Postmodernism
Times change; education, scientific discoveries, political upheavals, and life
experience change people and whole cultures and make them view the world differently than the
generations which precede them.
Going back a few hundred years, mid-eighteenth century Europe was the scene of a movement known as the Enlightenment. The basic assumption of Enlightenment thinkers was that an objective truth existed which could be found by rationality and empirical science and that human culture was moving in a positive direction. But during the 20th century with its various disillusionments, many artists and philosophers came to question these ideas. Often art itself, with its possibility of giving order and affirming meaning, was enthroned as a solution to the threat of meaninglessness. In the late twentieth century the reaction against so-called “modern” thought came to be known as postmodernism. Postmodern writers and other artists reject “grand narratives,” the stories "told by every culture to explain its belief systems.” Early SF embraced these narratives: as Julie Phillips writes in her biography of James Tiptree, Jr., “[i]n the early days the genre had a strong positivist strain: rational man, represented by the white-coated scientists, could always defeat the monstrous alien threat”(James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006, 45). In one of our stories, the threat cannot be defeated; in the other, there is no threat.
People who write generally read.Almost all literature of any sort depends on what has gone before. SF always reflects the time in which it is written as well as playing off against its predecessors.Both stories that we read last week skewer ideas of grandiosity – whether the greatness be attributed to human beings, aliens, or both. Experts within the stories present us with increasingly correct explanations of the events which have taken place. In both stories, the last explanation is the most plausible, for this is fiction, not real life, and the stories are constructed as mysteries which are gradually solved.
“The Screwfly Solution” by Raccoona Sheldon
This is a classic, often-anthologized tale by one of the first women science fiction writers, Alice Sheldon. She wrote her early stories as James Tiptree Jr., and her identity as a woman wasn’t widely known until the 1970s.Before that time it was difficult for women SF writers to be published. SF has changed since the early days. It had been seen as an exclusively masculine genre. But “with its metaphors for alienation and otherness […] it is highly suited for talking about women’s experience” (Phillips, 5). In Childhood’s End instead of white-coated scientists we get Overlords as the embodiment of reason and science. There are no important female characters except Jean Greggson, the perfect wife and mother, who is important only because of the child she gives birth to. In this story, a woman plays a central role and the story extrapolates from actual injustices against womento frightening conclusions.
The story begins with a letter from Anne, a professor at the University of Michigan, to her husband Alan, a biologist:
I stay busy-busy with the Ann Arbor grant review programs and the seminar, saying brightly, "Oh yes, Alan is in Colombia setting up a biological pest control program, isn't it wonderful?" But inside I imagine you being surrounded by nineteen-year-old raven-haired cooing beauties.
This short passage subtly broaches the story's major concerns: male vulnerability to sexual urges and“biological pest control”,, “the use of one organism to subdue another.”
This story is composed of many different but connected sections, presenting alternative explanations for the horrible events taking place, eventually worldwide, while the main narrative focuses on Alan's experiences, excerpts from Anne’s letters, and a brief excerpt from Amy’s diary, ending with Anne’s final letter to Barney. Other material is inserted into these narratives not only to establish an air of authenticity to the events, but as a technique often necessary in SF to present the information necessary to the story:
“Science fiction has one particular, unshared problem: the need to set out the ‘rules of the game,’ the precise and novel nature of each story’s individual universe … as well as getting on with telling the story itself. … The reader has to be given some clues about how to decode the story....With science fiction there is always a problem of information.” (Tom Shippey, xvi.)
The “hard science” information is conveyed to us by means of newspaper stories, interviews, reports, and excerpts from articles in Nature. These offer us many possible explanations for “femicide." We first hear of it as a localized threat as Anne writes Alan: “Everything is just about as you left it, except that the Peedsville horror seems to be getting worse. They're calling it the Sons of Adam cult now.”
Barney--Dr. Bernhard Braithewaite-- presents the next hint in the packet of information he asks Anne to include in her letter:He has found that the massacres of women are all occurring in the tropical convergence zone. He is also happy because his own biological pest control program is paying off – he has found an ecologically safe method of controlling the spruce budworm .That his two concerns are linked has not yet occurred to him.
The last paragraph of Anne’s letter mentions their daughter Amy and sets up the typical inner family conflict: “I'll miss her frightfully in spite of her being at the stage where I'm her worst enemy. The sullen sexy subteens [...] Amy sends love to her Daddy.” Thus we get a brief snapshot of the budding teenager whoopenly prefers her father to her mother.
