The only good alien is a dead alien

One of the great early socialists said that the status of women in a society is a pretty reliable index of the degree of civilisation of that society. If this is true, then the very low status of women in science fiction literature would make us ponder about whether we are civilised at all, writes Ursula K LeGuin, a leading science fiction author.

The women’s movement has made most of us conscious of the fact that science fiction has either totally ignored women, or presented them as squeaking dolls subiect to instant rape by monsters – or, at best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes.

Male elitism has run rampant in science fiction. But is it only male elitism?

Isn’t the ‘subjection of women’ in science fiction merely a symptom of a whole which is authoritarian, power-worshipping and intensely worshipping parochial?

The question involved here is the question of The Other – the being who is different from yourself. This being can be different from you in its sex; or its annual income; or its way of speaking and dressing and doing things; or in the colour of its skin; or the number of legs and heads. In other words, there is the sexual Alien, and the social Alien, and the cultural Alien, and finally the racial Alien.

Well, how about the social Alien in science fiction? How about in Marxist terms, the proletariat? Where are they in science fiction? Where are the poor, the people who work hard and go to bed hungry? Are they ever persons in science fiction?

No. They appear as vast, anonymous masses fleeing from giant slime-globules from the Chicago sewers, or dying off by the billions from pollution or radiation, or as faceless armies being led to battle by generals and statesmen.In sword and sorcery they behave like the walk-on parts in a school performance of The Chocolate Prince.

Now and then there’s a busty lass among them who is lass among them who honoured by the attentions of the Captain of the Supreme Terran Command, or in a space-ship crew there’s a quaint old cook, with a Scots or Swedish accent, representing the Wisdom of the Common Folk. The people in science fiction are not people. They are masses, existing for one purpose: to be led by their superiors.

From a social point of view most science fiction literature has been incredibly regressive and unimaginative.

All those Galactic Empires, taken straight from the British Empire of 1880.

All those planets – with 80 trillion miles between them conceived of as warring nation-states, or as colonies to be exploited, or to be nudged by the benevolent Imperium of Earth towards self-development – the White Man’s Burden all over again. The Rotary Club on Alpha Centauri, that’s the size of it. What about the cultural and racial Other?

It is the Alien everybody recognises as alien, supposed to be the special concern of science fiction; it’s in the old pulp science fiction; it’s very simple: the only good alien is a dead alien – whether he is an Alderbaranian Mantis-Man, or a German dentist.

And this tradition still flourishes: witness Larry Niven’s story ‘Inconsistent Moon’ (in All the Myriad Ways, 1971) which has a happy ending-consisting of the fact that America, including Los Angeles, was not hurt by a solar flare.Of course, a few million Europeans and Asians were fried, but that doesn’t matter, it just makes the world a little safer for democracy, in fact.

It is interesting that the female character in the same story is quite brainless: her only function is to say Oh? and Oooh! to the clever and resourceful hero.If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself – as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it, or defy it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing. to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.

This tendency has been remarkably strong in American science fiction. The only social change presented by most science fiction literature has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite – sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently.

Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general,, American science fiction has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.

I think it’s time science fiction writers- and their readers! – stopped daydreaming about a return to the Age of Queen Victoria and started thinking about the future.

I would like to see the Baboon Ideal replaced by a little human idealism and some serious consideration of such radical, futuristic concepts as Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And remember that about 53 percent of the Brotherhood of Man is the Sisterhood of Woman.

The only good alien is a dead alien