- Good evening, welcome, thank you all very much for coming. The usual apologies for the fact that your favorite alien isn't going to be featured, I suspect there are way too many of them out there for me to get through all of them, but my topic this evening, I'm going to start with the idea of when, and how, and why aliens become sympathetic characters. Obviously, some are not so sympathetic, this kind of alien is very common, but I don't have anything, I think, terribly interesting to say about them. They hate us, and they want to kill us, or eat us, or lay eggs in us. What I think is perhaps slightly more interesting is, as I say, when do they become sympathetic? For me, that story began, as did my whole love of science fiction, I have to say, with "Star Trek." I started watching this in the very early '70s, that's how old I am, when it was still quite new, and the very first time I heard these words,"These are the voyages of the star-ship Enterprise."Its five-year mission,"to explore strange new worlds,"to seek out new life and new civilizations," and to boldly split infinitives that have never been split before, I was really hooked. And I think one of the things that I loved about it from the outset was that sense of adventure, their voyage into the unknown, which of course is reminiscent of the heroic age of exploration in human history, and so on. But of course, in human history, voyages like this, this is an 18th century Dutch engraving imagining Columbus landing in America, these voyages tended not to work out too well for the new life and the new civilizations that were being contacted. You can just see here some of the indigenous people are running away as fast as they can, which turned out to be the smart move in most cases. One of the things about "Star Trek" that I found appealing was the possibility that these voyages might have happier endings, and the diversity of the crew, for example, suggested a different set of values were in play here. This is broadcast first at the very height of the Cold War, but we've got a Russian, Pavel Chekov, on the bridge as the navigator, there's also someone of Japanese decent, there's quite a diverse grouping here, famously, of course, we have an African American communications officer, Lieutenant Uhura, and my favorite character, of course, is there's actually an alien on the bridge, there's Spock. And again, I suspect I'm not unusual for nerds of my particular vintage in that Spock was the heart of the show as far as I was concerned. I suppose he's really responsible for this whole lecture series because it was watching this, and then watching "The Next Generation," where Mr. Data plays the Spock role in some senses, he's the foil for what it means to be human, he's the opposite of human, the non-human who provides that contrast. And part of where I started thinking about all this was wondering why the first season or two of "Voyager" were so absolutely pants, because they didn't really have anybody in that role, and it wasn't until Seven of Nine joins the crew that it really takes off. I'll come back to that a little bit later. But it's Spock, and the other aliens who provide those opportunities to ask what I thought of as the really interesting questions that the show raised. So I'll give you an example, this is one of the very early episodes from the original series, one of the first I remember seeing,"The Devil in the Dark," it first went out in '67, I would have seen it probably about six years after that. The story, very simply, is, the Enterprise is summoned on a distress call to this planet where the miners are being attacked by a mysterious monster, and killed by it, and so on. The crew are sent to aid them and investigate. They meet the creature, and Spock realizes that it's intelligent, and he manages to make contact with it. One of the very many useful plot devices here is the Vulcan mind meld, which allows Spock to make telepathic communication with other species, and he learns the story of this creature. It's called a Horta, and it's the last of its kind, and they have a lifecycle where, every several thousand years, they all die out, bar one, who lays eggs, those eggs hatch, and the next generation is born. And these perfect spherical, silicon spheres that the miners have been discovering and destroying are the Horta's eggs, and that's why it's been attacking them, so its motives make sense, and so forth. So initially, they attack the thing, they realize that it can move through rock with great ease, and so on, but its cooperation is finally established in the end thanks to Spock and the others understanding, as I say, the creature's motivations. This episode ends with the young Horta hatching and tunneling through the rock with great joy and ease, and the miners following after them and gathering vast amounts of mineral riches. This is kind of the same old exploration story, profitable mineral exploration will continue unhindered, but on this occasion, the indigenous creatures will not be slaughtered to make room for the mining. This is Gene Roddenberry, whose brainchild the whole of "Star Trek" was, and he said here that once you understand the Horta,"It wasn't just a monster, it was someone." And if the viewer could learn to feel sympathy for a Horta,"you may also be learning to feel for other humans"of different colors, ways, and beliefs," and that noble, liberal sentiment is one of the things that really guided "Star Trek," and is one of the things that, I must say, I found very attractive when I first started watching. The use of aliens as metaphors for other people, and for people who, at first sight, seem too different to be sympathetic or to relate to is one of the things that I want to look into in this evening's lecture. Of course, the opening of that famous voiceover at the beginning is,"Space, the final frontier," and again, this is a phrase that of course calls up the mythology of the American West. This is another famous episode,"The Spectre of the Gun," where the crew find themselves re-fighting the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. I have to say, there are two premises that make "Star Trek" work in the purely financial sense, one is that they only visit Earth-like planets, where parallel evolution has produced humanoid creatures very much like themselves, so minimal work has to be done on special effects to create aliens, and the other thing is that parallel evolution means that Earth history is often recreated very closely on different planets, and so on, so there are endless low-budget raids on the props cupboard at Paramount that allow this to become a filmable series,'cause there was no such science fiction series before this, nobody had ever done anything really like this before. But the mythology of the American West is another of the important sources, not just for "Star Trek," but for science fiction as a whole, and a lot of what is now called golden age sci-fi draws on very familiar plots which readers would have recognized from the Western in earlier forms. And in "Star Trek's" case, the link is actually very close because Gene Roddenberry actually pitches the show to rather skeptical TV companies as "Wagon Train" to the stars, it was a popular TV show at the time, but that's the model for them, because, as I say, this is an entirely unfamiliar concept, a science fiction show that has recurring characters every week, rather than a standalone story, where you revisit the same sets and buildings, but you keep visiting new places and discovering new problems. He'd actually previously written Westerns. There's a show called "This Gun for Hire," which ran for some years before "Star Trek," which is where he made his name, and William Shatner, Captain Kirk, had been in "Gunsmoke," Leonard Nimoy had been in both "Rawhide," along with Clint Eastwood, I've never seen that episode, but apparently, they're in the same show, and "Bonanza," which is a slightly jarring picture of Nimoy, I think. So the Western is literally in the blood of "Star Trek," but it's in the