Alan's next letter from Anne tells him that the murders of women are spreading but “nobody seems to be doing anything, as if it's just too big” and also “because the media have been asked to down-play it.” An enclosure from Barney contains the horrific unpublished report from Peedsville, showing the spreading and horrendous behavior on the part of a religious sect, the members of whom think it is a command from God. Barney feels and Alan agrees that “this murderous crackpot religion […] was a symptom, not a cause. Barney believed something was physically affecting the Peedsville men, generating psychosis, and a local religious demagog had sprung up to ‘explain’ it.”
By the next time Anne writes, the spread of murderous violence against women has worsened and the phenomenon has a trendy name:
So many places seem to have just vanished from the news, [….] And nobody's doing anything. They talked about spraying with tranquilizers for awhile and then that died out. What could it do? Somebody at the U.N. had proposed a convention on—you won't believe this—femicide.
The next official information we get, again from Barney, is the Report from the Ad Hoc Emergency Committee on Femicide that Anne had mentioned.They believe “femicide” is “a recurrence of similar outbreaks by some group or sect which are not uncommon in world history in times of psychic stress. In this case the root cause is undoubtedly the speed of social and technological change.”The committee treats the rampage as if it is a temporary condition that will run its course and suggests refugee camps and counseling.
Barney signs the minority report from the committee which maintains that “the geographical relation of the focal areas of outbreak strongly suggest that they cannot be dismissed as purely psychosocial phenomena. The initial outbreaks have occurred around the globe near [...] the area of principal atmospheric downflow of upper winds coming from the Intertropical Convergence Zone.” In other words, some agent has entered the earth’s atmosphere from “upper winds.” Watching the shifting of the winds is at least a way to anticipate the course of the disease. But no one is listening and no action will be taken. We believe Barney, who throughout the story has revealed himself as highly intelligent and trustworthy.
The story shifts to Alan’s discovery of his own illness followed by the report from "Professor Ian" who now explains how the agent could affect human males:
“It seems therefore appropriate to speculate that the present crisis might be caused by some substance, perhaps at the viral or enzymatic level, which effects a [….] failure of mating behaviour to modify or supervene over the aggressive/predatory response; i.e., sexual stimulation would produce attack only, the stimulation discharging itself through the destruction of the stimulating object.
We now know what is happening and why it is happening, butit is not until the end that we knowwho is responsible: aliens want our planet but want to rid it of our presence. They do to us what we have done to insects, looking, like good scientists, for “the vulnerable link in the behavioral chain,” as Barney advised Alan to do in his work against the cane fly larva in Cuyapan or like Barney‘s work on the spruce budworm. By the end of the story we have heard rumors of angels.Then Anne sees one and realizes it is an alien life form when “it sort of bentover and picked up something, leaves or twigs, I couldn't see. Then it did something with them around its middle, like putting them into an invisible sample-pocket.” In her last letter to Barney she reiterates “Let me repeat—it was there. Barney, if you're reading this, THERE ARE THINGS HERE. And I think they've done whatever it is to us. Made us kill ourselves off.”`
How do we know that this is the “correct” explanation? The ordering of information presented in the story leads up to Anne’s final insight as she is waiting for the right time to kill herself:
“Why? Well, it's a nice place, if it wasn't for people. How do you get rid of people? Bombs, death-rays—all very primitive. Leave a big mess. Destroy everything, craters, radioactivity, ruin the place.
“This way there's no muss, no fuss. Just like what we did to the screwfly. Pinpoint the weak link, wait a bit while we do it for them.
Her last words “I think I saw a real-estate agent”are a touch of macabre humor.
We are not sure why Barney appears to be exempt from the plague. He is presented throughout the story as shy with women, and perhaps in him sexual impulses were stifled a long time ago.A similar exception has perhaps occurred in the old man who calls Anne “boy” for show, but recognizes that she is a woman in hiding. That even Barney may not be safe is suggested when Anne writes “All the time you were cutting off my hair and rubbing dirt on my face, I knew it was right because it was you. Barney I never thought of you as those horrible words you said. You were always Dear Barney.”Barney at least has time to help Anne escape. But it is a futile gesture. Anne is possibly the last woman left alive and has no chance at survival.
