What produces this feeling that
we’re encountering something alien? And,
eventually, the more practical question, how do we create this feeling in our
writing?
First of all, it’s the sense of
something “off,” a slight case of the unexpected, the unlikely, When a
landscape, for example, seems basically the same, an expected version, but one
aspect of it is just a little askew, whether it be a color, a texture, a
movement, a smell, a sound, an image that doesn’t belong (like a face in the
rocks—see the blog entry on “Images in Stone”), or a simple hint of something
that shouldn’t be there, a slight sense of the uncanny.
It’s any peculiarity that
reminds us we have a certain expectation that has not been fulfilled, and thus it’s
a disturbance to our tranquility and our confidence in our own intellect. We feel displaced, as if we’ve tripped,
mentally. We’re not getting back what
we’ve “put out.” It’s the deconstructionist moment, the challenge of
intellectual limbo, when the picture presented by the senses doesn’t
compute. For example, as mentioned in
the previous blog, the first images of the moon Io. They were just not “right” according to what
we naively assumed.
How can this information and
speculation about “first encounters” help science-fiction writers? What are some of the “alienation effects”
that writers can use in describing such alien settings? SF writers know the scientific procedures of
world-building, the rigorous deduction of the precise equations for luminosity,
specific gravity, physical geology, meteorology, evolutionary biology, and all the
necessary physics and chemistry. (Well,
to be honest, most of us don’t know
these equations, but we can find them if we want to.) Still, ultimately, unless your book is
crowded with charts, graphs, and math, what you’re left to work with is just
the words, the sentences and
paragraphs. We still have to tell a
story with characters and events, and that requires basic narrative. Too much technical “info-dumping,” in the
form of academic lectures or formulas and calculus, will just slow the
pace.
So then, what devices help us?
I once wrote half a dissertation
on this subject, on “the fictional creation of alien worlds,” and, though I’d
never use again the bulky jargon I applied in that study (“experimental” SF, “conventional”
SF, “perceptual” worlds, “conceptual” worlds), I’m still interested in the
narrative techniques of suggesting newness to a reader. I don’t mean the bald presentation of
physical data (“this planet has gravity 1.4 terrestrial norm”) but statements
more descriptive and sensory (“his feet still hurt at the end of the day”). Not the numbers—but the words.
Simon Schama, in his excellent
book Landscape and Memory, talks of
19th century Romantic landscape painters as depicting a form of
“sensory brinksmanship,” of pushing the viewer to an edgy vertigo, as in an
image of a tree dangerously poised on the edge of a cliff, or where the
viewpoint—and thus the viewer—is brought to the rim of a precipice. Alpine passages in vintage Romanticism often
served this purpose by providing “vertiginous empiricism” or “sensory
disorientation,” using mountains as chastisers of “human delusions about
omnipotence and invincibility”(462), as seen in Turner’s painting of Hannibal
swept under by alpine storms, or Cozens’ depictions of people dwarfed by
“surreal, hallucinated” mountain landscapes.
It’s this sense of “brinkmanship”
that the prose passage can convey or suggest, the feeling that one’s
understanding, or, more accurately, expectation, is thwarted and challenged,
resulting in a sensory vertigo. It’s not
yet an intellectual response, though that might follow after. It’s that first “whistling in the dark” effect,
the feeling “this isn’t what I bargained for.”
Here are two examples. One straightforward and quite literal, the
second still direct but more subtle and suggestive.
The first is from Arthur
Clarke’s classic Childhood’s End, and
describes what a city would be like where all the inhabitants could fly. From the perspective of a normal earth-bound
human, it would be hazardous, precipitous indeed:
. . . he caught momentary glimpses of
the city, and realized how difficult—and dangerous—it would be for him to
travel around in it. Streets were
practically nonexistent, and there seemed to be no surface transport. This was the home of creatures who could fly,
and who had no fear of gravity. It was
nothing to come without warning upon a vertiginous drop of several hundred
meters, or to find that the only entrance into a room was an opening high up in
the wall. In a hundred ways, Jan began
to realize that the psychology of a race with wings must be fundamentally
different from that of earthbound creatures.
(193)
A basically conceptual idea or standard SF
thought-experiment, “what would a city be like where all the inhabitants could
fly,” is made more directly alien by the sensory and emotional qualities of
being pushed to an edge, literally, “a vertiginous drop of several hundred
meters” encountered “without warning.”
A more
tense or “edgy” example is taken from Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. A
human and a Gethenian are crossing a “rotten” icefield that has already led to
one of them dangerously falling into an abyss filled with surreal “blue
towers.” The description of continuing
on the ice gives a sense of a foreign, off-setting, and threatening
experience:
. . . In the white weather one
could not see a crevasse until one could look down into it—a little late, for
the edges overhung, and were not always solid.
Every footfall was a surprise, a drop or a jolt. No shadows.
An even, white, soundless sphere:
we moved along inside a huge frosted-glass ball. There was nothing inside the ball, and
nothing was outside it. But there were
cracks in the glass. Probe and step, probe
and step. Probe for invisible cracks
through which one might fall out of the white glass ball, and fall, and fall,
and fall. . . . An unrelaxable tension little by little took hold of all my
muscles. It became exceedingly difficult
even to take one more step. (264-6)
Walking inside a “frosted-glass ball” with no shadows but
with dangerous crevasses is a fine example of “sensory disorientation” and
“vertiginous empiricism,” the disruption of Enlightenment precision, and the
countering of expected size and measurement.
To quote Schama (who was describing Romantic paintings): “the mind is almost lost in the sublimity of
its own idea” and LeGuin’s “white, soundless sphere” leads “the mind beyond
what the eye sees” (472-3).
Though
Clarke’s passage still maintains an Enlightenment sense of measured deduction
and sensible speculation, even when poised on a brink, the second leaves one
with a ghostly sense of stepping beyond rationality, of settled thought being
challenged by the featureless, or shadowless, white ball of experience on this
endless icefield, or, as Philip Shaw put it in speaking of the sublime, where
“thought trembles on the edge of extinction” or where the harmony “of a body of
thought is brought into question” (148-49).
It’s a
pause in expectation, a moment of intellectual limbo, when the picture
presented by the senses just doesn’t completely compute—or, another way of describing
it, “sensory brinkmanship,” standing on the edge of a new perception.
Just where you want to put your
reader.
Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood’s End. (1953)
New York: Ballantine, 1974.
LeGuin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. (1969)
New York: Ace, 1983.
Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York:
Random House, 1995.
Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. New York:
Routledge, 2006.