blood of science fiction as a genre. And one of the things, I guess, I want to explore a little bit, and I've touched on this in other lectures, is the way that science fiction is always borrowing from other kinds of writing, and repurposing bits and pieces of other genres, and turning them into science fiction. And again, the Western is a genre where things generally don't turn out very well for the indigenous people, for example, or for anyone who's not interested in violence,"Star Trek" tries to turn that on its head. This is an episode called "Friday's Child," where Kirk tells the aliens,"The highest of our laws states that your world is yours,"and will always remain yours," and this is an early phrasing of what will become known as the Prime Directive, that Starfleet is bound by this oath never to interfere in other cultures, to be particularly careful around pre-warp cultures, those that haven't yet discovered faster than light travel, and not to interfere in their development, but to respect their cultural distinctiveness, so there's a certain refreshing cultural relativism about the show, as I say, compared with much that came before it, particularly much of the science fiction that came before it. They used this notion of sympathy for other kinds of people to occasionally try and explore topics of race and racism quite explicitly. This is a well known episode,"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," where they encounter two aliens, this one is in pursuit of that one, and they have been hunting each other for millennia, as far as they can tell, this chase has been going on, and it turns out that the guy here, who's called Lokai, his people are being hunted by the other lot. To the crew of the Enterprise, they look identical, but the aliens insist, I'm black on the right side of my face, he's black on the left side of his face, he's an inferior species, we are totally different. And the interesting thing about this episode, or one of the many interesting things about it, is that the Enterprise, the crew cannot understand this conflict at all, they literally can't, these people look the same to them, they can't see any difference, and to the people involved in this battle, this difference is absolutely fundamental. And of course, it turns out, they finally get back to the aliens' home planet and return them to it, and they return to find the entire planet is smoking ruins, the two groups have actually literally wiped themselves out in this ridiculous, endless conflict, and the Enterprise go away shaking their heads, how irrational is racism, how awful, how can anybody believe that. It's, as I say, well intentioned, there are problems with this, which I will come back to. But the lack of understanding, the notion of, here is a future in which racism is so far in the past that it's been forgotten, is comforting, I think, to some of the audience, but rather glosses over a lot of issues in a way, and one of the things that the original series consciously decided to do was that they never visit Earth, so you never see what kinds of political or economic systems Earth has. It's clear that war has ended, and conflict has ended, and racism has ended. They didn't do so well on sexism, I have to say, all the women in the crew are still wearing miniskirts, so there are some issues around that still, but there's a lot of progress, but we never see how it happened, nor do we hear anything about how that change was effected. The story of how aliens become sympathic, like a lot of stories in science fiction, I think, begins with HG Wells."The War of the Worlds" is one of the first really successful alien invasion stories, I'm sure it's familiar to you in some form or another, right at the very end of the 19th century. Wells says, in the book, it begins by introducing the idea that,"Human affairs were being watched keenly and closely"by intelligences greater than man's," so the idea of a superior alien species, far more advanced than us, is set up at the outset. And humans were confident, they went about their business sure that they were the superior species on their planet, and anywhere else, but, "across the gulf of space,"intellects vast, and cool, and unsympathetic"regarded this Earth with envious eyes"and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." The Martians invade, and of course, their technology is so far advanced, they just sweep human resistance aside. You have to think, this is a period, when this book is published, humans haven't even invented airplanes, so creatures that can cross interstellar space are bound to have the drop on us. And what's interesting about this is that Wells has studied evolutionary biology with Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's most vigorous belligerent, even disciple, and he sees what is happening very much in terms of natural selection, of the survival of the fittest. He says in the book that the Martians are only doing to humans what people have done to so many other species, like the bison and the dodo, this is the survival of the fittest, the more advanced will push aside the other. But Wells goes on to say that, of course, that same ideology, the Darwinian ideology, has been used to justify violence by humans against other humans. He actually says that,"The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness,"were entirely swept out of existence"in a war of extermination"waged by European immigrants"in the space of 50 years."Are we such apostles of mercy"as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" And so in the middle of the classic alien invasion story, you get this reversal of the standard imperial narrative, where, just for a moment, Wells invites you to put yourself in the place of all the people that Europeans have slaughtered, and pushed aside, and colonized, and to think about it from their perspective. So that's the kind of glimmer, I think, of the sympathetic alien beginning to appear, even though these particular aliens, the other might not be that different from us, and the other might be more deserving of our sympathy than perhaps the narrative immediately suggests. And of course, that book has provided the template for a lot of other stories, and a lot of other movies,"Independence Day" being a classic example. I really love "Independence Day," incredibly good fun, but there's no sense, and no hint of the moral complexity that Wells brings to his story in most of these later ones. Wells' other great contribution to science fiction, and this is even more directly relevant to the sympathy that we might feel for aliens, was "The First Men in the Moon," just three years after"The War of the Worlds," and this is one of the first descriptions that I'm aware of where we have a fully worked out picture of an alien society, which is described in some detail. The lunar travelers reach the Moon and discover that it's inhabited, there are a species there who they call Selenites, and they're insect-like when they find them, and it becomes obvious that they have a social structure very like that of social insects on Earth, so the whole Moon is like an ant heap, and there is a Grand Lunar, like an ant queen, or whatever, in the center of the society. One of the things that's clever about this is that Cavor, the scientist who's actually invented the technology that gets them to the Moon, is captured, the other human escapes and goes back to Earth, and then, when he's back on Earth, he starts to receive radio transmissions from Cavor, who is being held a prisoner, learns the lunar language, and explores and gets to know the Selenites, and sends back details of their society, which is how we learn so much about it. The transport in this is rather clever, Cavor has invented this material called cavorite, which insulates gravity, so they build this ship out of it, and it's actually made out of Venetian blinds of cavorite, so it's a glass sphere covered in these blinds, and when you open them, gravity gets through, and you're pulled towards a body, and when you close them, you