AUDIO 

Love between alien and human is, actually, an ancient topic. It occurs in early mythology in many cultures (perhaps all) in which nonhuman, other-wordly creatures visit the human world. Whether these are gods, goddesses, faeries, selke, and other creatures of the human imagination, these myths are often recast in modern times in terms of extraterrestrial life.   [For more on this see "Angels, Faeries, and Aliens ]

Up until now, our stories have been set on earth. Now we move farther afield. In our stories for last week, humans have ventured away from earth to other planets to encounter the extraterrestrial.  

 

“The Man Who Loved The Faioli” by Roger Zelazny  

Here we have not one but two aliens, both shape-shifters of sorts, Dracula Meets The Femme Fatale.  Zelazny was well-known for the explicit use of myth in his writing (see link above). The parallels between this story and other myths of human cultures are obvious. The Faioli bears marked resemblance to the mythological siren,  for instance,  a creature “half bird and half woman” whose songs deprived the sailors who heard it  "of their will to exist “ causing them to swim to the sirens’ island where they “lay listless upon the shore, utterly bewitched, until they wasted away. The shores. . . shined white in the sunlight - littered as they were with bleached bones.. . Such is the myth of the femme fatale in its elementary form.”

 Indeed,  Zelazny’s story seems a tale of the oral tradition, passed down by storytellers through the ages especially in the echoing “and no one knows it better than I.  Listen—" a device used to get the hearers’ attention and convince them of the skill and knowledge of the teller.  Like ancient legends, it is set in a timeless netherworld, but this one of the far future, “the graveyard for all the worlds” where are housed “the remains of people who once had lived.”

The Faioli herself is apparently one of a race of beings who travel among the stars searching for dying men to whom they bring one month of happiness, followed by oblivion as they suck the man’s life from him with a final fatal kiss. But this Faioli has met her match,  first in the world to which she comes where nothing lives (and the Faioli need life around them to exist and feed off of).  And next in the person of her would-be victim, John Auden.

John, we are told,  has spent over one thousand years in existence.  He lives a kind of death-in-life as a sort of cyborg, whose human faculties have been replaced for unknown reasons. He can, through touching a place “beneath his left armpit,"  activate “the necessary mechanism to make him live again.”  Though he is the one man in the universe who can fool the Faioli, being neither alive nor dead,  he is cursed with “a thing called disease that battens upon all living things, and he had known it beyond the scope of all living men.”   

 The Faioli realizes that he is different:  “you take life almost like one of the Faioli.” He tells her that he lives a “life within death”: “I asked for it because I feared oblivion. I volunteered to be gravekeeper to the universe, because in this place there are none to look upon me and be repelled by my deathlike appearance,”  an appearance possibly caused by the unnamed disease which has plagued him. Having spent a month of pleasure with her, he decides he is now at last ready to die.  “Kiss me," he says, “and end it.”

Now, like Eve or Pandora, and other women that patriarchy blames for all the ills of the world,  the Faioli’s curiosity is her undoing. If only she hadn’t wondered about him!  She touches the spot beneath his armpit and he vanishes from her sight, for she cannot see the dead.

The immortal, John Auden,  once he is in his other state “knew once again the icy logic that stood apart from emotion. Because of this, he did not touch upon the critical spot once again.”  With rationality and not romance now ruling him, he no longer wishes to die by her fatal kiss. He does not reappear to her.

The effect of his disappearance seems to be fatal to the Faioli.  She “sobbed once, horribly, as she had on that night when first he had seen her....her face dissolved and her body slowly melted.  The tower of sparks that stood before him then vanished.”   Has she simply vanished from human sight and moved on,  or is she destroyed?  We don’t know, but other similar myths suggest she has ceased to exist.

Some love is destructive – the obsessive kind. We all know that. This is where the myths of 

vampires – male or female—come from. The 19th century English poet John Keats, for reasons 

known only to himself,  was very good at describing this.  The knight in “La Belle Dame Sans 

Merci” is found wandering a "cold hill side," deathly pale, fading away as the flowers are fading. 

He has encountered a beautiful “faery’s child.” He feels sure,but doesn’t know since they don’t 

speak the same language, that she loves him. However, in  a dream her victims appear to him 

and warn him that she “hath thee in thral,.” that is, enslaved. He sees their “starved lips” and “death-pale” 

faces “in horrid warning gaping wide.” He awakens to coldness and lingering death. 

Such is not John Auden’s fate, since  his ability to return to his death-in-life state gives him a 

shield against lady vampires.

But Keats wrote another poem broaching the same subject matter, “Lamia.” 

 A lamia was a mythical creature half woman and half snake. In the poem she is loved by a 

young man,  Lycius.   He does not see her as she is (what lover does see his beloved 

accurately?) until the philosopher Apollonius reveals her nature to him: .  

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

 ….

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.[….]

