Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor

by Peter Watts

  Thirty-three years later, Ridley Scott shone a light into the darkness. He peeled away that skeletal shroud and showed us what lurked underneath: just a regular dude with big muscles and albinism, as it turned out. Mr. Clean without the earring. And with that one reveal, Scott took all that was mysterious and compelling and fearful about the monster under the bed, and reduced it to utter banality.

  The scene itself is almost meta—because when you scale it up, that’s pretty much what Prometheus does to the entire Alien franchise.

  If you haven’t checked out Caitlin’s review yet, you should: it’s concise and thoughtful and right on the money in terms of the broad missteps that make Prometheus sputter on its narrative cylinders. But perhaps the one grand achievement that this movie might lay claim to is, its failings are too vast and too numerous to be contained within the limits of any one review. It will take squads, entire platoons of reviewers to properly pick apart these bones. I only hope that I, along with the half of the internet that also happens to be weighing in, am up to the task.

  Where to begin?

  How about at the very first shot, where a naked alabaster oxygen-breathing humanoid strolls about on a planet that doesn’t have any oxygen in its atmosphere (i.e. prebiotic Earth). He drinks of a literal Cup of Life; dissolves; topples into Earth’s water cycle, where the soup of his dissolution forms the basis of all life on the planet. We know this, jumping ahead a few billion years, because we humans turn out to be an exact genetic match with said alabaster dude. Meaning that:

  1. Every earthly life form from the Archaea on down has exactly the same genotype—has had the same genotype for 4.5 billion years, in fact—and everything anybody ever discovered about genes from Mendel on down was wrong; or

  2. Different earthly clades do have divergent genotypes, but our particular twig on the tree (and none other) just happened to end up converging back to an exact match on the primordial soup after four and a half billion years of independent mutation, divergence and reticulation on its own (oh, and everything anybody ever discovered about genes from Mendel on down was wrong); or

  3. Everybody who ever had a hand in developing the screenplay for Prometheus dropped out of school after grade three, never watched a single episode of Animal Planet or CSI, and stuck their fingers in their ears and hummed real loud whenever anyone at a cocktail party talked about science. And everything Damon Lindelhof thinks he might have overheard somewhere about genes is wrong.

  These are pretty big lapses to encounter in the first ten minutes of any so-called “science fiction” film—much less one from someone as genre-defining as Ridley Scott—and yet I feel a little silly even bringing them up, because so many of the broader storytelling elements are such a mess. When the Challenger blows up, you don’t waste your time complaining about its paint job. But beyond Sweet et al.’s observations about the lack of dramatic tension, the lack of mystery, the lack of story , science does play a disproportionate role here. Alien was about a bunch of truckers on a lonely monster-haunted highway; Aliens, about a bunch of jarheads rediscovering, to their shock and awe, the nastier lessons of Viêt Nam. Prometheus is about a scientific expedition, for fuckssake—and while Aliens director James Cameron cared enough about verisimilitude to put his actors through a couple weeks’ basic military training, it’s blindingly obvious that Scott couldn’t be bothered to ensure that his “scientists” knew the difference between a gene and a bad joke. Much less anything about science as

  So nobody thinks it remarkable when an archaeologist performs micro-necro-neurosurgery or runs a genetic analysis—anybody with an ologist on their resumé has gotta be a whiz at everything from microbiology to global general relativity, right? We’re shown a biologist who uses the word “Darwinism” as though it were a legitimate scientific term and not a dig invented by creationists: the same biologist who, in the penultimate act of a profoundly undistinguished career, runs with his tail between his legs at the sight of the first actual alien the Human race has ever encountered, even though it’s been dead for thousands of years. Then, a few hours later, watches a live serpentine alien perform what’s pretty obviously a threat display—and tries to pet it.

  And yet, idiotic though that biologist may be, the scientist in me can’t really take personal offense because nobody in this shiny train wreck has a clue, from the pilot to the aliens to an on-board medical pod that, honest-to-God, is Not Configured for Females (unless that was supposed to be some kind of ham-fisted comment on gender politics?). Nobody bothers with any kind of orbital survey prior to landing (blind luck is always the best way to locate artefacts that could be anywhere on the surface of a whole bloody planet—although that’s downright plausible next to being able to find a multi-mooned gas giant from 34 lightyears away, based on a prehistoric game of tic-tac-toe someone scratched into a cave wall during the last ice age). A survey team goes charging into an unexplored alien structure and takes off their helmets the moment someone says “oxygen.” Their captain leaves the bridge unattended for a quick fuck, right after informing two crew members stranded in the bowels of said structure that an unknown life-form is popping in and out of sensor range just down the hall from them. The lead’s love interest notices an alien worm doing a quick tap-dance on his own cornea, then suits up for EVA without telling anyone. David the android does a pretty good pre-enactment of Ash’s later subterfuge in Alien by using his flesh-and-blood crewmates as incubators for this week’s infestation—for no reason I could see, since the standing orders that motivate Ash can’t possibly have been coded yet (nobody even knows about these aliens, or any others, prior to planetfall). And the “Engineers”—ancient godlike beings who act across billion-year timescales and give life to worlds—haven’t figured out how to make biohazard Tupperware that doesn’t breach the moment someone comes through the front door.

