Love between alien and human is, actually, an ancient topic. It occurs from 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 recast in modern times in terms of extraterrestrial life.

In all three of our stories for last week, humans have ventured away from earth to other planets to encounter the extraterrestrial. The question is why do we imagine these things? If the alien is the Other, than union with the Other is a way of connecting with something more than or other than ourselves, which is also the deepest most unknowable part of ourselves, the alien inside. [For more on this see "Angels, Faeries, and Aliens by Sophie Masson.] Sometimes, it seems to me, these stories exist also just for the delight in imagining beings different from ourselves, who, at first glance, have qualities we might wish for—unless we look more closely.

“When I Was Miss Dow” by Sonya Dorman

This story presents the experience of inter-species love from the alien perspective, and the species described here is in many ways an estranged, non-anthropomorphic creation. The alien natives are “a race of one sex only… rather amorphous beings …Protean, also, being able to take various shapes at will.” The protagonist is anxious to stress their commonality with other species: They spend their time “eating, recreating, attending races, and playing other games like most creatures.”

But in their species there is no sexual union: “Eventually we’re all dumped into the cell banks and reproduced once more.” There are thus no mothers, no prototype for physical love, no need for physical closeness. The only relations are known as Uncles. Human beings have come to their world as colonists, and the inhabitants take on human forms in order to procure “credits” (money?) and the addictive sulfas from these “hungry, mother-haunted people.”

The protagonist, a young member of the species, is ordered by his Uncle and an entity known as the Warden to take the shape of Miss Martha Dow, a botanist who will be the assistant to Dr. Arnold Proctor.

His Uncle and the warden want him to imitate humans more fully by forming two brain lobes to match the human mind. While not spelled out, there is science behind this description – the left and right brain, here described by Encarta: “Although the cerebrum is symmetrical in structure, with two lobes emerging from the brain stem and matching motor and sensory areas in each, certain intellectual functions are restricted to one hemisphere. A person’s dominant hemisphere [usually left] is… occupied with language and logical operations, while the other hemisphere controls emotion and artistic and spatial skills. “

The alien species posseses only one lobe, most similar to the left brain, stressing logic, scholarship, science, without much understanding of the right brain activities of human beings.

For as long as he is human, this double brain presents a problem for the protagonist. At first he is “in uncertain balance between myself and Martha Dow, who is also myself. But one does not have two lobes for nothing I discover.” Martha Dow must learn how to balance the two sides of her brain: “on the line between the darkness and the brightness it’s easiest to float…My balance is damaged. I never had to balance.”

Miss Dow is “charmed” by Dr. Proctor, her boss, whom she finds to be “a man of unusual balance…dedicated but agreeable.” She and Dr. Proctor become lovers. As they are about to become sexually involved she is unprepared for her feelings: “It’s all I can do to keep communications open between my brain lobes. I’m suffering from eclipses: one goes dark, the other lights up, that one goes dark, the other goes nova.” The two lobes make Miss Dow human in many ways. She finds herself experiencing what other human women have: “He’s not talking to me. He’s not caressing me. He’s forgotten I’m here, and like a false projection, I’m beginning to fade….If he doesn’t see me, then am I here?” In her case, these feelings have a reality beyond the human: he is the only human who knows her intimately as Miss Dow. His love gives her reality, in a sense, like his carving of the murger bird (a right brain activity) brings it into existence. But this dependence on the lover for one’s very existence is something felt by other beings, the human kind, in love.

In spite of this anxiety, she finds “that it’s good to cling to another.”

She is different from the other shape changers living among the humans, who possess only one lobe, enabling them to “tuck the Terran pattern into a corner of their own for handy reference” and “skip like pebbles over the surface of the colonists’ lives.” She begins to feel more and more that she doesn’t want to change shape, then that she “can’t be changed.” That “some impress of Martha’s pattern lies on my own brain cells…permanent damage which gives me joy….I want to be Martha.”

Another “character” in the story is Miss Dow’s “koota,” a doglike being bred for racing. Miss Dow cares for her koota the way humans care for their pets: “This koota has been my playmate and friend for a long time. She retains a single form, that of koota, full of love and beautiful speed; she has been a source of pleasure and pride.” But an Xray reveals that the koota carries the gene for osteo-arthritis, meaning she may go lame or “pass the defect on to some of her pups if she’s bred.”

As Dr. Proctor explains the koota’s genetic defect to Miss Dow, she notes that “sometimes the Doctor wears a head which resembles that of a koota, with a splendid muzzle and noble brow.” The koota is genetically flawed, and so, as it turns out, is Dr.Arnold Proctor. Their decline is paralleled. As time passes, she notices that Arnie looks more and more tired while “the koota no longer races on the wind-blown beaches.” Then comes Arnie’s fatal heart attack. Distraught Miss Dow asks her Uncle and the Warden to restore him to life, but they tell her this is impossible. She decides, “I am, really, just one of Arnie’s projections, a form on a screen in his mind. I am not, really, Martha. Though I tried.” Once he is dead, she literally ceases to exist as Miss Dow.

She returns to her home, lamenting what she has lost: “I can no longer float on the horizon between the two [lobes] because that horizon has disappeared.” She reverts to her “own free form” and lives in the cycle of day and night while “[t]he koota lies dreaming of races she has run in the wind. It is our life, and it goes on, like the life of other creatures,” the recurrence of an idea mentioned early in the story.

But in this created universe, the aliens are not like other creatures, either the koota or the humans.

