ALIENS

   1. Visitors to other worlds in stories of the 17th and 18th centuries met no genuine alien beings; instead they found men and animals, sometimes wearing strange forms but always filling readily recognizable roles. The pattern of life on Earth was reproduced with minor amendments: UTOPIAN improvement or satirical (SATIRE) exaggeration. The concept of a differently determined pattern of life, and thus of a lifeform quite alien to Earthly habits of thought, did not emerge until the late 19th century, as a natural consequence of the notions of EVOLUTION and of the process of adaptation to available environments promulgated by Lamarck and later by Darwin. The idea of alien beings was first popularized by Camille FLAMMARION in his nonfictional Real and Imaginary Worlds (1864; trans 1865 US) and in Lumen (1887; trans with some new material 1897 UK). These accounts of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS describe sentient plants, species for which respiration and alimentation are aspects of the same process, etc. The idea that divinely created souls could experience serial REINCARNATION in an infinite variety of physical forms is featured in Flammarion's Urania (1889; trans 1891 US). Aliens also appear in the work of another major French writer, J.H.ROSNY aine: mineral lifeforms are featured in The Shapes (1887; trans 1968) and The Death of the World (1910; trans 1928). Like Flammarion, Rosny took a positive attitude to alien beings: Les navigateurs de l'infini The Navigators of Infinity (1925) features a love affair between a human and a six-eyed tripedal Martian. In the tradition of the French evolutionary philosophers Lamarck and Henri Bergson, these early French sf writers fitted both humans and aliens into a great evolutionary scheme. In the UK, evolutionary philosophy was dominated by the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest. Perhaps inevitably, UK writers imagined the alien as a Darwinian competitor, a natural enemy of mankind. H.G.WELLS in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) cast the alien as a genocidal invader - a would-be conqueror and colonist of Earth (INVASION). This role rapidly became a CLICHE. The same novel set the pattern by which alien beings are frequently imagined as loathsome MONSTERS. Wells went on to produce an elaborate description of an alien society in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901), based on the model of the ant-nest (HIVE-MINDS), thus instituting another significant cliche. Early US PULP-MAGAZINE sf in the vein of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS usually populated other worlds with quasihuman inhabitants - almost invariably including beautiful women for the heroes to fall in love with - but frequently, for melodramatic purposes, placed such races under threat from predatory monsters. The specialist sf magazines inherited this tradition in combination with the Wellsian exemplars, and made copious use of monstrous alien invaders; the climaxes of such stories were often genocidal. Edmond HAMILTON was a prolific author of stories in this vein. In the early SPACE OPERAS meek and benevolent aliens usually had assorted mammalian and avian characteristics, while the physical characteristics of nasty aliens were borrowed from reptiles, arthropods and molluscs (especially octopuses). Sentient plants and entities of pure energy were morally more versatile. In extreme cases, alien allies and enemies became straightforwardly symbolic of Good and Evil: E.E.Doc SMITH's Arisians and Eddorians of the Lensman series are secular equivalents of angels and demons. Occasionally early pulp-sf writers were willing to invert their Darwinian assumptions and put humans in the role of alien invaders - significant early examples are Hamilton's Conquest of Two Worlds (1932) and P.Schuyler MILLER's Forgotten Man of Space (1933) - but stories focusing on the exoticism of alien beings tended to take their inspiration from the works of A.MERRITT, who had described a fascinating mineral life-system in The Metal Monster (1920; 1946) and had transcended conventional biological chauvinism in his portrayal of The Snake-Mother (1930; incorporated in The Face in the Abyss 1931). Jack WILLIAMSON clearly showed Merritt's influence in The Alien Intelligence (1929) and The Moon Era (1932). A significant advance in the representation of aliens was achieved by Stanley G.WEINBAUM, whose A Martian Odyssey (1934) made a deep impression on readers. Weinbaum followed it up with other accounts of relatively complex alien biospheres (ECOLOGY). Another popular story which directly challenged vulgarized Darwinian assumptions was Raymond Z.GALLUN's Old Faithful (1934), in which humans and a Martian set aside their extreme biological differences and acknowledge intellectual kinship. This spirit was echoed in Liquid Life (1936) by Ralph Milne FARLEY, which proposed that a man was bound to keep his word of honour, even to a filterable virus. Some of the more interesting and adventurous alien stories written in the 1930s ran foul of editorial TABOOS: The Creator (1935; 1946 chap) by Clifford D.SIMAK, which suggested that our world and others might be the creation of a godlike alien (the first of the author's many sf