fly free, so by opening and closing them, they can steer their way through space and land on the Moon. It's wildly implausible, but compared with the earlier, a flock of geese will fly you to the Moon, you'll be shot in a giant cannon, this is way more plausible. But Cavor, who's very much the archetypal scientist, talks about the wonderful social order that the Selenites have established. There's no war, there's no poverty, there's no unemployment, and there's no unemployment because if there's no work for a worker to do, they're put into a drugged sleep until they're needed again, but the whole society is very, very well organized, and there are clearly aspects of this that Cavor likes. And it's interesting that the Selenites, and it's clear in the pictures, they look quite different from one another, there are recognizable castes, as there are with many insects, and their career is decided very early on, when they're not much more than embryos, and then Cavor explains that,"A highly developed system of technical education"is stimulated by irritants and nourished by injection"while the rest of the body is starved," and so this is how they all come to look so different to each other. And he describes, actually, finding some young Selenites in jars who are being turned into specialized machine-minders:"They're confined in jars"from which only the forelimbs protruded,"who were being compressed"to become machine-minders of a special sort."Very efficient," Cavor admits,"but the memory of that wretched-looking hand-tentacle"sticking out of its jar haunted him,"because it suggested a sort of limp appeal"for lost possibilities."(phone rings) Thank you. But Cavor, who's rational to the last, says that, of course, this is really, in the end, a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then making machines of them. And of course, he's thinking about the classic work of the 19th century machine-minder reduced to being a factory hand, it's no coincidence, I think, that the tentacle is the organ that's being pressed on here. Cavor is trying to rationalize this, but I think the thing that's interesting about this, apart from the details of the society, and how well it's worked out, and some of the ways the science is thought through, is there is just that hint of criticism of Earth. We might think the aliens are inhuman, and the way they treat their young seems so barbaric, but are we really better? The same thought is there, is it more humane, actually, to let somebody grow into a fully developed, rounded human being and then give them something mind-numbingly tedious to do at the end of it? So that degree of cultural relativism crops up occasionally, again, in the descriptions of Wells' society, and that's another legacy that he bequeaths to later alien stories. This is a classic sympathetic alien, Klaatu, the visitor here, with his giant robot, in "The Day the Earth Stood Still." He's quite rare in the 1950s, there are not many of these sympathetic aliens that crop up. He's come with a message of peace to instruct the Earth, and save us from our own stupidity, and that's a classic alien role, we meet quite a lot of them in various guises along the way, but as I say, not so many in the '50s, the standard '50s image is utterly xenophobic, the alien means communist, yellow menace, one of those kinds of stereotypes is what they usually, more commonly signify. But in later movies, as I say, they become more common, and they're often linked to a very longstanding tradition in European writing, I'm thinking of people like Montaigne, "Of Cannibals," things like that, where the ways of other people are held up as a mirror to European society to make people think, are we really confident that our way of doing things is best, there might be many of other ways of doing them, and many other values that might, from another point of view, be as good as ours, that thought bubbles along in the alien stories. One of the things that aliens get used for, I could give a lot of examples of this, but time is tight, and people's attention spans are limited, but other kinds of others get used, so it's not just about race and immigration, although I'm going to focus on that this evening, I want to just give you one example of that. Various kinds of taboo subjects are treated through the metaphor of the alien. One of the earliest that I'm aware of is this one, 1953, "The World Well Lost," by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon, by the way, is a great character, Sturgeon is famous for what is know as Sturgeon's Law, or Sturgeon's Insight, which is that 90% of science fiction is crap, but that's because 90% of all art is crap, which I think is a great insight. Anyway, in Sturgeon's story, there are two aliens who come from a planet that has been cut off from the galactic community, nobody knows anything about this planet or its people, and they come to visit Earth, and they become known as the Loverbirds. The humans can't talk to them, they can't communicate with them, but they are so struck by the intense pleasure that the two obviously take in each other's company, and they inspire a Loverbird cult, people get Loverbird tattoos, and so on, as they see this as this perfect image of love between these two. And all is looking well until the forbidden planet, which is mentioned here, Dirbanu, demands their return. It's been announced that they are criminals, and that if they're not returned, there'll be war with Earth, and so on, so two human men are given the job of escorting the Loverbirds back to their home. The plot device here between these two is interesting in that when they go through hyperspace, or whatever it's called, it not described that way in the thing, everybody goes unconscious, but one of the crew members comes to much quicker than the other one, which makes him such a useful traveling companion, he's the one that can check the instruments and get them back on course. And as a result of him waking up first, he actually establishes a rapport with the Loverbirds, and he discovers that both the aliens are male, and this is the crime for which they are to be punished when they are returned to their home planet. This is not a common theme in 1950s science fiction, I have to say. And what is kind of great, Grunty, the one who wakes up first, helps the Loverbirds escape, he puts them in the lifeboat, he ships them off the thing, and he fakes their deaths so that they won't be pursued. And after they've gone, he turns to his companion, the other crew member, who is still unconscious, and kisses him, and admits that he's in love with him, but of course, the other guy's straight, and nothing is ever going to come to this, so it's a really poignant ending to the story. This illustration, if I just enlarge this detail here, it's not exactly X-rated, but this is raunchy for 1950s sci-fi, these two male aliens locked in this embrace as they are flown away into space. And there is a whole rich tradition of, as I say, all kinds of others being imagined, or talked about, or thought about through the lens of science fiction in various ways, and there's vastly more we could say about this topic. But I am going to turn to something a little more obvious, which is illegal aliens. This is a scene from the beginning of "Men in Black," which I'm sure many of you have seen, which is one of a number of films that riff off the fact that the Latin word alienus, foreign, is used to describe people who are from another country living in this country, or wherever, and then, not until the 1920s, does it begin to be applied to people from other planets as well. And so "Men in Black" is the most famous and commercially successful example of this genre, it's just that we're not exactly getting the same liberal, inclusive values as "Star Trek" here, but the premise of the thing is quite simple, that there is a special division of the immigration service which has been set up to deal with alien visitors, in case any show up, and some aliens do show up, and make friends with them, and so on, so