The Alien In The War Of The Worlds

Who is the Alien?

One of the most pervasively recognizable tropes in Science Fiction remains the Alien, the strange visitor who literally falls from the sky (although it can sometimes be constructed terrestrially, be discovered lurking below us or even emerge from within ). They come in war, they come in peace, they come to conduct experiments on us or even sometimes come to do some anthropological research (ET). No matter their motives, the appearance of the Alien is so embedded in our collective consciousness that its presence (once identified) is the ready indicator that we indeed have found ourselves in a science fictional setting. As the success of both the original source material and the most recent remake of The War of the Worlds reminds us, the Alien is as timeless as it is ubiquitous, serving as timeless allegory for our base fears and childlike curiosities; it is, as Elana Gomel notes, “SF’s most versatile metaphor, its signature trope.”

The Alien in science fiction often serves the function of Suvin’s novum, the catalyst of cognitive estrangement which uncannily disorients us as either the strangely familiar or the familiar stranger, serving as that unfamiliar quality that will bring us back to ourselves. This can occur through two different processes – either through the motivations of the Alien itself or the humanity/lack of humanity that visibly registers in the Alien’s Presence. (It is salient to note that Science Fiction rarely conceives of the extra/intra-terrestrial that does not harbor human-like motivations and desires . This inability to conceive of an Alien ontology may be a concept destined to forever drive around and around in a mental cul-de-sac. After all, it may simply be impossible to describe – let alone intelligible read – the stranger who is so unintelligible to us. This begs the corollary question of if we would ever really want to and if so,