  Not, granted, that all that black goo really can be contained, not by any plausible bioware facility (although you do have to wonder why, if the stuff really was such a handful, the Engineers didn’t just take off and nuke the site from orbit). The stuff seems to spin a roulette wheel to decide what it’s going to be at any given time: kraken, mealworm, biologist-eating cobra. At one point it acts as some kind of zombifying-and-reprogramming agent, reanimating the corpse of a dead geologist and sending him back to the mothership to flail around like Jason Voorhees on So You Think You Can Dance. Biological containment measures are doomed to fail because this McGuffin is not limited by any plausible biological constraints.

  I see that over on io9, my buddy Dave Williams describes the Engineer’s goo as a “DNA accelerant”1. I don’t know what that is; maybe it’s a product of “Darwinism.” I’d be more inclined to suggest that it simply exhibits whatever arbitrary characteristics the plot requires at any given moment, except for the fact that Prometheus doesn’t seem to have a plot. None of those iterations seem to tie into a coherent biological model; none of those incidents seem to connect narratively to any other. It’s as if some lazy DM showed up for a night of Dungeons & Dragons without having actually planned a campaign, and just threw a bunch of random encounters at the players hoping they wouldn’t notice.

  Of course, those who champion the film don’t do so on the basis of its science. It’s not about the science, they would say, it’s about the Big Questions. (I wonder how such folks would react if the producers of Master & Commander had followed the same logic, decided that since the heart of the story was the human relationships, why not just let Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany bob around the tropics in water wings and not worry about all that nineteenth-century nautical trivia?) I admit to half the point; I admit that Prometheus is not a movie especially interested in science. I do not concede, however, that it is a movie about Big Questions: that would put it into the realm of philosophy, and the script lacks anywhere near sufficient rigor to qualify on that score. Philosophy does more than throw a bunch of what-ifs at the wall and leave them sticking there like overcooked pasta. It doesn’t just ra
ise questions, it engages them. It grapples. Prometheus just takes its what-ifs and stuffs them into a hundred-million-dollar fortune cookie.

  Which makes it not a work of science or of philosophy, but of religion. It may mouth the Big Questions, but the answers it provides are downright inane. And you have to take everything else on faith.

  1 http://io9.com/5919306/another-theory-about-the-meaning-of-prometheus

  Motherhood Issues

  Nowa Fantastyka Nov 2011

  How many times have you heard new parents, their eyes bright with happy delirium (or perhaps just lack of sleep), insisting that you don’t know what love is until you first lay eyes on your baby? How many of you have reunited with old university buddies who have grown up and spawned, only to find that mouths which once argued about hyperspace and acid rain can’t seem to open now without veering into the realm of child-rearing? How many commercials have you seen that sell steel-belted radials by plunking a baby onto one? How many times has rational discourse been utterly short-circuited the moment someone cries “Please, someone think of the children!”? (I’ve noticed the aquarium industry is particularly fond of this latter strategy, whenever anyone suggests shutting down their captive whale displays.)

  You know all this, of course. You know the wiring and the rationale behind it: the genes build us to protect the datastream. The only reason we exist is to replicate that information and keep it moving into the future. It’s a drive as old as life itself. But here’s the thing: rutting and reproduction are not the traits we choose to exalt ourselves for. It’s not sprogs, but spirit, that casts us in God’s image. What separates us from the beasts of the field is our minds, our intellects. This, we insist, is what makes us truly human.

  Which logically means that parents are less human than the rest of us.

  Stick with me here. Yes, all of us are driven by brainstem imperatives. We are all compromised: none of us is a paragon of intellect or rationality. Still, some are more equal than others. There is a whole set of behavioral subroutines that never run until we’ve actually pupped, a whole series of sleeper programs that kick in on that fateful moment when we stare into our child’s eyes for the first time, hear the weird Middle Eastern Dylan riffs whining in our ears, and realize that holy shit, we’re Cylons.

  That is the moment when everything changes. Our children become the most important thing in the world, the center of our existence. We would save our own and let ten others die, if it came to that. The rational truth of the matter—that we have squeezed out one more large mammal in a population of seven billion, which will in all likelihood accomplish nothing more than play video games, watch American Idol, and live beyond its means until the ceiling crashes in—is something that simply doesn’t compute. We look into those bright and greedy eyes and see a world-class athlete, or a Nobel Prize-winner, or the next figurehead of global faux-democracy delivered unto us by Diebold and Halliburton.

  We do not see the reality, because seeing reality would compromise genetic imperatives. We become lesser intellects. The parental subroutines kick in and we lose large chunks of the very spark that, by our own lights, makes us human.

  So why not recognize that with a new political movement? Call it the “Free Agent Party,” and build its guiding principles along the sliding scale of intellectual impairment. Those shackled by addictions that skew the mind—whether pharmaceutically, religiously, or parentally induced—are treated the same way we treat those who have yet to reach the age of majority, and for pretty much the same reasons. Why do we deny driver’s licenses and voting privileges to the young? Why do we ban drunks from the driver’s seat? Because they are not ready. They are not competent to make reasonable decisions. Nobody questions this in today’s society. How are offspring addicts any different?