they're tasked with the job of finding them jobs and helping them settle into American society, as long as they're decent, hardworking, honest aliens; those who are undesirable troublemakers have to be hunted down and blasted all over the place. And when Will Smith is inducted into the agency, he's called Jay, his mentor, Kay, explains to him that,"At any given time,"there are approximately 1,500 aliens on the planet,"most of them right here in Manhattan,"and most of them are decent enough,"they're just trying to make a living." And Will Smith says,"Cab drivers?" and Kay says, "Not as many as you'd think." The film is full of great little gags about the aliens, and which humans might actually be aliens, you see the talking head of Arnie Schwarzenegger in one of the scenes of the various aliens who are hiding out on Earth, and so on, but it's not exactly very sophisticated in the way it deals with the politics of immigration, and so on. This is another film that takes the same premise. In this one, there are alien refugees, and we actually learn that they are escaped slaves, and that they have been genetically modified by their former captors so that they are both physically stronger and more intelligent than humans. So they're welcomed to Earth as refugees, they're called Newcomers, but some humans are very suspicious of them, partly because of their superiority, partly because they look different. And you'd think, well that's an interesting premise, and they might do something interesting with it, but as the poster here says,"Prepare yourself," prepare yourself for one of the most banal, tedious films you'll ever sit through, because it is really dire. It's a classic buddy movie, it's got all the problems of"In the Heat of the Night" without any of the redeeming features. And actually, if you take the racial metaphor seriously, the aliens, who are known as Slags by the more prejudiced cops, the actual message of this film is, if you are the only black cop in a white police department, and you're paired with a racist cop, you win his trust by helping him hunt down and kill a black drug dealer, and then he'll come to your wedding. That is actually what the message of the film is, really, seriously confused. My son, who's a movie buff, watched this with me, I made him help me with my homework, and he said, if you do mention it, do tell people it's really terrible, so you have Max's word for that. A slightly more sophisticated take on the same thing, a movie I strongly recommend if you've not seen it, and actually, his next movie after this one, "Chappie," is one of the many robot movies I would have like to have mentioned in the last one, and didn't get to, but this is "District 9." It starts with the classic premise, just like "Independence Day," a giant alien spaceship appears, but over Johannesburg, which is already interestingly different, and then nothing happens, there's no war, there's no explosions, they don't attack, and finally, the humans cut their way into the ship, and they find it's full of starving alien refugees. And so they're gradually brought down from the ship, and they're resettled into a camp, which is called District 9. For a South African audience, that is immediately going to have echoes of District Six, it's a famous neighborhood in Cape Town which was a very mixed-race, multicultural area that was cleared and turned into a white-only area, so it has all these resonances with apartheid, and questions like that in the background to the film. But in the film, District 9 very quickly turns into an absolutely terrifying slum, and armed criminal gangs are running the place, and there is a real sense of growing aversion from the part of the humans to the aliens, and to the way that they're living, even though they've been forced into living like this by their hosts. And their appearance is against them in the eyes of most humans, they look very strange, and the racist nickname here is, they're called Prawns by the humans. So there's an increasing aversion to them based on the fact that they're really so different from us. And a multinational weapons company, MNU, Multinational United, is hired to relocate them, they're too close to the center of the city, in District 9, they need to be moved further away because of the crime, and so on. And one of the many things about this film which I really like is this guy. Wikus van de Merwe is the character's name, and he's the son-in-law of the boss of the big multinational. Van de Merwe is a kind of joke name in South Africa, the archetypal dummy in all South African jokes is always called van de Merwe, and he is very much that kind of guy. The whole film is shot like a TV documentary, so he does these pieces to camera where he's being interviewed about the operation, how it's going to go, and what the Prawns are like, and how they're going to relocate them, and so on, and he actually, I don't want to spoil this if you haven't seen it, but he undergoes quite a journey, which ends with him being able to empathize with the aliens much more than he ever thought he was going to be able to. And of course, one of the many things, watching this film again right at the moment, that it really makes you think about, of course, is the refugee crises, and the relocation of refugees is an ever-present issue, and has not changed at all, but it really makes you think about the fact that it somehow seems a lot easier to sympathize with refugees who look like you than it does to refugees who look very different to you, and I can't help watching the news at the moment and thinking, the outpouring of empathy and sympathy for people from Ukraine doesn't seem to have been matched with the same response to people from Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Libya, and so on, and I'm including myself in that, I didn't react in the same way, but it's a timely film from that point of view, really makes you think about some of these issues. A film maybe you haven't heard of that I want to talk about a little bit more,"The Brother From Another Planet," 1984. Similar kind of themes, we've got a mute alien, who's played by Joe Morton. If you remember "Terminator 2," he's the scientist in the film who accidentally invents the Terminator, so he has a career in science fiction after this, but this was his first film. He looks African American as long as he doesn't take his shoes off, he's got three-toed, clawed feet, but apart from that, he looks human, and obviously he looks black, and he's actually able to blend in to life in Harlem. And there are some great scenes where he goes to this bar called Odell's, it's a black-owned bar, entirely black clientele, they get to know him, they get to like him, they help him find a job, they help him settle in, and he can't speak at all, but they manage to establish communication, and there's a friendship, and there are just some great scenes as to how this is all worked out. And then these two white men show up, played by John Sayles, the writer-director, and David Strathairn, in matching black suits, and one of them is carrying a book on English as a foreign language, and they have sort of mastered human customs and language, so they can actually speak English, when they talk to each other, it's in this high-pitched squealing, but they can speak English. But they come into the bar, and they order beer, and the bartender says, what kind of beer? Draught beer, and then they say, on the rocks. And they go around the bar sniffing conspicuously for the alien, and they move very strangely, and as they leave, one of the regulars just says, white folks get weirder every day. But they claim to be immigration agents, they're from the government, they have pictures of the Brother, as he's called, who they believe to be an illegal alien. And the regulars warn the Brother that the men in black, as they call them, the men in black is actually a phrase that, I think occurs in this film long before the comic book on which the Will Smith movie is based, and he clearly, when they say the men in black