The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

Allan: Adj. extraneous, strange, foreign, outlandish, exotic, excluded. Alienated: disaffected, irreconcilable. Alienable: negotiable, transferable, reversional. N. heathen, gentile, Nazarene; unbeliever, infidel. Alienism: extraneousness, exteriority) mania, paranoia, aberration. V. alienate: transfer, convey.

(Roget’s Thesaurus)

In science fiction, the word has come to be almost synonymous with extraterrestrial. In fantasy, most alien beings are terrestrial in origin-very much so. (Demons and leprechauns, trolls, gnomes, and fairies, naiads and dryads: the whole hierarchy of magical descent. The animate plant-being; the possessed animal; the halfway life—were-things, vampires, zombies, et al.) Almost the only non-earthy parts in the supernatural or gothic casts are angels—who, after all, still belong to the cosmology that centers around Earth.

Yet the science-fictional alien is rarely as fearsome, and more often “human” in nature than the fantastic one. The difference, I suspect, is that the e-t alien is ordinarily a symbol of the real stranger, the geographical or cultural outsider; while the archetypes of fantasy are, rather, externalized symbols of the dark shapes of the subconscious mind.

The “survivor story” which has an honored history in science fiction (Wells, Benét, Stewart, Wylie, and Golding, among others; seldom contains either one of these alien types. It deals instead with the alienated: with “normal” people in a world suddenly turned alien.