  I’m trying to slip such a political movement to the noisy (and slightly satirical) background of the novel I’m currently writing—but the more I think of it, the more it strikes me as an idea whose time has come. It’s a no-lose electoral platform as far as I can see. And of course, parenthood is just the beginning. If we ban parents from voting because of impaired judgment, what do we do about horny voters? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve made some very stupid decisions in the quest to get laid.

  But then celibates would be out too: even though they aren’t having sex, they will at least be distracted mightily by unfulfilled urges (assuming they’re not senescent). Oh, and the senescent—that’s another group we don’t want making too many decisions. Failing memories, Alzheimer’s, you name it.

  So who’s left? By now our voting pool is down to chemically-castrated non-parents whose sex drives have been hormonally suppressed. Oh, and we should suppress the survival instinct too, since any brainstem-equipped mammal is going to irrationally value its own life over the good of society as a whole (a fact that Heinlein touched upon in his classic YA novel Starship Troopers).

  Which rules out everybody except potential suicides. Except suicidal depression also impairs judgment. So that leaves . . . that leaves . . .

  You know something? We just gotta do away with this whole voting thing entirely . . .

  The Halting Problem.

  Blog Nov 17 2013

  You know you’re asking for it. When you turn down the kittens, because everybody and their dog adopts kittens. When you seek out the battered one-eared guys with pumpkin breath and rotten teeth and FIV, the old bruisers who’ve spent their lives on the street because who else is gonna give them a home? Even when you get lucky—when the stray on your doorstep is only a few months old and completely healthy, not so much as a flea on the fur and her whole life stretching out before her—even then you know you’re asking for it, because the very best-case scenario only lasts a couple of decades before her parts wear out and she grinds painfully to a halt in a random accumulation of system failures. You know, and you do it anyway. Because you’re a dumb mammal with an easily-hacked brain, and if you don’t step up who else will?

  It was Chip, this time. I called it back when Banana died, I said Chip would probably be next to go. And I can’t really complain, because we thought he was going to die back in 2011. But here it is, almost the end of 2013, and the patchy little fuzzbot was alive right up to 3:30 yesterday afternoon. He’d be alive right now if we hadn’t killed him, although the vet says he wouldn’t be enjoying it.

  You really hope they’re not lying to you when they say things like that. You wonder how they even know.

  I didn’t even know his name at first. He was just this weird hostile cat who’d sneak in from outside, bolt through my living room and down the hall, and hide under my bed. I called him Puffy Patchy White Cat, with that poetic and lyrical imagination for which I have become so renowned.

  Puffy Patchy White Cat hated my guts. He’d shoot past me en route to his underbed fort, and he’d hiss and spit whenever I bent down to look at him under there. He just wanted the territory. I have no idea why. How many children lie awake at night, fearful of predatory monsters beneath the bed? I lived that dream. I would fall asleep to the growls and hisses of some misanthropic furball just the other side of the mattress, lurking and fuming for reasons I could not fathom.

  This went on for months before his Human finally showed up at my door, looking to dump him. Told me that Puffy Patchy White Cat’s name was “Chip,” and that he’d be at the Humane Society within twenty-four hours if nobody was willing to take him. What could I say? The fuzzbot was already spending half his time at the Accursed Apartment; I was going to see him incarcerated, maybe killed, just because he wanted to claw my eyes out?

  The day after I said yes I saw Chip’s Human rolling a dolly full of personal effects past my living room window. Chip ran in his wake, mewing piteously: what’s going on where are you taking all my stuff where are we going what’s happening why won’t you talk to me? That two-legged asshole never slowed, never looked back. The service elevator closed behind him and Chip was alone.

  He spent th
at night, like all the others, under my bed. For once he didn’t growl, didn’t hiss, didn’t make a sound.

  By the next day he had decided I was his bestest friend. I went into the kitchen and he jumped up on the fridge, started bonking me with that trademark head-butt that is the hallmark of slutty cats everywhere, but which Chip somehow made his own. I fed him. Banana shrugged and made room for another bowl in the house.

  In the years since, Chip worked unceasingly to win the title of Toronto’s Priciest Cat. Unused to playing with others, suddenly absorbed into a five-cat household, he peed chronically and expensively on a succession of carpets and towels. The insides of his ears sprouted clusters of grotesque, blueberry-like growths filled with a bloody, tar-like substance that blocked off the canal and provoked a series of infections that smelled like cheese. We had them surgically removed. They grew back. We took him out to a secret government lab in Lake Scugog, spent a couple thousand dollars having his ears lasered clean of tumors. Called him “Miracle Ears” when he came back with perfect pink shells where all that corruption used to be. Groaned when it reappeared yet again, six months later.

  A few years back, when he inexplicably went off his food, we spent three grand exploring a lump in his abdomen that the vet said was consistent with cancer. (It turned out to be gas.) He also had chronic tachycardia, which translated into a lifetime prescription for pricey little blue pills called Atenolol.