recognises the same patterns everywhere, the aliens’ wordless natural language had been deeply shaped by the same pressures as have shaped the natural languages of life on earth. The whole biochemical spectrum is missing, from their point of view, because we have no wanderers, no intelligent secretions at all. But every human gesture that remains is as intelligible to them as another brood’s dialect of the common tongue that everyone shares at home. To make sure of my point I raised and dismissed the possibility that they were time-travellers returning to their forgotten planet of origin; and the other possibility that they had grown, like us, from humanoid seed sown across the galaxy by some elder race. They were an absolutely, originally different evolution of life. But they were the same because life, wherever it arises in our middle dimensions, must be subject to the same constraints, and the more we learn about our development the more we see that the most universal pressures—time and gravity, quantum mechanics; the nature of certain chemical bonds—drive through biological complexity on every fractal scale, from the design of an opposable thumb to the link between the chemistry of emotion and a set of facial muscles. This sameness, subject to cultural variation but always reasserting itself, was shown chiefly in their ability to understand us.

  In line with my model of Aleutians as “women,” and “native peoples,” it was right for them to be wary and rather contemptuous of spoken language. I wanted them to be silent like the processes of cell-biology, like social insects exchanging pheromone signals: and like larger animals conversing through grooming, nuzzling, eye-contact and gesture. I wanted the humans, convinced that the barrier between self and other was insurmountable except by magic, to be deeply alarmed by these seeming telepaths—the way characters in classic male-gendered science fiction are so absurdly impressed at an occult power they call empathy: whereby some superbeing or human freak can walk into a room and actually sense the way the other people there are feeling. (God give me strength: my cat can do that.) But I didn’t want to do away with spoken language altogether. Words are separation. Words divide. That is the work they do. I know this because I’ve felt it happen: whenever I open my mouth and speak, having been accepted as perfectly normal until that moment, and prove by my parlous accent and toddler’s vocabulary that I’m not French; or whenever I make a public, female-gendered statement in a male group. Everything else that we think we use language for, we can handle without what the Aleutians call “formal speeches.” But for the Aleutians not to have this separation, this means of stepping out of the natural cycles, would have made them less than people. So I invented a special class of Aleutians, the “signifiers,” who were obligate linguists the way other Aleutians were obligate food-processors or spaceship-builders. Of course they assimilated human articulate languages with dazzling speed. This is another of the space-fantasy clichés that I think has been unfairly derided. I wouldn’t be able to do it. But then, nobody would sign up an obligate monophone such as myself on a trading mission to another planet, would they?

  It also transpired that the aliens did have a kind of no-kidding alien-life-form telepathy for long distance contact: another proliferation of the wanderer system. But that’s another story. And there was no problem with the mechanics of speech, by the way. I gave them teeth and tongues and larynxes more or less like ours: why not?

  I had made the Aleutians into self-conscious intelligences who still manipulated their surroundings the way bacteria do it; or the simpler entities that spend their lives manufacturing and communicating inside our cells. In their use of all forms of language I elaborated on this conservatism. They were beings who had reached self-consciousness, and spoken language, without abandoning any of the chronological precursor communication media. All life on earth uses chemical communication; then comes gesture, and vocalization comes last. Humans have traded all the rest for words—so that we have to rediscover the meaning of our own non-verbal gestures, and the likely effect of the hormone laden scent-cells we shed, from self-help books full of printed text. To the Aleutians, by the way, this lack of control gives the impression that all humans have Tourette’s Syndrome: we’re continually babbling obscenities, shouting out tactless remarks, giving away secrets in the common tongue. I pictured my Aleutians like a troop of humanly intelligent baboons, gossiping with each other silently and perfectly efficiently, having subtle and complex chemical interactions: and just occasionally feeling the need to vocalise; a threat or boast or warning, a yell of “Look at me!” It only occurred to me later that I’d made the Aleutians very like feminist women in all this: creatures dead set on having it all, determined to be self-aware and articulate public people, without giving up their place in the natural world.

  But inevitably, insidiously the “signifier” characters, the aliens with the speaking parts, became an élite. I had already realised that I had to “translate” the wordless dialogue of Aleutian silent language into words on the page. In this I was up against one of the walls of make-believe. Science fiction is full of these necessary absurdities: I accepted it with good grace, the same way as I’d accepted the human body-plan, and used some funny direct speech marks to show the difference between spoken and unspoken dialogue, which the copy-editor didn’t like. But now I felt that the male-gendered mechanist-gadget world was sneaking back into power, with historical inevitability in its train, in the Trojan Horse of articulate language. I did everything I could to correct this. I began to point out the similarities between the Aleutian “silent” language, and our spoken word as it is used most of the time by most humans. I found myself listening to human conversations and noticing the gaps: the unfinished sentences, the misplaced words, the really startling high ratio of noise to signal. I realised that most of our use of language fulfils the same function as the grooming, the nuzzling, the skin to skin chemical exchange that other life-forms share, but which with us has become taboo except in privileged intimate relations. I further realised that everything humans “say” to each other, either in meaningful statements or in this constant dilute muttering of contact, is backed, just like Aleutian communication, by a vast reservoir of cultural and evolutionary experience. We too have our “soup of shared presence,” out of which genuinely novel and separate formal announcements arise rarely—to be greeted, more often than not, with wariness and contempt.

  Re-inventing the wheel is a commonplace hazard in science fiction. It makes a change to find one has re-invented post-structuralist psychology. I recognised, some time after the event, that in the Silence of Aleutia I had invented the unconscious in the version proposed by Lacan, the unspoken plenum of experience that is implicit in all human discourse. Then I understood that my “signifiers” represented not a ruling caste but the public face of Aleutia; and the Silent represented all those people who don’t want to “speak out,” who “just want to get on with their lives”: the group to which most of us belong, most of the time. In Aleutia, as in human life, the “signifiers” may be prominent figures. But who is really in charge? The intelligentsia, or the silent majority? Which is the puppeteer? The fugitive, marginal latecomer, consciousness? Or the complex, clever, perfectly competent wordless animal within?

  Convergent evolution

  It’s now several years since I started writing about the Aleutians, and nearly a decade since I first outlined the project. . . on a beach in Thailand, one warm August night in 1988. A lot of history has happened in that time, and much of it somehow affected the story. The 1989 revolutions in Europe made a great difference to White Queen. The war in the former Yugoslavia had a grim influence on the second episode, North Wind. The nature of our local low-intensit
y warfare in Northern Ireland has also had a part in shaping my fictional conflicts, while the third book, Phoenix Café, is bound to have a fin de siècle feel. I’ve read and shakily assimilated lots of popular science, and science itself has become more popular, so that concerns which were completely science-fictional and obscure when I began are now topics of general interest: and that’s made a difference too. Even the battle of the sexes has changed ground, both in my mind and in the real world. I’m not sure how much, if any, of my original plan survived. But this is okay. I intended to let the books change over time. I wanted things that happened at first contact to be viewed later as legends that couldn’t possibly be true. I wanted concerns that were vitally important in one book to have become totally irrelevant in the next. I wanted phlogiston and cold fusion in my science, failed revolutions and forgotten dreams in my politics. I thought that discontinuity would be more true to life than a three hundred years’ chunk of soap-opera, (or so, it’s difficult to say exactly how much time has passed, when the master race finds measurement boring) that ends with everybody still behaving the same as they did in episode one. It’s true to the historical model too. I don’t think anyone would deny that the European Empire builders had lost the plot, sometime long before that stroke of midnight in 1947, climactic moment in the great disengagement.