considerations of pseudo-theological themes - GODS AND DEMONS; RELIGION), was considered dangerously close to blasphemy and ended up in the semiprofessional MARVEL TALES, which also began serialization of P.Schuyler Miller's The Titan (1934-5), whose description of a Martian ruling class sustained by vampiric cannibalism was considered too erotic, and which eventually appeared as the title story of The Titan (coll 1952). The influence of these taboos in limiting the potential the alien being offered writers of this period, and thereby in stunting the evolution of alien roles within sf, should not be overlooked. Despite the Wellsian precedents, aliens were much less widely featured in the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES. Eden PHILLPOTTS used aliens as objective observers to examine and criticize the human world in Saurus (1938) and Address Unknown (1949), but the latter novel explicitly challenges the validity of any such criticism. Olaf STAPLEDON's STAR MAKER (1937) built humans and aliens into a cosmic scheme akin to that envisaged by Rosny and Flammarion. Stapledon also employed the alien as a standard of comparison in one of his most bitter attacks on contemporary humanity, in The Flames (1947). The alien-menace story remained dominant in sf for many years; its popularity did not begin to wane until the outbreak of WWII, and it has never been in danger of dying out. Such xenophobia eventually became unfashionable in the more reputable magazines, but monstrous aliens maintained their popularity in less sophisticated outlets. The CINEMA lagged behind written sf in this respect, producing a host of cheap MONSTER MOVIES during the 1950s and 1960s, although there was a belated boom in innocent and altruistic aliens in films of the 1970s. While pulp sf writers continued to invent nastier and more horrific alien monsters during the late 1930s and 1940s - notable examples include John W.CAMPBELL Jr's Who Goes There? (1938), as Don A.Stuart, and A.E.VAN VOGT's Black Destroyer (1939) and Discord in Scarlet (1939) - the emphasis shifted towards the problems of establishing fruitful COMMUNICATION with alien races. During the WWII years human/alien relationships were often represented as complex, delicate and uneasy. In van Vogt's Co-operate or Else! (1942) a man and a bizarre alien are castaways in a harsh alien environment during an interstellar war, and must join forces in order to survive. In First Contact (1945) by Murray LEINSTER two spaceships meet in the void, and each crew is determined to give away no information and make no move which could possibly give the other race a political or military advantage - a practical problem which they ultimately solve. Another Leinster story, The Ethical Equations (1945), assumes that a correct decision regarding mankind's first actions on contact with aliens will be very difficult to achieve, but that priority should definitely be given to the attempt to establish friendly relationships; by contrast, Arena (1944) by Fredric BROWN bleakly assumes that the meeting of Man and alien might still be a test of their ability to destroy one another. (Significantly, an adaptation of Arena for the tv series STAR TREK changed the ending of the story to bring it into line with later attitudes.) Attempts to present more credibly unhuman aliens became gradually more sophisticated in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly in the work of Hal CLEMENT, but writers devoted to the design of peculiar aliens adapted to extraordinary environments tended to find it hard to embed such speculations in engaging stories - a problem constantly faced by Clement and by more recent workers in the same tradition, notably Robert L.FORWARD. Much more effective in purely literary terms are stories which juxtapose human and alien in order to construct parables criticizing various attitudes and values. Despite John W.Campbell Jr's editorial enthusiasm for human chauvinism - reflected in such stories as Arthur C.CLARKE's Rescue Party (1946) and L.Ron HUBBARD's Return to Tomorrow (1954) - many stories produced in the post-WWII years use aliens as contrasting exemplars to expose and dramatize human follies. Militarism is attacked in Clifford D.Simak's You'll Never Go Home Again (1951) and Eric Frank RUSSELL's The Waitabits (1955). Sexual prejudices are questioned in Theodore STURGEON's The World Well Lost (1953). Racialism is attacked in Dumb Martian by John WYNDHAM (1952) and Leigh BRACKETT's All the Colours of the Rainbow (1957). The politics of colonialism (COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS) are examined in The Helping Hand (1950) by Poul ANDERSON, Invaders From Earth (1958 dos) by Robert SILVERBERG and Little Fuzzy (1962) by H.Beam PIPER. The bubble of human vanity is pricked in Simak's Immigrant (1954) and Anderson's The Martyr (1960). The general human condition has been subject to increasingly rigorous scrutiny through metaphors of alien contact in such stories as A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS (1954) by Edgar PANGBORN, Rule Golden (1954) by Damon KNIGHT, What Rough Beast? (1980) by William Jon WATKINS and The Alien Upstairs (1983) by Pamela SARGENT. Sharp SATIRES on human vanity and prejudice include Brian W.ALDISS's