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Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule by Elana Gomel

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pan.2017.0024

1565-3668

Deanna Wendel,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Reviewed by: Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule by Elana Gomel Deanna Wendel Elana Gomel, Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 232 pp. Elana Gomel's book enacts a quest for a rare type of science fiction (SF), one which imagines and engages with an alien Other that is truly Other, outside of a long and popular tradition that represents aliens as mirrors of humanity who share its ethical norms. This fascinating and nuanced study traces science fiction's often incomplete attempts to envision this Other. Each chapter tackles a range of theoretical issues rich enough to be the subject of a larger separate work. Gomel's introduction lays out the type of anthropocentric SF narrative that she is NOT seeking, while criticizing blockbuster visions of a world where humans and aliens always seem to be more like than unalike in their motivations, languages, and their very way of being. No matter how colorful differences appear on the surface, in mainstream SF narratives acts of translation tend to be too simple. Gomel's work takes issue with the way in which many fictive alien encounters are built upon the logic of the Golden Rule of treating others as you would like to be treated, assuming "reciprocal transparency" of mind (23). Similarly, even texts that make an effort to engage with difference, such as Carl [End Page 397] Sagan's Contact (which depicts the alien through the lens of the numinous) have a way of falling back on the familiar, revealing the alien in the novel's conclusion through reductive father/daughter imagery (15). Gomel builds on the work of scholars like Seo-Young Chu in describing science fiction as ideally a poetics of "cognitive estrangement" (6). She is most interested in the ways in which the genre offers a "testing-ground for new forms of subjectivity and narrativity," suggesting that it might make greater use of this potential if it abides less by psychological realism (4). The book is divided into three parts, each based upon a particular "scenario of encounter": confrontation, assimilation, and transformation (each of which in turn are usefully broken down into other sub-types) — the last being the most truly posthumanist (6). "Confrontation" begins, appropriately, with Wells' The War of the Worlds. While Gomel's rhetorical focus is on unraveling the "residual humanism" within The War of the Worlds and subsequent military SF, she also points to some posthuman potential within those texts. For instance, in the beginning of The War of the Worlds the emphasis on wonder (a more posthuman attitude) co-exists with the emphasis on war, which is dependent on the humanist assumption that it is possible to understand an enemy and its intentions. The second of the chapters in "Confrontation" branches out to consider Soviet science fiction and how the early era's visions of the "New Man" are reflected in its alien-human relationships. As a reader with limited knowledge of the Soviet works that Gomel discusses, I liked being exposed to what seems to be an under-researched archive. Initially it does not seem entirely clear why Soviet science fiction belongs in the same "Confrontation" category as Golden-Era SF written in English, because as Gomel notes, Soviet SF tended to represent alien encounters as much more cooperative ("space brothers") than conflicting (71). Yet the Soviet "New Man" is, according to Gomel, not a truly posthuman ideal of shared transformation and transcendence. If these works are not narratives of open warfare, she shows that there is still a different kind of violence, one that "erases alterity," which happens literally in one striking example from Ivan Efremov's "Cor Serpentis" where a character suggests that aliens should be genetically altered to be able to reproduce with humans in what Gomel terms a "utopia of the Same" (73). In contrast, Gomel concludes the chapter with a consideration of how a small selection of late Soviet works, including the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic, represents a positive exemplar of the "radical alterity" that more fundamentally embodies the ethics of posthumanism of the book's title (71...