All fiction is metaphor,” wrote Ursula K Le Guin. “Science fiction is metaphor.” The writer, most famous for her Earthsea fantasy novels, captured the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism and the rise of environmentalism in her fiction from the 1960s through to her death in 2018. “What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life.” Now, as we live through the greatest acceleration in technological development since the advent of automation, it’s on science fiction, once again, to probe and provoke. That’s a role that Alien: Earth, the first TV instalment in the Alien franchise, takes very seriously.
A spaceship bearing alien specimens has mysteriously crash-landed on Earth, parking up unceremoniously in the fictional city of New Siam. Onboard, predatory creatures stalk the poorly lit hallways, offering the Prodigy Corporation – a shadowy multitrillion-dollar Really Big Tech firm, led by precocious CEO Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) – a chance to test its new “hybrids”. These aren’t cyborgs (enhanced humans) or synths (humanoid robots) but a new breed: human consciousness in a perfect synthetic body. “We’re something different,” Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a 12-year-old girl piloting, in true Hollywood style, the body of a sexy adult, informs the audience. “Something special.” Even with the huge teeth and drooling maws of the aliens wreaking havoc on the spaceship, there is nothing more chilling in Alien: Earth than these topical questions about the nature of being.
Science fiction has a long history of engaging in social commentary. Fritz Lang’s 1927 expressionist masterpiece Metropolis, for example, sounds a warning about untrammelled industrialisation, a contentious political subject of the Twenties. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey at the height of the “Space Race”. A year before man landed on the moon, the film presented a philosophical argument about extraplanetary exploration and the friction between progress and mysticism. Again and again, science fiction has aired the preoccupations of its age: The Matrix (information systems of control), The Terminator (man’s ability to contain technology), RoboCop (political authoritarianism), Children of Men (nativism in a changing world) and so on.
Alien: Earth is by no means the first work to deal with the question of what it is to be human. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” Rutger Hauer’s replicant, Roy Batty, reveals at the climax of Blade Runner. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” This line, one of the most famous in the history of cinema, is fraught with nuance. Roy’s real memories – seen through synthetic eyes – have left an imprint on viewers (synthetic memories, through real eyes) grappling with that most tortured of questions: what do we leave behind after this short, mortal life?
Since the Alien franchise was rebooted in 2012 with Prometheus, the series has become ever more interested in the existential questions surrounding artificial life. It reflects a sense that all of science (and therefore all of science fiction) is headed towards the creation of an artificial life indistinguishable from its natural counterpart. Michael Fassbender’s David 8 (the antagonist of both Prometheus and its 2017 sequel Alien: Covenant) is a sensitive android who has turned against humanity. Through his judgment of his creator, he demonstrates a bitterness that feels quite familiar. “He was human,” David opines. “Entirely unworthy of his creation.”
In the 13 years since Prometheus, the scientific pursuit of a capable artificial intelligence has ramped up significantly. The “race for immortality” described in Alien: Earth is happening right now, 95 years before the action of the series is set. OpenAI, Meta, Google; these are proxies for the mega-corporations trifling with the singular nature of existence in the Alien universe. “We ended death,” Essie Davis’s compassionate scientist implores her employer. “Now we have to make their quality of life better.” This expresses a key concern of the AI movement: that progress will result in longer lifespans, faster computers and instantaneous creativity, but that life itself will be damaged, irreparably, in the process.
Or, to quote another sci-fi icon, Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, technologists have been “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should”. After all, there’s a reason why film and television are such good outlets for our societal anxieties. Something has to go wrong. If Jurassic Park had kept a better eye on its dinosaurs (maybe focused on the herbivores rather than the flesh-eating raptors?), then it would’ve made for a much more successful tourist attraction, but a far less exciting film. The Alien franchise comes with certain promises: violent extraterrestrial life will get loose, and the remaining life forms, both living and robotic, will turn on each other. This is the horror genre, after all, so there needs to be a little fear-mongering.
But for Alien: Earth, these preoccupations are meatier than ever. Even looking back, now, at David 8, it’s striking how much his blanched, dead-eyed visage looks like that of Bryan Johnson, the American entrepreneur who has become a media darling for expounding an anti-ageing regimen. “Most people assume death is inevitable,” he has told Time magazine. His experiments are “reframing what it means to be human”. It is dialogue that could have come straight from the mouth of Boy Kavalier. Our fragile earthly bodies, our flawed processing minds; it is the remit of science to replicate, enhance and replace these aged tools. And it is the role of science fiction, then, to raise a scream of its own.
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Morrow (Babou Ceesay), the cyborg security officer of the crashed ship USCSS Maginot, tells his pursuers. “To be all machine, instead of the worst parts of a man.” Nice though, or just easy? A world of self-driving cars, vending machines, chatbots and smart speakers might grease the wheel for humanity, but it is a fine line. Alien: Earth rings the alarm bell against the next century eroding and commoditising humanity itself. It is a stark warning that we are on the precipice, utilising the genre tools that, over the years, have exposed our existential fears time and again.
‘Alien: Earth’ is available to stream on Disney+