are looking for him, he knows exactly who these people are, and he's clearly scared of them. And there's this great scene, this is his landlady's son, Little Earl, and they go to a museum of African American history, and the Brother, who cannot speak, points to pictures of a runaway slave, and explains, that's me, that's who I am, these people are slave catchers, that's why they're looking for me, so the racial analogies here are obvious are interesting. There are many, many things about this that I really like, one of the things that's great is that, right at the beginning, the Brother's spaceship, when he's escaping, it splashes down right near Ellis Island, in New York, and he comes to shore, and you can see the Statue of Liberty behind him, as it shows here in the poster, but it's interesting that as he walks around, it's like he doesn't see it, it's almost like it's invisible to him, and it's just a subtle reminder about the many different kinds of coming to America stories, and the fact that, of course, African Americans' ancestors did not come through Ellis Island, they weren't here voluntarily, yearning to be free, they didn't have any choice about the journey, so it has these little, complex, but subtle, interesting things about the differences between different people's stories. And I think that if you compare this with, say, something like the "Star Trek" episode I was talking about before, one of the things that's really obvious about the film is that it recognizes that race is about a lot more than pigment, the "Star Trek" episode really does think that it's about what color your skin is, and it doesn't go any further, and this film really explores the way it's about language, it's about culture, it's about history, that race has all these levels and complexities to it. And although this is a white director-writer, it's a majority black crew and cast, and Sayles really works on his films workshopping, and improvising, and collaborating with the crew, so you get a very different feel in this film compared with some of the others that I've been talking about. I guess I could give you lots more examples, but I think there is a common theme here in a lot of these films, which is that they are almost all from a white perspective, nearly all white directors, writers, majority crew, and so on, and they do give a particularly one-dimensional view of race, which is all about we, the people in power, should try and be more tolerant, it's a recurring theme throughout them. I could talk about how much more diverse science fiction has become in the last few decades, we'd be here all night, and frankly, I don't really have the expertise to do that, but I am just going to gesture at this, looking at this term afro-futurism, for example, which was coined by Mark Dery, to describe the way that race, science, and technology are being explored in art, music, and literature of contemporary black America in relation to techno-culture and science fiction, is part of his definition, and a film like "Black Panther" is only the most visible, high-profile, high-budget version of this, there is a hell of a lot of stuff that would be captured under the loose label of afro-futurism. As I say, I don't have the expertise, and I certainly don't have the time to try and do justice to that. What I'm going to do instead is just focus on one writer who I particularly like, Octavia Butler, and just talk a little bit about her writing, and this is bringing the series full circle,'cause I started the whole thing with a quote from her back in the first lecture. In 1987, Butler published a novel called "Dawn." It's the first part of a trilogy, which was originally called"Xenogenesis," or alien origins, but was retitled "Lilith's Brood" later, and then the second volume is "Adulthood Rites," the third one is "Imago." And if you've not read these, I cannot recommend them highly enough, but I will just briefly give you a tiny flavor of some of the things they deal with. The first novel, "Dawn," begins with Lilith, a human woman, waking up in a featureless room, there are no windows, there are no doors, no visible source of light, and a voice questions her. And then she gets to ask questions, but nobody ever answers, nobody replies, and then she goes back to sleep, and she reawakens, she has no idea how long she's been asleep, how long this has been going on. And gradually, she pieces together the story that she has been captured by aliens. The Earth has been devastated by nuclear war, this alien species, the Oankali, found humanity on the brink of extinction, rescued all the survivors, and have taken them up into this ship, they have been healing them, trying to learn about their culture, they've been restoring the planet back to habitable conditions, and it turns out that 250 years have gone by since the war, since the last thing Lilith remembers. And the Oankali describe themselves as genetic traders. From their origins, which are so far back that they can no longer remember them, they have this irresistible instinct, this drive to interbreed with other species. So they drift through the galaxy on these ships, and their ships are vast, bigger than cities, floating across space, and they find interesting partners, they have to be attracted to a species for the trade to happen, and they have selected humans as their next partner. The end result of this trade is going to be a completely new species, that Oankali and human genes will be mixed to create something completely new, and eventually, that new species will take flight and go off in search of another partner species. So if Oankali were ever to be meet each other at some point, they wouldn't necessarily know each other, they wouldn't look anything like each other. The one thing they would have in common is this entirely natural ability to mix the genes of different species. One of the many complexities of this is that the Oankali have three sexes, and the middle sex, the Ooloi, who are neuter in gender, are the ones who actually facilitate the gene trade between differences. But the word trade is misleading here, because this is not a voluntary exchange. By the time Lilith is woken, the remaining humans have all been sterilized, in effect, they can only breed through the facilitation of an Oankali Ooloi, they have to have this intermediary, they are now sterile when they try to breed with other humans. So it's a very complicated story that goes on here, but basically, it's compulsory hybridization or extinction, these are the only options, and when this is first explained to Lilith, she's the first human to be awoken, she sees this as genocide, this is the end of humanity. But the story gradually gets more complex

we discover that the reason the Oankali are so fascinated by humans is because of what they call the human contradiction. From our genes, it's obvious that we're an intelligent species, in fact, the Oankali regard us as one of the most intelligent, potentially, that they've met, but we're also hierarchical, and that's a very rare combination, unique, in fact, in the Oankali's experience, and that is what has almost destroyed us, we're intelligent enough to make weapons, and hierarchical enough to organize ourselves into societies where those weapons will get used. And so the point of the trade is to stop us from doing that again. If they just put us back on Earth and let us carry on as before, we would rebuild our civilizations on the same model because our genes ultimately determine the way we're going to act. If you bought the first edition of this book, this is the cover that you would have had. In the story, Lilith's job is to awaken the first human survivors, and she's going to train them in order to equip them to return to the Earth, and the artist perhaps hadn't read the book, or perhaps the publisher had a particular notion of what was going to sell, but as you can see here, Lilith and the woman she's awakening are both very clearly white, and as one fan pointed out, you're kind of expecting a lesbian bubble bath scene