ABSTRACT
Alien encounter, one of the most popular themes in science fiction, is paradigmatically undergirded by a telos of preserving human autonomy (Malmgren). In the majority of alien encounter stories, from H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898) to Roland Emmerich’s film Independence Day (1996), the prime strategy for preserving autonomy is warfare. Stories about “alien love” such as E.T. The Extra-terrestrial are exceptional in the sense that they relinquish violence, but here, too, there is a humanist ideology at work that sets humanity apart from its “others” (Badmington 6, 63). Many of these stories are not about encounter at all but about its evasion. Especially beyond Hollywood cinema, however, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. In Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction classic Childhood’s End (1953), humanity is destined to merge with extraterrestrial “Overlords,” who turn out to be mere messengers of a central “Overmind,” a pure, disembodied abstraction controlling the universe, incorporating everything into itself. Although there is resistance to the transformation, eventually, any notion of individual, human autonomy is lost in the presence of the Overlords. Here, human existence reaches a kind of immanence, critiquing the modern division between (animal) body and (human) mind, although the story can also be read as a transhumanist fantasy of transcendence, reaching a pure state of energy and information independent of matter. Whereas the novel is posthumanist in the sense of the human being subsumed into a larger cosmic story, it avoids thinking through the consequences of human-nonhuman encounter, keeping both races mostly separate and ending in a kind of unnarratable unification. Only rarely do science fiction authors develop stories of sustained human-alien contact in which both parties transform. Works of feminist science fiction authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Naomi Mitchison, Marge Piercy, and Octavia Butler are remarkable in this regard.
