By James C. Bassett

Brian Aldiss, map of ‘Helliconia.’ https://brianaldiss.co.uk/writing/novels/novels-h-l/helliconia/

I recently came across a most curious and unsettling pair of essays by Brian Aldiss that I am still trying to process, because they seem to strike against the very heart of science fiction literature, and even much of Aldiss’s own writing. “As far as we know, we are alone in a universe,” Aldiss points out in the second of these essays on the subject of aliens (Aldiss 1999, 340), and he is absolutely right. As far as we know.¹ But although the jury is still out on the Big Question, in this essay Aldiss seems fervidly convinced that extraterrestrial sentience simply does not exist. When Aldiss argues “the case for mankind’s solitary state here [the universe], for which the evidence is plentiful” (Aldiss 1999, 334). He appears to accept an absence of evidence as evidence of absence, an extrapolative leap which defies logic and scientific method.

“There is no scientific evidence that [alien sentience exists], any more than there was ever any evidence for the long-held belief in spontaneous generation”² (Aldiss 1999, 335), an unfair comparison, because spontaneous generation (the theory that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter—for example, that flies grow from rotting meat or that frogs grow from mud) was disproved by scientific evidence against it, a state of affairs that has not been reached regarding the existence or non-existence of sentient extraterrestrial life.

Still, anyone who believes in aliens absent any definite proof is misleading themselves, according to Aldiss. Such belief “represents a continuation of that venerable credulity” (Aldiss 1999, 340) that cursed our race with gods and monsters. Yet absent any definite proof that aliens do not and have never existed, Aldiss seems to be just as guilty of relying on a type of faith — just as “credulous” — in forming his conclusions.

Whatever the reasons for it, or the reasoning behind it, this personal disbelief in the existence of aliens is of little consequence to anyone but Aldiss himself. Of far greater import, however, and far more troubling to the science fiction genre, is an earlier essay in which Aldiss presents an overview of the development of the role and portrayal of sentient alien life in SF literature from its long pre-Campbellian days to the present, and an examination of the causes and effects of the debased and increasingly “monsterish” concept of aliens and what is alien (Aldiss 1996).

Continue reading “Aldiss’s Error: Aliens, Science Fiction, and the Problems of Genre” →