Nnedi Okorafor - Lagoon (2014)

"We are change."

"Human beings have a hard time relating to that which does not resemble them. It's your greatest flaw."

Nnedi Okorafor's 'Lagoon' is a first contact novel, in which the aliens land in Lagos. It is a fresh and original take on the subject, not least for its setting, which is vividly and powerfully evoked by Okorafor. However as well as providing a welcome antidote to all the British and American-centred stories in which the aliens land in New York or London, the aliens in 'Lagoon' have not just come for the President and the protagonists; their arrival is a cataclysmic event with enormous implications for everyone living on Earth. 'Lagoon' portrays the reactions of a diverse cross-section of all the various walks of life and perspectives in Lagos, as well as the effects it has on fish and animals - human beings aren't Earth's only inhabitants after all. The end result is an ambitious, powerful and complex story, in which the city of Lagos plays as central a role as Okorafor's characters.
   Okorafor portrays Lagos with passion and in great depth. She clearly has a great love for and fascination with the place, its energy and bustling vitality, but also has a canny understanding of its many and complex problems, the poverty, corruption and religious tensions. This allows her to portray the good and the bad about Lagos as it reacts to alien visitors, with considerable nuance. This is aided by the fact that Okorafor is interested in everybody's response. Her narrative takes in not just her main characters, but expands to follow 419 scammers, the students' LGBT society, the military, gangs, prostitutes, manipulative religious leaders and differently abled street kids. So many depictions of anywhere in Africa by Western media portray the entire continent as one homogenized culture, so it is both refreshing and necessary as a British SF reader to engage with a work that portrays Lagos in all its complexity. Okorafor understands the value and importance of giving all of these different, and frequently marginalised characters, a voice. Everyone reacts to the news differently, coming as they do from different backgrounds and with different perspectives, and the cumulative effect of this is that it allows Okorafor to portray first contact as the cataclysmic, perspective altering event it would not doubt be.
   'Lagoon' also subverts the standard human arrogance which assumes that we would be the only species on Earth that the aliens would be interested in interacting with. Okorafor's aliens land in the sea, and their first interaction is with fish. Throughout the book they are just as interested in interacting with animals as they are humans, offering them the same help. The uplifted animals provide us with the first hint of what the aliens are doing; they don't see their job as being to add anything, but to act as a catalyst for the animal or person's desire. In this way they act as instigators of social change. One of the results of the aliens landing is that the sea life now has the weapons to fight off humans polluting their environment. The new world that the aliens will create will have to be fairer not just for people but for animals as well.
   As well as interacting with Lagos' people and wildlife, the aliens also interact with the spiritual forces that have been living in Nigeria along with the humans. Ijele, the Igbo Chief of Masquerades, Legba, the spirit of the crossroads, and the Bone Collector, a road monster that consumes human victims of road accidents, all manifest and interact with the aliens, and it is revealed at the end that the entire story has been spun by Udide Okwanka, a giant story weaving spider who lives in a cave underneath the city, and who has been inspired by the aliens to stop weaving and take part in the story. These are all forces that have been in Nigeria before the arrival of the aliens, forces which give the country the strength of character and history to react to something as big as alien visitors. This is also shown in the supernatural powers of the three main characters, who were specially selected to be ambassadors. Adaora, a marine biologist, was born with webbed hands and feet, and has a natural affinity with the water. Anthony, a famous rapper, is able to tap into the cosmic rhythm and use its power. Agu, a soldier, has super strength. These characteristics have put them on the edge of human society and the spiritual world, and allows them to interact with the aliens on more equal footing and as ambassadors of both.
   Part of what gives the book its unique flavour is its dialogue, much of which is written in Nigerian Pidgin English. Okorafor has a great ear for dialogue, and the different registers, how much slang the characters pepper their speech with, gives the reader more information about their background and their personality, as well as greatly contributing to the sense of place. The book's structure is interesting as well, moving from the third person present for much of the book to sections related by minor characters in the first person when the aliens are mingling with the humans and chaos has broken out. These sections help to deliberately disorientate the reader in the midst of all this chaos, creating a sense of disorder and speed as the reader is rushed around different places and viewpoints. There are also more poetic sections, as rendered directly by Udide Okwanka the spider, harking back to the oral tradition and linking this thoroughly modern work of SF to the traditional. The book ends on an appropriately ambiguous note; the aliens have arrived, Ayodele's sacrifice has made humanity open to interacting and sharing with their alien visitors, all possibilities are open for a new dawn for Lagos. What happens next is left to the characters, and to the reader's imagination.
 
 

Michel Faber - Under The Skin (2000)

"The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions.
   "In the end, though, vodsels couldn't do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn't siuwil, they couldn't mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they'd never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn.
   "And, when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why."

Normally at this point I would bitch about film tie-in covers, but this one is actually pretty tastefully done.