As Miss Dow absorbs Terran history, she learns to enjoy comedy but then “While I float on the taut line, the horizon between light and dark, where it’s so easy, I begin to sense what is under the costumes.” She begins to understand the idea of tragedy. Her species has no tragedy: “In my species family relationships are based only on related gene patterns; they are finally dumped into the family bank, and a new relative is created from the old [….]The koota, her utility destroyed by a recessive gene, lies sleeping at my feet. Is this tragedy?”

This species has no recessive damaging genes, and no death as we know it. But the implication is that the lack of tragedy means a lack of true joy. “Miss Dow” has joyed in sexual love – something “she” cannot know as a member of her own species. “To see the truth, you must have light of some sort, but to see the light, you must have darkness of some sort.”

A complex and beautiful story, “When I Was Miss Dow” parallels the many myths of shape-changers or immortals who take human form and fall in love with mortals, though it ends less tragically for the protagonist (if not for Dr. Proctor) than the legends where often the nonhuman is killed, or gives up his immortality to live forever in the human world. Like the ancient myths this story pays homage to being human, as much SF does. We may not be able to change shape or live forever, we might be genetically flawed, but, mother-haunted though we may be and thus capable of tragedy, we can love.

“The Man Who Loved The Faioli” by Roger Zelazny

Here we have not one but two shape-shifters of sorts, two aliens, Dracula Meets The Femme Fatale. Zelazny was well-known for the use of myth in his writing (see website link above). The parallels between this story and other myths of human culture 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.”

While “Miss Dow” is a first “person” narrative, 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—" an oral 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 either take the shape of women or have this shape as their own (the story is deliberately ambiguous on this point). They 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 is dead but 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.” She 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.” 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.”

Having learned his secret, all too much woman, the Faioli’s curiosity is her undoing. She touches the spot beneath his armpit and he vanishes from her sight, for she cannot see the dead. The effect of his disappearance upon her makes actual the emotions felt by Miss Dow, who feared non-existence without the attentions of her lover. The Faioli “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.”

The immortal, John Auden, like Miss Dow, 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.” Like Miss Dow, he reverts to his former condition.

At the end of the story, he 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.” The use of “here” tells us that John Auden himself may be the narrator and that the Faioli have learned their lesson.

It’s interesting that in both stories one member of the couple ceases to exist--Arnold Proctor in "When I Was Miss Dow" and the Faioli. The protagonist/narrators are left behind. Love comes and goes.It’s best not to look at it too closely. We think it will do us in, but it rarely does (unless we are Faioli), though life without it may be less colorful.

How Beautiful With Banners by James Blish
Wherever we go—even if to the moons of Saturn or beyond, we take our selves with us. There is no escape.

Ulla is passionless, joyless, in her personal and professional life, a near automaton with a negative assessment of every aspect of her life. Her death on Titan is an emblem of the way she has lived. In her negativity, she is unaware of what is probably her greatest accomplishment -- that she has inadvertently caused an evolutionary change in a lifeform, by bringing to the planet the virus bubble suit, an entity which “if it did not actually think…often…almost seemed to.“ Not much is known about the flying cloaks of Titan—-one presumes the humans were too interested in their mining operation. After the cloak has wrapped itself around the bubble suit, Ulla speculates that the cloaks “were in some respect much like the bubbles. It was almost as though the one were a wild species of the other.”

As the cloak and the suit merge , she finds something “shockingly familiar” about it and recalls a “sordid little encounter” of her own. The experience is “a shock of recognition, but recognition of something she had never felt herself.” When the second cloak comes on the scene, she feels its anger and jealousy. Several times she feels like an eavesdropper, for she is not part of what is happening, just as she has never been. She “had a vague but persistent impression” that the various emotions she is feeling have been “imposed from outside, at least in part.” She also knows that the emotions' “real nature, whatever it was, had no necessary relevance to her own imprisoned soul.” She feels guilty for eavesdropping, for being “a mortal present at the mating of inhuman essences.”

She cannot fully accept this experience (when has she ever?) and keeps thinking of it as metaphor or “ancient and coincidental nonsense” having “as much truth as poetry.” But we, of course, know that poetry contains a lot of truth, that in the SF world emotions can be “imposed from outside” even if they also reflect a character’s suppressed passions. The bubble and the cloak merge into a new creature. Ulla had thought of the suit as “less satisfying” than human companionship but “much more reliable.” Of course she is wrong. She cannot offer the suit as much as the flying cloak does.

When the bubble-cloak deserts her to “sport” with the second cloak, she never has time to “regret what she had never felt, for she had never known it.” Her last thought is a feeling of betrayal : the virus bubble is to her not part of a new life form but a “philanderer.”

The two cloaks leave together to begin a clumsy courting ritual but above “[t]he banners of the rings flew changelessly,” a contrast to the “clumsy” changing world of courtship, begetting, and betrayal. The banners look down on everything as they always have “until nothing remained but the banners of their own mirrored beauty.” It is a cold inhuman beauty, an alien landscape where humankind does not belong and which we can never truly comprehend, only speaking of it in human terms.

Thus clothing imagery permeates this story as metaphor or intertextual reference: the bubble suit, the flying cloak, the shirt of Nessus; the "banners" of the rings are also metaphor for that which cannot be easily described. Saturn is the Roman god sometimes associated with promiscuous sex. References to the gods for which the planets and their moons are named enrich the texture of the story, adding a layer of human-imposed imagery to a situation without human meaning.

Ulla is the antithesis of the lovers –human or alien-- in the other two stories. While it’s true that it’s not good to examine love too closely with the rational mind, as painful as love may be, experience is, in the final analysis, better than cold isolation.

Week 12: Nov. 20—26
Michael Swanwick, "Legions in Time"
Robert Reed, “Hexagons”
EXTRA CREDIT John Wyndham, “Consider Her Ways.”