any minute now from this weird opening. But the book actually makes it extremely clear that Lilith is African American, it's spelled out quite clearly, and even quite a cursory reading would make that obvious, and so this cover has been the source of some controversy, as you can imagine. But once you start to read this with Lilith's color, and her race, and that history in mind, of course, it starts to look a very different story. This is one of Butler's most famous, most successful novels,"Kindred," which is very explicitly about the legacies of slavery, and what that means to African American people, but it's something that occurs regularly in her stories. And I think, once you have that in mind, the whole story of the Oankali starts to look different. We have this problem of just slotting in an alien to stand in for some kind of oppressive relationship. I rather like the critic Francis Bonner here, said that earlier SF writers would just introduce one big, blue extraterrestrial who could be, "metaphorically substituted for an examination"of any number of actual social divisions," so they become an all-purpose metaphor that you can just jump in. And as Dances with Blue Aliens tells us, they can stand in for oppressed indigenous people who are going to be exploited by miners, or any other group you care to name. And I think that one of the things that happens when you do that is the specificity of the history, and a particular people's experiences and culture gets erased, even when very good intentions are at work here. Butler has this great story that she gave in an interview while she was writing "Dawn." She's at a science fiction convention, and an editor, and she rightly observes, of a now-defunct magazine, argued to the audience that black people should only appear in science fiction if the story dealt explicitly with, quote,"some sort of racial problem," because if the writer were simply to,"put in a black, all of a sudden,"the focus is on this person," and we wouldn't want that, would we. And he proposed that even when racial problems were going to be discussed,"perhaps you could use an alien instead"and get rid of all this messiness,"and all those people that we don't want to deal with." I can't imagine the look on Octavia Butler's face as she had to sit through this, but that captures the problem of the big, blue metaphor, you're just erasing the specificity of history, and putting something else in. Gerry Canavan, in a book about Butler, said,"If we're interested in stories about brutal invaders"who come in technologically advanced ships from faraway,"who kidnap, murder, rape, and enslave,"we do not need to look to outer space,"that is already Earth's actual history." So the metaphor of slavery is one of the many things that's going on here, but again, it's not simple, it's not just a straightforward retelling of slave stories, Butler's doing far more than that. One of the many things about this book I find both fascinating and really discomforting is this idea that biology is destiny, that your genes really determine who you are, and how you're going to act, and what your history is, and for the Oankali, that is absolutely the case. The books followed the destiny of Lilith's brood, her children, and in the second one, Akin, one of her male children, tells a human,"Human purpose isn't what you say it is"or what I say it is,"it's what your biology says it is,"what your genes say it is." And from the Oankali's perspective, the genetic trade is the only way to save humanity, otherwise they will lead to extinction at their own hands. And despite the fact that there are all these complexities to the story, the Oankali really care about humans, they never willingly hurt them, and there's one occasion where one of them accidentally kills a human, and the alien becomes catatonic with grief, and dies as a result of having killed the human. So it's not a simple, straightforward story of exploitation. When Lilith first becomes pregnant with her first child at the end of the first book, the Ooloi, this is the middle sex in the Oankali, tells her that the daughter that she's going to bear will have five parents, two human, two Oankali, and then of course itself, the fifth,"and because I've mixed it, shaped it,"seen that it will be beautiful,"without deadly conflicts,"it will be mine,"it will be my first child, Lilith." So they're going to resolve the human conflict, they're going to give humans a future that they would never have without the Oankali's intervention, is the claim. But Lilith has not consented to becoming pregnant, Nikanj has done this without her consent, and has actually used the stored sperm of her now-dead human partner to do this, and she never gets over that, she never loses her anger with the Oankali, she never loses her fear and her mistrust of them, she's never at all convinced that she isn't a traitor to humanity, that she's actually collaborated in genocide, and yet she keeps mating with the aliens, and she has a series of children with them over a long period, who she loves. It's a very complex story, and there are all kinds of things about consent, and so on, which make for very discomforting reading. But I think that what she's saying at the end is that, for all the things that are wrong with this trade, there's no going back, that human nature in its original form, pure human, is a dead end, literally, there's no future to that, we have to have a more expansive, wider definition of human. So if there's going to be a future, we've got to take the notion of people and expand it beyond human as the definition of people. Let me finish by asking a question which I've been conspicuously avoiding throughout this series, what is science fiction, if anything? This is a scene from "Arrival," only because it's one of the many brilliant, smart films about aliens that I'm not going to talk about 'cause I haven't got time, but I wish I had. Defining science fiction, I mentioned this in a Q&A to an earlier lecture, Frederik Pohl, once asked what science fiction was, he said, "It's that thing"that people who understand science fiction point to"when they point to something and say,"that's science fiction." There clearly is something called science fiction, this label gets used in lectures like this, on books, and so on, but how does it get defined, what makes something SF? There are all kinds of obvious tropes, subject matter, visual imagery, and so on, that go to make something science fiction, robots, aliens, spaceships, and so on, we know it when we see it, but is that enough? Maybe it's none of the above. One of the things that's interesting is that academic science fiction critics, Darko Suvin is just my favorite example, only because he sounds and looks like a "Star Trek" villain, I think, but he has a hard-line Marxist analysis of science fiction, and basically, if it doesn't advance the revolution, it can't really be called science fiction. And a lot of academics do versions of this, and what they all end up doing is they leave a large crowd of science fiction fans going, well what about all the stuff I love, which isn't part of your definition, so it's a weird snobbishness that actually erases most of the contents of what we might point to as science fiction. Roger Luckhurst, who's a historian whose work I really like, and who I've drawn on a lot here,

