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frightening near-close encounter with something potentially
extraterrestrial to the coming of the Mothership as a powerful salvation.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie, 2001 with its ending image of a
cosmic child bom from the cross-fertilization of humanity and aliens is
important as a popular culture representation of the positive, if painful,
transformation of humanity by aliens who know better. Arthur Clarke’s
fiction stands behind Kubrick’s movie, of course, and also relevant here
is Clarke’s earlier novel. Childhood’s End (1953), in which the
Overlords come, their great silver ships poised above the major cities of
the world, to take over, but only to help humanity on its way to joining
the Overmind, a disembodied, transcendent state that represents
humanity’s best destiny. The Overlords, in other words, come to take us
over to reveal to us who we really are or, more to the point, what we
really should be. Apparently, nothing else, in our hard-headedness and
determined backwardness, will do to help us forward to realize not the
alien outside but the alien as ourselves.
Octavia Butler comments that the alien has so often meant, “the
human alien from another culture, country, gender, race, ethnicity. This
is the tangible alien who can be hurt and killed” (415). As to the concept
of the tmly alien — the encounter with the extra-terrestrial alien —
Butler doubts we can conceive of it at all.
Perhaps someday we will have tmly alien company . . .
How will we be able to endure such a slight? . . . Perhaps
for a moment, only a moment, this affiront will bring us
together, all human, all much more alike than different,
all much more alike than is good for our prickly pride . .
. What will be bom of that brief, strange, and ironic
union? (416)
Butler’s last question points to the further impossibility of our conceiving
of our alike-ness. The alien is deeply embedded, not in our concept of
extra-terrestrials, but in our self-concept, in our self-definition though
our divisions with each other. Butler indicates that we are “all much
more alike than different,” but also that the realization of such a world, a
world without racism, is itself strange, impossible. More impossible even
than an encounter with extraterrestrials.
Butler’s powerful fictions speak to what an artistic meditation on
the alien can mean. As the dangerous word (in an American context, at
least) “Overlord” from Clarke’s novel indicates, SF’s fictional
representations can hardly avoid the outrageous functions of power in the
real world, especially, for our American context, the history of slavery.
Butler’s powerful. Dawn (1987), for example, presents an as-always