Then Lamia breath'd death breath; the sophist's eye,

Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly,

Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well

As her weak hand could any meaning tell,

Motion'd him to be silent; vainly so,

He look'd and look'd again a level - No!

"A Serpent!" echoed he; no sooner said,

Than with a frightful scream she vanished:

In the poem, Lycius dies as well. But at the end of the “The Man Who Loved the Faioli,” John is still there, still in his state of death-in-life since “no cure has ever been found” for his disease. The last paragraphs of the story hint at the identity of the teller who repeats his initial claim that “no one knows it [the story] better than I” and further reveals that “I know that he [John] walks the Canyon of the Dead and considers the bones, sometimes stops by the rock where he met her, wonders at the judgment that he gave.” In his last sentence he reveals that Faioli “never come here any more.” One cannot blame them. The use of “here” tells us that John Auden himself may be the narrator and that the Faioli have learned their lesson.

It is significant that John “wonders at the judgment that he gave.” He is not sure that his choice 

to stay in this perpetual state of death-in-life was for the best.   In other words, reason can be 

destructive to certain kinds of passionate love. It is possible to be rational and talk yourself out 

of love.  As soon as he is no longer human (through the Faoili’s curious touch--she also 

looked too closely), he gains a rationalistic perspective on the whole thing. He had been

ready to die for love – but now he doesn’t want to. He withdraws from her (literally invisible) and 

she like Lamia vanishes. The spell is broken.  And John is left in a state of death in life. 

No one wins. 

“Blood Child” by Octavia Butler

Other kinds of fatal attraction are broached in this story.  Love is blind,  childbirth is dangerous.  Political realities exist in which we pretend that all is well while the reality is decidedly different.

The story told by Gan opens with his characterization of it as his “last night of childhood.”   He “lay against T'Gatoi's long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then […]. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor.”   The sterile Tlic eggs induce a drug-like pleasure and are something that the Tlic can give the Terrans to mitigate the realities of their situation.

Like a man plying a woman with drink, T’Gatoi, who is ready to impregnate Gan, insists that Gan have a whole egg for himself, remarking that he is too thin.  We don’t understand why she says this yet and she seems pleasing, with her “long velvet underside."  It is only with the mention of  “several of T'Gatoi's limbs” that we realize how alien she is. It gets worse.  She has at least six or seven limbs.  She stings human to help them sleep. She is much larger than Gan. She has “bones - ribs, a long spine, a skull, four sets of limb bones per segment.” She makes clicking sounds when she walks and hisses when she’s upset.

But Gan has known her since infancy, and to him, unlike to his mother and brother, she is familiar and comforting. He even finds her aesthetically pleasing: “But when she moved that way, twisting, hurling herself into controlled falls, landing running, she seemed not only boneless, but aquatic [….] I loved watching her move.”   Social conditioning will cover over many harsh realities -- just as in our world, where sexual attraction blinds us to the nature of the person we love in order  that the human race may continue.

The horrific experience of seeing Lomas cut open and the writhing red worms removed from his body causes Gan to reevaluate.  T’gatoi seems suddenly alien: "What are you?" he asks her. “What are we to you?"

It is ironic that the humans from earth (Terra) have come to the Tlics’ planet to escape persecution and enslavement from their own kind but used to kill Tlic  “as  worms.”  Then, even more ironically, they find themselves imprisoned again, confined to reservations and used for their abilities to host the Tlic's grub-like young.  (Serves them right?)

But the worst of inter-species strife is in the past. The fact that conditions have improved for the Terrans and that T’Gatoi is a kind of liberator for them who has made their relationships with the Tlic far more consensual does not erase the ugly fact that this is not a relationship among equals. This ambivalence is reflected in Gan’s own feelings: he thinks of himself as participating freely but also does not protest when his brother calls him a “host animal.”

This ambivalence is reflected in the larger political situation:  T’Gatoi  “parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people.”

Further signs that this is not a relationship between equals is symbolized by the presence of the hidden guns in the house of Gan’s family. The Terrans are not permitted to have them. After Gan’s aborted threat of suicide, T’Gatoi moves to take his gun but Gan insists on keeping it: “If we're not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner."

“It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was old enough to have seen what guns could do to people.”  

That T’gatoi does let go of the gun is sign of a steadily improving relationship between the two species.  In the end, because of  his love for T’Gatoi but also to shield his sister from the ordeal, Gan agrees to host T’Gatoi’s young. 

The relationship between the Tlic and Terrans is symbiotic: the Tlic acquire the perfect hosts for their children; the humans acquire protection from sympathetic Tlic such as T’Gatoi who understand that they are not simply host animals. But the Terrans possess little real power in the situation. Is it also so for women? We think of marriage and childbirth as “natural” experiences that define "womanhood."  By assigning the ordeal to men, Butler makes us look at it afresh.

SF is adept at making the familiar strange. In this story human reproduction and relations between genders – and between races -- are looked at from a new perspective.