When Two Worlds Collide

The aliens can always speak English. This is one of those absurdities of pulp fiction and B movies, like saucer-shaped spaceships and hairdryer machines that track your brain waves, that might well come true— suppose the visitors avoid those disconcerting forms of long-haul space travel that whisk you across the galaxy and dump you in the concourse of Lime Street station before you have time to say ‘Non-Smoking’. If they come in slowly they'll spend the latter part of their journey travelling through a vast cloud of human broadcasting signals, which they'll easily pick up on the alien cabin TV. They'll have plenty of time to acquire a smattering of useful phrases. Or so the current received wisdom goes—I'd love some expert to tell me if this idea makes sense, by the way. By now it's not completely inevitable that they'll speak English, and with a United States accent, in the traditional manner. They might get hooked on Brazilian soap opera. But whatever formal, articulate language our visitors use in real life, all the aliens we know so far speak human. They speak our human predicament, our history, our hopes and fears, our pride and shame. As long as we haven't met any actual no-kidding intelligent extraterrestrials (and I would maintain that this is still the case, though I know opinions are divided) the aliens we imagine are always other humans in disguise: no more, no less. Whether or not hell is other people, it is certainly other people who arrive, in these fictions, to challenge our isolation: to be feared or worshipped, interrogated, annihilated, appeased. When the historical situation demands it science fiction writers demonize our enemies, the way the great Aryan court poet who wrote the story of Prince Rama demonized the Dravidian menace, in India long ago. Or we can use imaginary aliens to assuage our guilt. I think it's not unlikely that our European ancestors invented the little people who live in the hills, cast spells and are ‘ill to cross’—who appear so often in traditional fiction north of the Mediterranean and west of Moscow—to explain why their cousins the Neanderthals had mysteriously vanished from public life.