The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider1
(Winner, Pioneer Award, 1990)
That SF is capable of evoking in its readers "a sense of wonder" has become something of a critical cliché.2
Another and equally characteristic side of the SF coin, however, is
its role in what we might term "the domestication of the fantastic."
H.G. Wells introduces this issue, for example, in his "Preface to the Scientific Romances"
(1933). "Nothing," he writes, "remains interesting where anything may
happen." For this reason, the SF writer should provide the reader with
orderly ground-rules for his or her fictional universes. Wells
concludes that "[the writer] must help [the reader] in every possible
unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis" (p.
241; Wells's emphasis). This is reiterated, in different terms, by Eric
S. Rabkin, who argues that
what is important in the definition of science fiction is...the idea that paradigms do control our view of all phenomena, that within these paradigms all normal problems can be solved, and that abnormal occurrences must either be explained or initiate the search for a better (usually more inclusive) paradigm. (p. 121)
For this reason, while the SF genre
expands the scope and the variety of the physical universe, it often
does so—ironically perhaps—at the expense of what cannot be explained
in terms of natural law and scientific possibility —i.e., at the
expense of the super-natural or the un-natural, the ontologically
indeterminate area of the fantastic.
From the generic perspective of SF,
the territory of the fantastic lies just across the border, and SF has
always been effective at expanding its own territories through the
scientific rationalization of elements originally located in the
narrative worlds of fantasy. In Colin Manlove's words, "the science
fiction writer throws a rope of the conceivable (how remotely so does
not matter) from our world to his [or hers]..." (p. 7). Manlove points
out that "as soon as the 'supernatural' has become possible we are no
longer dealing with fantasy but with science fiction" (p. 3).
A classic example of this domestication of the fantastic occurs in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953),
a novel which draws the conventional figure of the devil—bat-wings,
barbed tail, and all—across the border of the supernatural into SF
territory. Childhood's End not only provides a "plausible"
narrative framework for its demystification of the devil-figure; it
also aims to explain the powerful ongoing presence of this figure in
our collective race-memory. Clarke thus manages to transform mythic
fantasy into alien reality while maintaining the "sense of wonder"
inscribed in the original figure.
The vampire, a less grandiose but
equally horrific archetype, is one satanic figure which is currently
enjoying a resurgence of literary and critical popularity.3 "Immortalized" by Bram Stoker in his classic Gothic novel, Dracula (1897),
and still most typically associated with the horror genre, the vampire
too has occasionally crossed the border from fantasy to SF, undergoing
varieties of domestication in works such as Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), Tanith Lee's Sabella, or the Blood Stone (1980), and David Bischoff's Vampires of Nightworld (1981).
