Neophobia

Trying to finish my next post, which is running much longer than I'd intended, reminded me of an aspect of speculative fiction I haven't thought about much. Science Fiction and Horror are diametrically opposed in one crucial aspect: curiousity. It's neophilia vs. neophobia. In one case, you're supposed to shine a light on the thing in the shadows; in the other, run from it. Popular culture, because it banks on fear of the unknown for thrills and constantly reinforces the status quo, has not been kind to SciFi. In fact, aside from being action-oriented, most SciFi movies featuring any non-human or post-human entities are Horror with a flimsy spackle of lasers and spaceships, presenting the audience with an easily hated monster or enemy tribe juxtaposed against the plains-ape status quo. Think about it: was anything about the aliens in, say, Independence Day, relevant to the plot? Aside from being an enemy army?

Very few flicks, like the original Alien movie for instance, truly manage to straddle both genres, to instill both curiousity and fear in their audience. Worse, so much of the best SciFi, like Clarke's The Wire Continuum or A Meeting with Medusa or Childhood's End, has never been done justice because it is intrinsically transhumanist, because it denies its audience the horror label for the unknown, that cozy retrenchment into simian instinct, emotion and stupidity.

Oh, disgust, disgust, disgust.