"A literature of technologically saturated societies,"a genre that can therefore emerge"only relatively late in modernity,"it's a popular literature"that concerns the impact of mechanism,"to use the older term for technology,"on cultural life and human subjectivity." And the point he makes about this is it's grounded at a particular moment in history, it needs things like mass production to make it happen. Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould, again, great definition here, they have an essay called"There's No Such Thing as Science Fiction," and they talk about the way genres come into existence, and they talk about the fact that writers, producers, distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics, and others create them, often retrospectively, and there has to be a consensus in the community of people who like that kind of thing before it becomes a genre, before it gets recognized. They draw a lot on film criticism, and one of the examples they use which I really like is things like this. This is a scene from "Double Indemnity," what kind of film is this, what genre does it belong to? I think as soon as you see that, and you see the light coming in through the Venetian blinds, and the strong black and white, the moody lighting, this is film noir, we know immediately what it is. But of course, the term film noir didn't exist when this film was made, and it actually doesn't become popular until the mid '50s, but after the term has been coined by film critics, it then becomes obvious that there's a genre there called film noir, so it's defined retrospectively, we look back, and the genre grows as we look back and recognize that all these things belong to it, even before we had a genre or a label to apply to them. And I think that's absolutely true of science fiction. The term doesn't exist until the 1920s, but once it exists, all kinds of other things turn into science fiction, sometimes literally. This is the first edition of "The War of the Worlds," that's what it looked like, it looked like serious literary fiction of the late Victorian period, this is what it started to look like as soon as it was serialized in the pulp magazines, and it becomes something that is obviously science fiction. Exactly the same thing happens to "Frankenstein," there's the first edition, 1930s edition, and we could give lots of versions of this. As science fiction grows, it hybridizes, it borrows from all these other genres, from the Gothic, from the Western, from other things, and it becomes this monster stitched together from parts of other things, and all kinds of things turn into science fiction as the genre develops. Let's come back to "Star Trek," and the Borg, one of the all-time great villains in "Star Trek," who famously keep announcing that, "Resistance is futile." If you don't know this, this is in "The Next Generation," they're cybernetic organisms, so they're a hybrid of technology and organic forms that they have assimilated into themselves. And the other part of their threat with which they announce themselves is,"We will add"your biological and technologicial distinctiveness"to our own," so we will actually constantly extend what it is to be Borg by absorbing more and more species. I'm not necessarily a big fan of the Borg, except as a great villain, but there's something interesting about that phrasing, I think, and it just struck me that the original Federation are the real Borg. Anybody can join the Federation as long as you're willing to play by the rules of the European Enlightenment. Basically, you have to be white, and human, and liberal, you have to be mostly atheistic, which is kind of interesting, all of these various values are obligatory. One of the many things I found fascinating about this episode is that we learn that Lokai, the fugitive, that his people were once slaves, that was the origin of this conflict, and that's what he's being hunted for, he's actually like the Brother from another planet. But even after that is explained, the crew of the Enterprise don't really get what the conflict is about. Even Lieutenant Uhura cannot understand the hatred that he feels for his former oppressors that he cannot let go of. The big, blue metaphor problem leads to this problem where you can't actually see the impetus of history, you can't actually see its force and the way that it works out. And you think, has she completely assimilated the Federation's liberal values, racism is so far in the past that it no longer means it, or has she actually been assimilated by those values, so that she's actually lost her own cultural identity, her own sense of her own history, and where she's come from, and the journey that she's undertaken? I've said throughout these lectures that human has been defined again and again by what it isn't, so it's not animal, for example, it's not ape, it's not woman, is the argument of many writers, and so on, it's not artificial, like the replicants in "Blade Runner," and of course it's not alien, human is the opposite of those things. So it's always definition by exclusion, and that sort of reminds me a little bit of the way that academic science fiction critics tend to define science fiction, by excluding all the things that are merely fantasy, or probably Gothic, or just Westerns, or whatever. And if that's the definition of human, who would want to be human at all, where's the benefit in this for anybody, is one of the question that comes to my mind. And I think that, as the definition gets clearer, the more people are excluded from it, the less attractive and the less interesting it becomes. So what does it mean to be human? I hope that you're not going to be too disappointed if I admit that I don't know, I don't have a clear, definite answer to the meaning of human,

suppose we were to define human the way we define science fiction, so we define it as a messy, hybrid entity, a thing that is constructed retrospectively, that grows by welcoming others in, and constantly expanding its self-definition as it does so, so as we look back, we notice that all those people who we thought weren't human turned out to be human all along, and the notion of human gets bigger and bigger. And if that were true, one of the things that it leads me to think is that perhaps it would be better to be the Borg than to be the Federation. I thank you very much for listening.(audience applauds)- The first question is,"During your research for the lecture,"did you notice if particularly must-be-destroyed aliens"tend to be what might be termed female, rather than male?"I'm wondering this"because of the prevalence of male writers."- Yeah, that's interesting. There are certainly some very fatale femmes in science fiction, and one of the many things about that that's really complicated is the kind of threat to the bodily integrity of the human victim that they represent. The classic horrifying female alien will lay her eggs in you, that's the gory secret to the second "Aliens" movie, why it's so popular, is that visceral horror of being penetrated by a female ovipositor, and then turned into a helpless carrier of an alien egg, is really about as nasty as it gets for sensitive men. Again, one of the many amazing Octavia Butler stories, if you don't know this, read "Blood Child," but don't read it last thing at night, because it's not comfortable reading, but she takes that story and does very interesting things with it. But yes, I do think that is part of it, but most of the aliens are either genderless or assumed to be male, so the female alien does reach to a particular set of, I think, primarily sexual fears, and they make some of the creepiest monsters. The Borg Queen is a particularly alluring and discomforting character because she's actually seductive and offers a merging with the Borg that has distinct erotic connotations, so they are very interesting characters, but I think most of them are just marching about as alien Nazis, or communists, or Russian, or Chinese, or whatever, whoever your villain de jour happens to be when the movie's made, they will be the aliens.- [Questioner] Thank you, Jim, for the presentation. My question is, a lot of the content today has focused on American and European, and, I suppose, in the context of South Africa, Europeans going into South Africa. In your research, have you seen how the themes go across other cultures, in Asian culture, or African, South American, do they have the same themes in the way they deal with their fictional aliens?