The Dark Light Years (1964) and Thomas M.DISCH's The Genocides (1965) and Mankind Under the Leash (1966 dos). The most remarkable redeployment of alien beings in sf of the 1950s and 1960s was in connection with pseudo-theological themes (RELIGION). Some images of the inhabitants of other worlds had been governed by theological notions long before the advent of sf - interplanetary romances of the 19th century often featured spirits or angels - and the tradition had been revived outside the sf magazines by C.S.LEWIS in his Christian allegories OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938) and Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus). Within sf itself, however, the religious imagination had previously been echoed only in a few Shaggy God stories (ADAM AND EVE). In sf of the 1950s, though, aliens appear in all kinds of transcendental roles. Aliens are spiritual tutors in Dear Devil (1950) by Eric Frank Russell and Guardian Angel (1950) by Arthur C.Clarke, in each case wearing diabolical physical form ironically to emphasize their angelic role. Edgar Pangborn's Angel's Egg (1951) and Paul J.MCAULEY's Eternal Light (1991) are less coy. Raymond F.JONES's The Alien (1951) is ambitious to be a god, and the alien in Philip Jose FARMER's Father (1955) really is one. In Clifford D.Simak's Time and Again (1951: vt First He Died) every living creature, ANDROIDS included, has an immortal alien commensal, an sf substitute for the soul. In James BLISH's classic A CASE OF CONSCIENCE (1953; exp 1958) alien beings without knowledge of God appear to a Jesuit to be creations of the Devil. Other churchmen achieve spiritual enlightenment by means of contact with aliens in The Fire Balloons (1951; vt In this Sign) by Ray BRADBURY, Unhuman Sacrifice (1958) by Katherine MACLEAN, and Prometheus (1961) by Philip Jose Farmer. In Lester DEL REY's For I Am a Jealous People (1954) alien invaders of Earth turn out to have made a new covenant with God, who is no longer on our side. Religious imagery is at its most extreme in stories which deal with literal kinds of salvation obtained by humans who adopt alien ways, including Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth (1970) and George R.R.MARTIN's A Song for Lya (1974). The evolution of alien roles in Eastern European sf seems to have been very different. The alien-menace story typical of early US-UK sf is absent from contemporary Russian sf, and the ideological calculation behind this absence is made clear by Ivan YEFREMOV in Cor Serpentis (trans 1962; vt The Heart of the Serpent), which is explicitly represented as a reply to Leinster's First Contact. Yefremov argues that, by the time humans are sufficiently advanced to build interstellar ships, their society will have matured beyond the suspicious militaristic attitudes of Leinster's humans, and will be able to assume that aliens are similarly mature. UK-US sf has never become that confident - although similar ideological replies to earlier work are not unknown in US sf. Ted WHITE's By Furies Possessed (1970), in which mankind finds a useful symbiotic relationship with rather ugly aliens, is a reply to The Puppet Masters (1951) by Robert A.HEINLEIN, which was one of the most extreme post-WWII alien-menace stories, while Joe HALDEMAN's THE FOREVER WAR (1974) similarly responds to the xenophobic tendencies of Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959), and Barry B.LONGYEAR's Enemy Mine (1979) can be seen as either a reprise of van Vogt's Co-operate - or Else! or a reply to Brown's Arena; Orson Scott CARD took the unusual step of producing an ideological counterweight to one of his own stories when he followed the novel version of the genocidal fantasy ENDER'S GAME (1977; exp 1985) with the expiatory Speaker for the Dead (1986). This is not to say that alien-invasion stories are not still being produced - Larry NIVEN's and Jerry POURNELLE's Footfall (1985) is a notable example - and stories of war between humans and aliens have understandably retained their melodramatic appeal. The recent fashionability of militaristic sf (WAR) has helped to keep the tradition very much alive; examples include the Demu trilogy (1973-5; coll 1980) by F.M.BUSBY, THE UPLIFT WAR (1987) by David BRIN and the shared-world anthology series The Man-Kzin Wars (1988-90) based on a scenario created by Larry Niven. Anxiety has also been maintained by stories which answer the question If we are not alone, where are they? with speculative accounts of a Universe dominated by predatory and destructive aliens; notable examples include Gregory BENFORD's Across the Sea of Suns (1984), Jack Williamson's Lifeburst (1984) and David Brin's Lungfish (1986). Stories dealing soberly and thoughtfully with problems arising out of cultural and biological differences between human and alien have become very numerous. This is a constant and continuing theme in the work of several writers, notably Jack VANCE, Poul Anderson, David LAKE, Michael BISHOP and C.J.CHERRYH. Cherryh's novels - including her Faded Sun trilogy (1978-9), Serpent's Reach (1980), the Chanur series (1982-6) and Cuckoo's Egg (1985) - present a particularly elaborate series of accounts of problematic human/alien relationships. Such relationships have