'Under The Skin' by Michel Faber is a striking piece of role reversal and an unflinching look at the ease with which sentient people can be dehumanised. It is at once an impressive piece of SF imagination and a necessary examination of humanity's cruelty, and beautifully written to boot. The novel follows Isserley, a member of a race of dog-like aliens surgically altered to appear like an attractive human female so that she can pick up unwary human male hitchhikers who are drugged, castrated and de-tongued and processed into voddissin, a ludicrously expensive delicacy on Isserley's homeworld. Her normal routine is interrupted when Almis Vess, the idle rich son of the company in charge, visits the farm and sets free some of the human prisoners, claiming that humans are people too and shouldn't be eaten.

   One of the most striking aspects of the novel is the extent to which humans are othered. The novel is told in the third person from Isserley's point of view, so she refers to her species as humans, human beings and people, whilst referring to Homo sapiens as vodsels. This device not only cleverly reminds us of Isserley's alien perspective, but indicates how she and her people view us, not as intelligent beings with autonomy and rights, but as animals for the slaughter. This is further emphasised when Faber describes the processing and holding pens at the farm, and Isserly reflects that it's easy to mistake the vodsels for human when they are wearing clothes and walking around and talking, but it's possible to see their true animal nature once they have had their tongues and clothes removed, have been fattened up and are locked up in pens with their own filth. This of course reflects some of the thought processes that allows real world atrocities to happen in reality, whereby concentration camp guards can come to see their victims as less than human and so undeserving of basic human rights. It's a powerful and disturbing scene.

   But 'Under The Skin' doesn't limit itself to portraying just one kind of systematic inhumanity. Gradually, from the details Isserley reveals about her past life, her betrayed hope and dreams and her fears, we learn a lot about her people and the dystopian world they live in. Her home planet is uninhabitable on the surface, so everyone is forced to live underground. Their society is strictly stratified, with the rich living sheltered lives of luxury, using their power and prestige to manipulate naive young girls like Isserley used to be into sleeping with them for protection, while the vast majority work themselves into an early grave in dire, poisonous conditions. Deftly and in the background, without resorting to any moments of chunky exposition, Faber builds up a truly horrifying picture of a culture built entirely on exploitation and privilege that has destroyed its own ecosystem through its own greed and hubris, a dark mirror to our own. Of course this is a people that would have no problem with eating another sentient people.

   Amlis Vess, for all his professed compassion for the vodsels, is ultimately just a tourist. He admits that at the end of the day he's probably only going on this grand crusade just to annoy his father, who wants him to inherit the family business. Isserley quite rightly calls him out on his privilege a number of times, but she's hopelessly in love with him. This blinds her to the fact that he's perfectly happy to chase a trendy cause like vodsel welfare whilst doing nothing to alleviate the hellish plight of the working class on their homeworld, or indeed the ingrained sexism that is clearly still a problem there.

   It is perhaps in its feminism that 'Under The Skin' is at its most angry, and it is here that Faber reserves the book's most caustic satire, for Isserley herself is a victim as well. Having been through extensive and painful surgery to look like a completely different species, she is wracked by constant pain and in a constant state of extreme dysmorphia. The surgeon took Isserley's image from a magazine, so she has ludicrously oversized breasts that give her incredible back pains. Her face, arms and legs are all covered with surgical scars, but none of this matters to the men she picks up, who simply see a large pair of breasts. Faber mines some truly dark humour out of the idea that this would be enough to entrap horny males. The only parts of the book that aren't told from Isserley's point of view are from the point of view of the males she picks up in her car. The men, not even knowing that Isserley is an alien, other and objectify her as much as Isserley's people do to us vodsels. This is a book about meat markets, after all. Isserley's job is pretty much to act as live bait. Not only is she objectified by the vodsels, she gets this treatment reflected back at her by her own people as well. All her colleagues at the farm are male, and they patronise her to her face and smirk and make crude jokes behind her back, while her bosses put her in a situation where she is exposed to the risk of sexualised violence as part of her job. Small wonder that she winds up having to remind her people that she is the same as they are under the skin.  

   

   

 

Stanisław Lem – Solaris (1961)

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.”

The photo is sideways because I hate movie tie-in covers. And not because my photography skills suck. Shut up.

Aliens may be central to the ideology and appeal of SF, but they are frequently not all that, well, alien. Frequently life on other planets is reduced to a thinly veiled caricature of some culture the writer feels is suitably exotic, or a broad representation of whatever human characteristic the writer feels like dealing with today. Both of these approaches are as common as all hell and are thoroughly problematic, the former being straight-up racist and the latter robbing the aliens of any real sense of agency and reducing them to simplistic stereotypes. This is especially common in TV and movie SF – think the classic Star Trek rubber forehead alien – for fairly obvious reasons. Before the advent of CGI it was simply not feasible to build truly alien aliens, and it doesn’t hurt that having human actors makes them more immediately easy to relate to. This isn’t to say that Star Trek and others haven’t told some good stories in this mode. Occasionally Trek would try to come up with more unusual aliens, usually resulting in the god-like alien, who had the power to take human form so they could conveniently be portrayed by a human actor, but also had whatever magical powers the plot demanded. In many ways this is an even lazier alternative, exchanging science for the worst kind of deus ex machina magic. Again this isn’t to say that good stories haven’t been told using this mode.