We are exterminated through the alien ability to capitalize on our primary weakness as a species -- a weakness shared by many terrestrial species --the link between male sexuality and aggression. It is particularly ghastly because we know the link is there—-and here we read that even a decent loving man like Alan smiles to himself as he thinks of his daughter and takes a salacious side in the mother-daughter struggle: “the memory of that prepubescent little body plastered against him. She was going to be a handful, all right. His manhood understood Amy a lot better than her mother did.” He also realizes that there has always been an element of violence in his relationship with his wife Anne: “Yes; much of their loveplay could be viewed as genitalized, sexually-gentled savagery. Play-predation.”
We are also aware of the perils of religious fanaticism and what it has done to women so far in our real world. In the story, there is not much distance between the Sons of Adam cult –“When man gets rid of his animal part which is woman,this is the signal God is awaiting. Then God will reveal the new true clean way, maybe angels will come bringing new souls, or maybe we will live forever, but it is not our place to speculate, only to obey” -- and the later declaration by a cardinal at the Vatican, not a cult religion this time, but an organized worldwide one: “The Scriptures define woman as merely a temporary companion and instrument of Man. Women . . . are nowhere defined as human, but merely as a transitional expedient or state. The time of transition to full humanity is at hand.” The misogyny that overpowers the world here has been part of major western religions for a long time – has permeated history and is still present in our own time, where it is often implied that to be fully human, one must be male.
Anne laments several times sentiments such as “nobody seems to be doing anything” and we think of events today which shock us at first hearing and then are neutralized by repetition – genocide, torture, government corruption and interference in the lives of citizens as well as governmental failures in the face of emergency; the inadequate responses of bureaucracy which pretends to solve problems by forming committees and writing reports. These aspects of the story are chilling because they are real.
The story reflects the time in which it is written, a time of increasing concern about the treatment of women in our societies. There has also been a shift in our evaluation of ourselves as a species, following, in the US and Western Europe, the triumph of victory in the Second World War.By the time Arthur Clarke wrote Childhood’s End, we are no longer the scourge of the universe. Instead we are outranked by two superior alien species. Nevertheless, we are admired by the Overlords for our creativity and our innate ability to evolve. The Overmind is eager for us to join. But in “The Screwfly Solution” we are not admirable – our hard wiring makes us vulnerable to an alien-induced plague; to the aliens we are little more than cockroaches to be exterminated so that they can have our land.
“Eight Episodes” by Robert Reed
Though told by one voice, a dispassionate journalistic voice, “Eight Episodes” has a similar structure to “The Screwfly Solution.” In both stories (as in much SF) we are presented with an unknown, here the TV series, Invasion of a Small World, a title which proves to be ambiguous, which becomes increasingly mysterious as the story unfolds.
In spite of the dismal production values of the series, scientists from the start are “some of the series’ most unapologetic fans” because they“liked to point out that the instruments and principles were genuine.”
In the series “Dr. Smith’s” assistant Mary finds a metal ball “about the size of 2 grains of rice” in an ancient rock which “powered up its own tiny light show. Fortunately a nanoscopic camera had been inserted into the hole, and the three scientists were able to record what they witnessed—a rush of complex images coupled with an increasingly sophisticated array of symbols.”
From then on the work of science is done by international cooperation instead of a lone hero or heroine. The explanation eventually offered is that “in the remote past, perhaps long before there was multicellular life on Earth, an alien species had manufactured trillions of tiny ships like this one. The ships were cast off into space, drifting slowly to planetary systems scattered throughout the galaxy.” On the ship were certain texts — "a history of the aliens and an explanation into the nature of life in the universe.”
Dr. Smith appears on television to conclude: “By all evidence human beings were late players to an old drama. And like every other intelligent species in the universe, they would always be small in numbers and limited in reach.“
This shatters human delusions, a discouragement first expressed in the story by Dr. Smith’s teenage son who echoes the macho posturings of an earlier era: “You know, don’t you? That these aliens are just lying to us? They’re afraid of human beings, because they know we’re the toughest, meanest things in the universe. And we’re going to take them on.”
When the series is re-issued “the scientists in several fields, astronomy and paleontology included, were the ones who created a genuine buzz that eventually put Invasion into the public eye.” They are the ones capable of telling that the pictures of space, as well as of the earlier earth of the Permian age, are not fakery. Further recent discoveries at that time about the long-ago past of Mars and further findings in South Africa corroborate the video. The scientists conclude that “[b]y means unknown, aliens had sent a message to earthlings, and it took the form of Invasion of a Small World.”
