The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

It works both ways, of course. Even as the word “alien” evokes the start of fear, so our deepest fears and darkest torments have evolved into symbols of alienness. The symbols must keep pace with culture, it is true. For most of us, a horned-tailed-and-hoofed devil is no longer an apparition of terror; we are more likely to be struck with real fear by the familiar yellow radiation symbol, or by the image of a hairy-legged multimagnified germ-laden fly.

But the Devil was Lord of the Flies long before the microbe hunters traded in their bells and candles for microscopes and agar cultures. Mermaids sang in wondrous strange seductive tongues hundreds of years before zoologists began to puzzle out the language of mammalian porpoises. And the archetypal duality of love-hate, good-bad, hope-guilt, took the form (centuries before anyone coined words like “schizoid” and “alienist”! of the shape-changer—the werewolf.