Pittsburgh Massacre: Violence & American History

The aliens in old science-fiction shows and movies are almost always humanoid: two arms, two legs, and a head, more or less arranged in the pattern of H. sap. That was done partly for the same reason that inspired Gene Roddenberry to wink at physics and create the Star Trek transporter beam: budget. Staging a starship landing for every episode would have been ruinously expensive. In the same way, it was a lot easier to stick some prosthetic ears on Leonard Nimoy or to roll Jeri Ryan around in a bin of old TI-99 parts than to depict something radically non-human. But there was also a dramatic reason: If the crew of the Enterprise encountered intelligent life that was, say, about 500µm in size, didn’t use language, and wasn’t bent on dominating the universe in godlike fashion (the sci-fi version of Original Sin), it would be difficult to get very much drama out of that.

Literary science fiction can afford a little more imagination, because it costs the same to print 200 pages of clever and creative writing as it does to print 200 pages of anything else. In Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, a tragic and ultimately genocidal war erupts between humans and an alien civilization because each is so radically different from the other that neither realizes that the other is an intelligent species until it is too late. Others have speculated, in fiction and elsewhere, that life (and even intelligent life) from elsewhere in the cosmos might be so radically different from human beings that we likely would not even understand each other as living things.

About the Author

Kevin D. Williamson

Kevin D. Williamson is a former fellow at National Review Institute and a former roving correspondent for National Review.

The aliens in old science-fiction shows and movies are almost always humanoid: two arms, two legs, and a head, more or less arranged in the pattern of H. sap. That was done partly for the same reason that inspired Gene Roddenberry to wink at physics and create the Star Trek transporter beam: budget. Staging a starship landing for every episode would have been ruinously expensive. In the same way, it was a lot easier to stick some prosthetic ears on Leonard Nimoy or to roll Jeri Ryan around in a bin of old TI-99 parts than to depict something radically non-human. But there was also a dramatic reason: If the crew of the Enterprise encountered intelligent life that was, say, about 500µm in size, didn’t use language, and wasn’t bent on dominating the universe in godlike fashion (the sci-fi version of Original Sin), it would be difficult to get very much drama out of that.

Literary science fiction can afford a little more imagination, because it costs the same to print 200 pages of clever and creative writing as it does to print 200 pages of anything else. In Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, a tragic and ultimately genocidal war erupts between humans and an alien civilization because each is so radically different from the other that neither realizes that the other is an intelligent species until it is too late. Others have speculated, in fiction and elsewhere, that life (and even intelligent life) from elsewhere in the cosmos might be so radically different from human beings that we likely would not even understand each other as living things.