- I haven't read enough to say. One of my major handicaps as a scholar is that I really only read and write English, and not even that some days, and so I'm very limited in what I can read, so there's whole traditions I know nothing of. I have started reading a lot more, I'm actually reading a great collection at the moment called "Dark Matter," which has the subtitled "Fiction From the African Diaspora," and some of it is African American and some of it is from Africa, and so on, but I really feel I haven't read enough or know enough to be able to generalize about that, but it is a very rich question, and I do think that Anglo-American science fiction sets a template, and then all kinds of other people are now reacting to it and against it, and critiquing it, and opening up to different perspectives, which is one of the things I find most interesting about recent science fiction.- [Questioner] If aliens really exist, how do they look like, you think?(Jim laughs)- We'll have to wait and see, won't we. I have no idea. One of the many things I find fascinating is the way that there are obvious aliens, like the Selenites, who are based on various forms of life that we're familiar with, they're insects, for example, is a very common trope in the aliens. One of the things is that this kind of caricature classic alien who you see, this is a Halloween costume, pops up a lot. And the other movie that I would totally recommend if you don't know this movie is "Paul," which is a hysterically funny, brilliant film, but this is about an alien who's been living secretly on Earth for a long time, and has been quietly influencing human culture, and he looks like this. There's a great scene where he's on the phone to Steven Spielberg, giving him some ideas for his forthcoming movie "E.T.," and so on, so maybe they're already here, and they're already planting this information in the movies, it seems as plausible as any other thing, but who knows. I hope we find out one day, but I'm not holding my breath.- [Questioner] Have you noticed, since 9/11, and obviously America's approach to the other, a shift in the way America approaches the other, have you noticed a change in how science fiction is made in that regard?- That's interesting. I am struck by how many movies begin with the blowing up of New York, this has become such a weary cliche that you're almost relieved by "District 9" just because it's Johannesburg, and even if it is going to get blown up, which it isn't, at least it's somewhere different, and so there is that kind of moment that recurs and recurs, and speaks to a certain kind of trauma, but I think that was already there in the movies before 9/11, which is interesting. I haven't seen a particular shift, but it's certainly been argued by some of the critics that I've read that the ultimate source of the fear of the alien is actually the rise of Islam, and it is actually the Ottoman armies at the gates of Vienna that leads to this paranoia about those very different people, with their very different religion, and culture, and language, and the threat that they might pose to us, whoever we're supposed to be, and that is the primal scene for science fiction, that's the trauma that keeps coming back to haunt successive generations. But each generation of sci-fi writers reinvents the alien according to the paranoia of the time, so there's a whole raft of '50s films where the aliens look just like us, and normally they bite you on the back of the neck like a vampire, and then you turn into a mindless zombie and start voting Democrat, or whatever, so the subtle infiltrator becomes a particular phobia at a particular point in history to do with McCarthyism, and so on, for example, but at other times, you get much more obviously militaristic aliens, who just arrive and start laying waste to things, so it shifts back and forward.- [Questioner] Do you think there's a difference in the narrative and themes when the main character is the alien? I'm thinking of "Doctor Who," do you think there's a difference in the story when we see the story through the eyes of the alien?- Yeah, it is interesting, although it's interesting how I'm struck, and this is true when you read stories that are told from the perspective of the robot, or the AI as well, that they often feel not merely as human, but more human than the humans. It's actually terribly difficult to imagine an alien intelligence, to actually give us their view, and there are very few science fiction writers I can think of that have come anywhere near achieving that."Doctor Who" feels like everybody's uncle, it doesn't feel alien at all to me in many ways, that's part of the fun of "Doctor Who," but the one exception to that that immediately comes to mind is "Solaris," which is not told from the alien's perspective, but Lem's novel imagines a really, genuinely alien intelligence, a sentient planet, and the humans are utterly incapable of establishing communication with it. And there are two film versions of it, the first one is a classic, which, as we all know, is film buff language for unbelievably long and boring, but the remake of it, with George Clooney, is really good, I really recommend it very highly, if you tried to sit through the first one and died of boredom before the third reel, try the new one. And it deals with that question of, and it makes you think would we even recognize an alien if we met one, this comes back to your question about what do they look like, they might be so alien that we wouldn't even know that they were sentient in the first place. The Horta, when it appears in "Star Trek," is made of silicon, it's a silicon-based life-form, it doesn't show up on the tricorder as even alive, and when Dr. McCoy is asked to repair it, to heal it, he says, "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer," one of the first of many,"I'm a doctor, not," which Doctor McCoy says throughout the series. And the same would be true of a computer, if a computer really had an intelligence, would we know it? It may be that those weird glitches, where the whole system seems to be offline for a minute is just the computers socializing with one another, we've got better things to do than your work, go away, Excel is down at the moment, we're having fun over here, I've no idea, but it's a fascinating question.- I'm really sorry, I know there are quite a few other questions, you might prevail upon the professor at the end if you wish to ask a couple, but I know we also have to get off. But I did want to say that this is, sadly, Professor Endersby's final lecture as visiting professor of the history of science at Gresham College, and so I did want to just say a few words about his tenure. In addition to his work for Gresham, Jim is professor of the history of science at the University of Sussex, he's the author of the prizewinning

A Cultural History,"

"The Plants and Animals Who Taught Us the Facts of Life," 2020 saw the publication of his "Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science." His tenure as visiting professor here ranged from 2019 to 2022, and in that time, he provided fascinating series on the history of science, beginning with his first series, "Utopian Gardens," where he explored the links between botanic gardens and utopias, both modern European inventions that embodied a fascination with the future, and then this was followed by his series

Monkeys, Orchids, and Myths," marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's "Descent of Man." This series critically examined the book, and explored ways in which it was received across the world. And this was then followed by his current series,

"Exploring Humanity Through Science Fiction," which, including the fantastic lecture tonight, has explored the rich ways in which writers and filmmakers have represented what constitutes human nature. Throughout his time at Gresham College, Professor Endersby has brought his considerable knowledge to a wider audience, and we at the college are very grateful indeed to him for his excellent work, and we hope to welcome you back in the future, Jim, you're not off the hook yet. So thank you very much for everything that you've done over the past three years as a Gresham visiting professor, and please join me in thanking the professor.(audience applauds)