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Aliens R Us

The Other in Science Fiction Cinema

Edited by

Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt

Press

LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

Pluto

First published 2002 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,

Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the author of

this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1544 5 hardback

ISBN 0 7453 1539 9 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Aliens R Us : the other in science fiction cinema / edited by Ziauddin

Sardar and Sean Cubitt.

p. cm.

ISBN 0–7453–1544–5 –– ISBN 0–7453–1539–9 (pbk.)

1. Science fiction films––History and criticism. I. Sardar, Ziauddin.

II. Cubitt, Sean, 1953–

PN1995.9.S26 A45 2002

791.43'915––dc21

2001003316

10 9

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by

Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG

Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester

Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow, England

Contents

Introduction

Ziauddin Sardar

1. Delicatessen : Eco-Apocalypse in the New French Science

Fiction Cinema

Sean Cubitt

2. Rewriting the ‘American Dream’: Postmodernism and

Otherness in Independence Day

Jan Mair

3. Displacements of Gender and Race in Space: Above

and Beyond

Nickianne Moody

4. Star Trek: First Contact : The Hybrid, the Whore and

the Machine

Christine Wertheim

5. Japanimation: Techno-Orientalism, Media Tribes and

Rave Culture

Toshiya Ueno

6. Wicked Cities: The Other in Hong Kong Science Fiction

111

Gregory B Lee and Sunny S K Lam

7. Saying ‘Yours’ and ‘Mine’ in Deep Space Nine

134

Kirk W Junker and Robert Duffy

8. False and Double Consciousness: Race, Virtual Reality

and the Assimilation of Hong Kong Action Cinema in

The Matrix

149

Peter X Feng

9. Global Visions and European Perspectives

164

Dimitris Eleftheriotis

Notes on Contributors

181

Index

184

Introduction

Ziauddin Sardar

Science fiction explores space – ‘in a galaxy far, far away’, The Outer

Limits , Space: Above and Beyond . It projects us into imagined futures

– ‘Beam me up, Scottie.’ Yet as a genre the space that science fiction

most intimately explores is interior and human; to tell future stories

it recycles the structure and tropes of ancient narrative tradition and

to devise dramatic tension it deploys issues and angst that are imme-

diately present. The fiction in science fiction is the fiction of space,

outer space, and time, future time. Far from being the essential object

of its concern the devices of space and time are window dressing,

landscape and backdrop. The ‘science’ offered by science fiction is

populist dissection of the psyche of Western civilisation, its history,

preoccupations and project of future domination – past, present and

future. Science fiction is a time machine that goes nowhere, for

wherever its goes it materialises the same conjunctions of the space-

time continuum: the conundrums of Western civilisation. Science

fiction shows us not the plasticity but the paucity of the human

imagination that has become quagmired in the scientist industrial

technological, culturo-socio-psycho babble of a single civilisational

paradigm. Science fiction is the fiction of mortgaged futures. As a

genre it makes it harder to imagine other futures, futures not

beholden to the complexes, neuroses and reflexes of Western civili-

sation as we know it. ‘Houston, we have a problem.’

THE DYNAMICS OF SPACE AND TIME

Space and time are dimensions that give perspective on our place in

the order of the universe, our origins and ends. These themes have

always fascinated the human imagination, they are present in the

narrative tradition of all cultures and traditions of thought. They are

the basis of religious teaching, the building blocks of epistemology

and philosophy as well as science. The early myths and epic sagas of

many narrative traditions relate stories about shifting, transcending

or disrupting space and time. In mythic tradition such stories

provide lessons in the proper order and meaning of space, time and

the powers and forces of the universe. Myths and sagas popularise

2 Aliens R Us

and disseminate epistemology as well as sophisticated contemporary

knowledge about the world, they hone this material to their major

purpose: providing basic moral and ethical precepts. Epistemology,

philosophy and science begin, in all civilisations, with the same

cultural perspective on the bounded sets of relationships between

space and time as that found in the narrative tradition of myths and

epic sagas. Just as there are many narrative traditions, there are many

distinct traditions of science apart from the dominant Western

tradition: Islamic science, Indian science, Chinese science, for

example. 1 These sciences do not survive only in ancient treatises in

archives and museums. Increasingly, they are revitalised in current

academic thought, they are repositories for critiques of Western

science, they are making a comeback as ingredients of other civil-

isational perspectives. 2

So the basic ingredients out of which science fiction has been

fashioned exist everywhere, in different civilisations and cultures, in

the past and the present. Yet science fiction, the genre as we know

it, does not. Science fiction is a very particular possession of just one

tradition – Western civilisation. It does not exist in India, China

(leaving out the special case of Hong Kong), Indonesia or Egypt –

countries with flourishing and extensive film industries. 3 Moreover,

only one kind of science provides the backdrop for science fiction,

while its creators, contributors and in large part its audience are

drawn from the West. This particularity is not accidental. An exam-

ination of the structure, themes and dramatic devices of science

fiction provides an explanation for this particular and necessary rela-

tionship. What distinguishes science fiction is a particular view of

science; a scientistic view of humanity and culture; the recycling of

distinctive narrative tropes and conventions of storytelling. In each

case science fiction employs the particular constellations of Western

thought and history and projects these Western perspectives on a

pan-galactic scale. Science fiction re-inscribes Earth history, as ex-

perienced and understood by the West, across space and time.

If science is essential to science fiction, a point for debate, then

the science it uses is not only Western science, it is the Western

science that has been used to define and distinguish the West from

all other civilisations. The sociologist Max Weber, in common with

Marx, posed the familiar foundational question of Western episte-

mology: why did the Industrial Revolution happen in the West and

only in the West? What separates the West from the Rest is science

and its instrumental rationality. The question and its answer were

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