become further complicated by virtue of the fact that the gradual decay of editorial taboos from the 1950s onwards permitted more adventurous and explicit exploration of sexual and psychological themes (PSYCHOLOGY). This work was begun by Philip Jose Farmer, in such stories as THE LOVERS (1952; exp 1961), Open to Me, My Sister (1960) and Mother (1953), and has been carried forward by others. Sexual relationships between human and alien have become much more complex and problematic in recent times: STRANGERS (1974; exp 1978) by Gardner R.DOZOIS is a more sophisticated reprise of THE LOVERS, and other accounts of human/alien love affairs can be found in Jayge CARR's Leviathan's Deep (1979), Linda STEELE's Ibis (1985) and Robert THURSTON's Q Colony (1985). And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side (1971) by James TIPTREE Jr displays human fear and loathing of the alien curiously alloyed with self-destructive erotic fascination, and the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-9) by Octavia BUTLER takes human/alien intimacy to its uncomfortable limit. The greatest difficulty sf writers face with respect to the alien is that of depicting something authentically strange. It is common to find that aliens which are physically bizarre are entirely human in their modes of thought and speech. Bids to tell a story from an alien viewpoint are rarely convincing, although heroic efforts are made in such stories as Stanley SCHMIDT's The Sins of the Fathers (1976), John BRUNNER's The Crucible of Time (1984) and Brian HERBERT's Sudanna, Sudanna (1985). Impressive attempts to present the alien not merely as unfamiliar but also as unknowable include Damon KNIGHT's Stranger Station (1956), several novels by Philip K.DICK - including The Game-Players of Titan (1963), GALACTIC POT-HEALER (1969) and Our Friends From Frolix-8 (1970) - Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970) and Phillip MANN's The Eye of the Queen (1982). Such contacts as these threaten the sanity of the contactees, as does the initial meeting of minds between human and alien intelligence in Fred HOYLE's The Black Cloud (1957), but here - as in most such stories - the assumption is made that common intellectual ground of some sort must and can be found. Faith in the universality of reason, and hence in the fundamental similarity of all intelligent beings, is strongly evident in many accounts of physically exotic aliens, including those featured in Isaac ASIMOV's THE GODS THEMSELVES (1972). This faith is at its most passionate in many stories in which first contact with aliens is achieved via radio telescopes; these frequently endow such an event with quasitranscendental significance. Stories which are sceptical of the benefits of such contact - examples are Fred HOYLE's and John ELLIOT's A for Andromeda (1962) and Stanislaw Lem's HisMaster's Voice (1968; trans 1983) - have been superseded by stories like James E.GUNN's The Listeners (fixup 1972), Robert Silverberg's Tower of Glass (1970), Ben BOVA's Voyagers (1981), Jeffrey CARVER's The Infinity Link (1984), Carl SAGAN's Contact (1985), and Frederick FICHMAN's SETI (1990), whose optimism is extravagant. Where once the notion of the alien being was inherently fearful, sf now manifests an eager determination to meet and establish significant contact with aliens. Despite continued exploitation of the melodramatic potential of alien invasions and interstellar wars, the predominant anxiety in modern sf is that we might prove to be unworthy of such communion. Anthologies of stories dealing with particular alien themes include: From off this World (anth 1949) ed Leo MARGULIES and Oscar J.FRIEND; Invaders of Earth (anth 1952) ed Groff CONKLIN; Contact (anth 1963) ed Noel Keyes; The Alien Condition (anth 1973) ed Stephen GOLDIN; and the Starhunters series created by David A.DRAKE (3 anths 1988-90).

   2. Film (1986). Brandywine/20th Century-Fox. Prod Gale Anne HURD, dir James CAMERON, starring Sigourney Weaver, Paul Reiser, Carrie Henn, William Hope, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein. Screenplay Cameron, based on a story by Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill. 137 mins. Colour.

   This formidable sequel to ALIEN is more an action than a HORROR movie, reminiscent of all those war films and Westerns about beleaguered groups fighting to the end. Ripley (Weaver, in a fine performance), the sole survivor at the end of Alien, is sent off again with a troop of marines to the planet (now colonized) where the original alien was found. The colony has been wiped out by aliens (lots of them this time); the marines, at first sceptical, are also almost wiped out. Ripley saves a small girl (Henn), the sole colonist survivor, and finally confronts the Queen alien. A is conventional in its disapproval of corporate greed; less conventional is its demonstration of the inadequacy of the machismo expressed by all the marines, women and men. A peculiar subtext has to do with the fierce protectiveness of motherhood (Ripley and the little girl, the Queen and her eggs). This is a film unusually sophisticated in its use of sf tropes and is arguably even better than its predecessor. The novelization is Aliens (1986) by Alan Dean FOSTER. See also: HUGO.