In the last episode Dr Smith reappears to confront not his teenage son but the prime minister of an unnamed country who shares the teenager’s view of human importance. Dr. Smith advocates not wasting time on fantasies of the conquest of space: “we must care for our world and the neighboring planets inside our own little solar system. We must treasure every day while wasting nothing, if only to extend our histories as far as into the future as possible.”
But this explanation is too prosaic for world leaders and teenagers: The prime minister believes that “[t]he aliens are intentionally misleading us about the nature of the universe [….] [t]o cripple our future […] By convincing us to remain home, they never have to face us between the stars.”
Dr. Smith can only respond: “A lie is as good as a pill, if it helps you sleep. . . .” The foremost authority on the alien contact, he will not buy into the idea of evil aliens, an illusion that gives us our self importance. Of course he himself is a computer construct on a TV show devised in the first place by aliens.
Now we hear another explanation of what has transpired, directly revealed by the narrative voice as the “most durable explanation.” And finally, the truth – so much harder to hold onto than fantasies of aliens among us trying to keep us from the stars. The explanation is given by a person of great credibility,"a Nobel laureate in physics: “Invasion is true everywhere but in the specifics.” He believes that there was an “ automated starship,” still small but “bigger than a couple of grains of rice.” Pieces of it may have landed on earth with scouts perhaps the size of cockroaches.But they did not embed themselves in rock and wait millions of years to be noticed. Instead, the “starship” waits, perhaps on the moon, for “radio signals from the earth, and when they arrive, she [the ship] studies what she hears. She makes herself into a student of language and technology. And when the time is ripe—when she has a product to sell—she expels the last of her fuel, leaving the moon to land someplace useful."
“Looking like a roach, maybe, she connects to the Web and offers her services at a cut-rate price.”
Here the alien is not the grand Overlord or powerful Overmind, but a small being the size of a cockroach, an artificial intelligence capable of putting together the episodes of the series.The physicist concludes: “Paraphrasing my fictional colleague, ‘A lie is as good as a truth, if it leads you to enlightenment.’ ” The series lied in some of the details of its presentation, but not in its overall message.
The story, like “The Screwfly Solution,” has moments of dark humor. If you’ve ever enjoyed a TV series only to see it disappear in ratings wars, perhaps you feel a thrill of recognition. Moreover, the alien artificial intelligence, which took all its scripts from its long observations of our species, has not mastered all our cultural tics – it is not as intelligent, perhaps, as the Overlords who more easily assimilate to our culture (though apparently they only found it necessary to learn English). What the alien intelligence selects and what it omits in its computer-generated dramatization is telling. Somehow it has neglected to focus on good "production values" or glamorous white actors. To its long time view of us from the other side of the moon, the western world is not the center of the earth. The overweight hero “Dr. Smith” comes from India, one of the most populous countries in the world; his assistant and sometimes paramour Mary is of mixed race ancestry and not of TV star quality. Somehow the artificial intelligence on the moon noticed our obsession with sex, but does not know how to make it erotically enticing, to say the least.
This story also plays off against earlier SF ideas about the prevalence of life in the universe. Much has been written by evolutionary biologists recently about how difficult it probably was for life to get started on earth and how rare it might be in the universe. The story bears this out. It is a contemporary rebuttal to Clarke’s idea that the universe is “teeming with life.”
But in spite of this, the story ends on a note of hope. At the end of the series, another child, Mary’s daughter, looks for reassurance from her mother. Mary — not an alien, but a character created by the alien artificial intelligence -- refuses to falsify what the aliens know about the universe: it is, she tells her daughter, “basically true” that the universe is empty and cold. But she has something else to say, “But dear, I also believe this [....] Life is an invasion wherever it shows itself. It is relentless and it is tireless, and it conquers every little place where living is possible. And before the universe ends, all the good homes will know the sounds of wet breathing and the singing of glorious songs.”
This too is part of what the long-ago aliens wanted to tell us: There may not be many “good homes” – planets capable of sustaining life — in the universe, but there are some. And “wet breathing” life, real life, not artificial life, will thrive in those places, even if interstellar voyages are few.