Tevun-Krus #53 - Return to First Contact

The Imitation Narrative - An Article by @CelestriaUniverse

Clones and duplications: initial explorations in The Imitation Narrative

'So how do we know who's human? If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation, how would you know if it was really me?'

-Childs, John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)

Recently I underwent research into what I've labelled 'The Imitation Narrative,' for a University writing module, in preparation for my own writing. Here I am condensing much of my research and theories for you to consider here as an initial exploration into this common science-fiction scenario, dipping our toes into the waters, so to speak.

These texts, be they in novels, short stories, films or other forms of media, deliberately enhance paranoia by their very nature. We ask ourselves the simple question of whether we can trust our friends, our families. Is my mother really my mother, or but a clone of her? Philip K. Dick has used the narrative in many of his stories, two of which being The Hanging Stranger (Dick, 1999), and The Father-Thing (Dick, 2001). Both stories focus on the break-up of the family in order to instil paranoia and fear in the reader. In The Hanging Stranger this is with Loyce finding his wife and children replaced by 'Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men', and in The Father-Thing it is a larvae-like pod-person imitating Charles' father. Sabine Büssing describes this attack on the familial unit thus: 'Since the family is usually considered a stable unit, new American Gothic tries to destroy it and, along with this destruction, bring chaos into society,' (Bussing, 1987).

It isn't just extra-terrestrial threats these stories tap into however, in order to create their paranoia. John Carpenter has cited Agatha Christie's novel, And Then There Were None (Christie, 2015), as an influence on his filmic adaptation of Campbell's novella Who Goes There? (Campbell, 2011), which contains a very similar set-up of an isolated group of people being picked off one by one by a killer in their midst, with paranoia and tension creeping up as the seconds tick on.

Perhaps one of the strangest examples of this attack on the family is John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos (Wyndham, 1980), which sees every fertile woman in the small town of Midwich give birth to a golden-eyed child with latent psychic abilities. Here it is quite clear that the emotional bonds that hold us together as a familial community are being directly attacked, the act of reproducing our species being almost sacrilegiously used for the purpose of disturbing us socially.

Not only does this present another of our fears, that of children being not of our kind (look at the birth scene from Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) or a large amount of the Alien/Prometheus films for more explorations of humans birthing aliens/monsters), but it begins to bring up the idea that many of these imitations are psychic in some way, or in many cases have hive minds. The children of Wyndham's novel are all interconnected, ''what one of the boys knows, all the boys know'', and this even sneaks into places like Doctor Who, when the skin-stealing slitheen show that they feel another of their family's deaths, 'Sip Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day-Slitheen is dead.' 'I felt it.' (BBC, 2005). The implications of this is that, being in our human form, the alien's power takes the form of mental superiority over us; the cleverest monkeys on the planet have been dethroned.

What does all of this mean for The Imitation Narrative itself, though? In short, what does The Imitation Narrative itself mean?

In his seminal tale of alien encounters, H. G. Wells notes this about the Martians: '"We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians... were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space if fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"' (Wells, 1897). In perhaps his most well-known story, Wells compares this invading, extra-terrestrial threat to us, both raising our enemies up and bringing us down. Through this lens, we can see the Imitation Narrative in a new light.

Let's jump back to the 1950's, to two seminal texts, one perhaps more well-known novels. Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers (Finney, 2010) describes a race of parasitic spores that replicate all living things to be exactly the same but without emotions, and Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (Heinlein, 1987) has its Titan slugs wage a global war on humanity with the promise of 'nirvana'. If we remember that the 50's was the height of the Cold War, and the threat of communist invasion was paramount on American soil, by applying the Wellsian lens of seeing the aliens as reflections of us, is it any wonder that these lifeless imitations are seen as being allegorical of an invasive ideology? 'Finney has denied that his novel had anything to do with the Cold War, but the pods can be read as a metaphor of perceptions of Communism as emotionless regenerations, or subservience in a production and distribution system,' (Seed, 1999). Heinlein himself writes in The Puppet Masters, 'I wondered why the titans had not attacked Russia first; the place seemed tailor-made for them. On second thought, I wondered if they had. On third thought, I wondered what difference it would make,' (Heinlein, p.138).

In today's society, however, we are not constantly on our guard for communist threats. Instead we are vigilant for a different kind of danger, a new 'other'. David M. Higgins notes that science fiction reshapes itself after 9/11 'to directly address anxieties concerning terrorism, terrorist attacks, and America's war on terror, and aliens often functioned as direct allegories for terrorists.' (Higgins, 2015). Even if it were not intentional, it could be so easy to read an Imitation Narrative in today's world as representing fears of invasion from an extreme religious ideology.

Through this very brief initial discussion of the Imitation Narrative, therefore, it is clear to see that the threat of an alien race coming to our little green and blue planet as clones or duplications of ourselves, not only creates paranoia on a fundamental level, but on a deeply social level inextricably linked with the society in which we live. Under the guise of a Tudor-like 'paranoid horror' narrative, The Imitation Narrative translates the colonial fears of Wells' Martians to match the threats of foreign ideologies relevant to the time period in which the story is being written.

Though I have not even scratched the surface of even the extra-terrestrial dimension of the Imitation Narrative, may this be your introduction to a new way of thinking about the underlying metaphorical and allegorical meanings and interpretations of this staple of speculative fiction.

-copyright Kieran Judge, known on Wattpad as CelestriaUniverse

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alien. 1979. [Film] Directed by Ridley Scott. United States of America: Brandywine Productions.

Bussing, S., 1987. Aliens in the home: The Child in Horror fiction. United States of America: Greenwood Press.

Campbell, J. W., 2011. Who Goes There?. 1st ed. London: Gollancz.

Christie, A., 2015. And Then There Were None. London: HarperCollins.

Dick, P. K., 1999. Second Variety. United Kingdom: Orion.

Dick, P. K., 2001. The Father-Thing. Great Britain: Orion.

Doctor Who: S1 Ep5. 2005. [Film] Directed by Keith Boak. United Kingdom: BBC.

Finney, J., 2010. The Body Snatchers. Great Britain: Orion Publishing.

Heinlein, R. A., 1987. The Puppet Masters. United Kingdom: Hodder & Stoughton Paperbacks.

Higgins, D. M., 2015. American Science Fiction after 9/11. In: G. Canavan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction. Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, pp. 44 - 57.

John Carpenter's The Thing. 1982. [Film] Directed by John Carpenter. United States of America: Universal Studios.

Seed, D., 1999. American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film. Great Britain: Edinburgh University Press.

The Fly. 1986. [Film] Directed by David Cronenberg. United States: Brooksfilms.

Tudor, A., 1987. Monsters And Mad Scientists: A Cultural History Of The Horror Film. 1st ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.

Wells, H. G., 1897. The War Of The Worlds. United Kingdom: Pearson's Magazine.

Wyndham, J., 1980. The Midwich Cuckoos. Aylesbury: Penguin Books.