    When it comes down to it, many of the aliens we encounter in SF can fit broadly into either of these categories. Both of them are disappointingly unimaginative and ultimately unscientific. The appearance of humans has been determined by millions of years of evolution, shaped by the circumstances and environments we encountered on this planet. It is simply unrealistic to assume that any intelligent life we might encounter would have been exposed to exactly the same evolutionary pressures, and simply arrogant to assume that our bipedal mammalian structure would be the gold standard in an infinite universe. Then there is the assumption that aliens would think and behave in ways that are broadly analogous and understandable to human beings. An intelligent life form would again be shaped by its own alien culture, however that may have developed. There is no reason to assume that it would share our values; perhaps we would not even be able to understand each other’s cultures or even thought processes and motivations. Very few works of SF acknowledge this; even writers like Iain M. Banks who create aliens with wonderfully imaginative appearances still have them behave in understandable, relatable and ultimately human ways.

   ‘Solaris’, by Polish author Stanisław Lem, is an exception to this rule. It takes as its major themes how utterly unknowable the truly alien is and the difficulty of communication between life forms so radically different they cannot share any common reference points. It is a tribute to the power of Lem’s vision and the importance of his ideas that ‘Solaris’ is one of the few works in translation to find a permanent place in the British/North American canon of science fiction, despite the only English translation available being the notoriously poor 1970 translation from a French translation of the original Polish. (The first direct Polish to English translation was finally released in 2011 as an audiobook and then as an ebook, but as I dislike audiobooks and I do not own a kindle, this review is of the old translation). It has also been adapted into a film three times, which considering the philosophical nature of much of the text and the sheer trippiness of much of the action, is thoroughly baffling.

   The book centres on Dr. Kris Kelvin, a deeply damaged psychiatrist visiting the Solaris Station, a research space station located over the ocean planet of Solaris. The ocean on Solaris is a single living entity that appears to have some form of intelligence, but all attempts to communicate with it have proven futile. He has been sent to investigate the mental health of the crew, but he soon has his own problems to worry about as he is faced with an apparition of Rheya, his dead wife. It turns out the crew have all experience these visitations, and that it is the ocean’s equally futile attempt to communicate with them. One of the scientists eventually develops a technique to destroy the apparitions. This is pretty much all of the plot, but the novel makes up for the thinness of the plot with its psychological depth.

   Much of the novel is taken up by Lem’s description of the Solaris and the various scientific attempts to understand it. This is an example of exposition done incredibly well. Much of the point of the book is how unknowable this alien life is, and this is reflected by the fact that the scientific community, despite decades of research, actually knows very little about Solaris. In a sequence worthy of Douglas Adams, Lem hilariously lampoons self-important scientific writing and the fickle gaze of mainstream media’s scientific interest. Despite Solaris being the only known example of such a life form, the scientists have nonetheless given it a scientific name and classification. Humanity’s history with Solaris is a history of competing scientific theories of philosophical interest but of absolutely no practicality as the organism is so far outside our experience no one has the slightest idea about how to go about testing these theories. There is not even a scientific consensus on whether or not Solaris qualifies as intelligent life.

   More seriously, Lem takes the opportunity to satirise scientific post-colonialism. The quote at the top of the page shrewdly points out the post-colonialist attitude present in much of the way SF deals with aliens – the Trek ideal of humanity spreading justice and democracy across the unenlightened galaxy. Humanity is incapable of dealing with Solaris because people have approached first contact expecting to see something recognisable and ultimately human reflected back at them within the alien. Solaris is so utterly other that many scientists refuse to acknowledge that it counts as intelligent life, not so much because it doesn’t appear intelligent but simply because it doesn’t conform to our narrow ideals of what ‘life’ is.

  Yet by the end of the book we are left with no doubt that Solaris is an intelligent being attempting to communicate. Solaris is prone to bizarre formations that appear and disappear across its surface. Some of the novel’s most poetic (and most resolutely unfilmable) sequences arise from Lem’s description of the mysterious and beautiful formations such as symmetriads and asymmetriads that spontaneously form and collapse across the surface of the ocean. Dr. Kelvin eventually realises that simply being able to accurately copy a symmetriad and drop it in the ocean wouldn’t necessarily allow us to communicate any better with Solaris because we still fundamentally don’t understand what these formations could possibly mean for the ocean. This is reflected in Solaris’ doomed attempts to communicate. While it is able to flawlessly replicate Kelvin’s wife from his image of her in his mind, the replication isn’t able to act as an avatar for the ocean – an obvious solution to the communication problem that a lesser author would have taken. Because of Solaris’ nature as a massive sentient ocean it can no more understand what individual human beings are than we can understand it. So while the imitation Rheya appears to have consciousness and self awareness, as well as all of the original Rheya’s memories from prior to her death, and can communicate as the original to Dr. Kelvin, she cannot know that she is the creation of an utterly alien being or what that being is trying to communicate. Her presence causes Dr. Kelvin such emotional distress he assumes that Solaris is intentionally trying to torture him, before recognising it as an attempt to communicate using the only information it has available to it yet utterly devoid of understanding of what that information means. But it does reveal that Solaris wants to communicate with humanity and is willing to try, perhaps the only thing these two widely different organisms share.