Ken Liu
Ken Liu is an award-winning author of speculative fiction, whose work explores the relationship between technology, storytelling, and cultural memory. He is the author of The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and the silkpunk epic fantasy series The Dandelion Dynasty, and a recipient of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards.
Essay
Ken Liu, Xenoreflection
In 1695, Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock and discoverer of Saturn’s moon Titan, finished Cosmotheoros (later rendered into English as The Celestial Worlds Discover’d), in which he speculated on the existence and nature of extraterrestrials. It was the last book he wrote, for he would pass away later that year.
Cosmotheoros is full of bold imaginings. Not only are planets like Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn populated by animals (or “Creatures capable of moving themselves, not at all inferior to ours”), but some of these animals would be “endued with Reason.” Indeed, a few of these reasoning creatures would be astronomers, mathematicians, and musicians, and they would have inventions that we on Earth did not. Huygens’s vision of the inhabitants of Saturn contemplating the world-spanning shadow cast by its rings, a wonder that blots out a geometrically perfect slice of the sky, can stand toe-to-toe with any of the sublime cosmic marvels imagined by Arthur C. Clarke or Lois McMaster Bujold centuries later.
And yet, at the same time, from our later vantage point, it is striking how conservative Huygens was in his speculations. For instance, despite acknowledging the drastically different physical conditions pervading the other planets—Mercury would be scorching while Saturn must be exceedingly cold—he couldn’t conceive of aliens with a sensorium distinct from ours. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell must be all that aliens can enjoy, for “Nature [has] so plentifully, so perfectly provided for the necessary preservation of her Creatures [on Earth], that I think she can give nothing more to [aliens on other planets], but what will be needless and superfluous.” Similarly, animals on extraterrestrial planets must necessarily reproduce via “Copulation of Male and Female” and move about using feet or wings just like ours. For us, knowing that birds and turtles navigate by magnetoreception, that sharks catch their prey through electroreception, that plants communicate via the wood-wide web, that asexual reproduction is more common than sexual, that our cognition may be partly carried out by microbes in our gut, that organisms found in underground mines and near deep-sea vents are nothing like the creatures found on the surface … the idea that nature would have no other tricks up her sleeves on other planets feels so timid as to be nearly ridiculous.
Likewise, Huygens was convinced that aliens would not only have writing, but whatever alien writing was like, it would not be “more ingenious or easy” than Latin letters, whose superiority was as readily discerned as the superiority of European culture over other terrestrial cultures: “For how much more ready and expeditious is our Way, than by that multitude of Characters used in China and how vastly preferable to Knots tied in Cords, or the Pictures in use among the barbarous People of Mexico and Peru?” In a time when we have already invented countless digital encoding schemes orders of magnitude more ingenious and easier than human writing, and when we have come to possess a better appreciation of the ingenuity and ease encoded in all human writing systems, Huygens’s paucity of imagination feels disappointing.
This contrast is reconciled when we realize that Huygens’s imagination was simultaneously empowered and constrained by his knowledge of our own planet: Earth. The alien is the flip side of the familiar, and the extraterrestrial is thus defined by the planetary.
In fact, Huygens was engaged in what I call xenoreflection, a process through which knowledge of our own world is reflected into imaginings of the alien, and knowledge of the alien is reflected into imaginings of ourselves.
As a work of xenoreflection, Huygens’s Cosmotheros builds his gaze into the heavens upon his understanding of the orb on which he stands. It was better knowledge of the Earth’s place in the universe, a consequence of the Copernican Revolution, that allowed him to imagine inhabitants elsewhere. “A Man that is of Copernicus’s Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlighten’d by the Sun, like the rest of the Planets, cannot but sometimes think, that it’s not improbable that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, and perhaps their Inhabitants too.” The de-centering of Earth, merely one among many planets, certainly not the center of the Solar System, much less the heart of the universe, opened up human imagination and made space for extraterrestrials.
But it was also better knowledge of our planet, especially the result of European exploration of the Americas, that constrained Huygens’s imagination of the alien. Why was he convinced that the animals of Jupiter and Saturn could not be very different in form from those of Earth? “Who doubts but that God, if he had pleased, might have made the Animals in America and other distant Countries nothing like ours? yet we see he has not done it.” Again, with the wisdom that comes from our latter location in time, we see the root of Huygens’s mistake: that the animals of the Americas bear so much resemblance to the animals of the Old World is the result of the single tree of life on Earth, a shared evolutionary history that cannot be assumed to apply to creatures found anywhere else in the universe.
However, we can resist Huygens’s intuition to extend what was found in America to the heavens only because we have a different imagination for our own planet. In an age where pears grown in Argentina can be shipped to Thailand, where they’re chopped up, drenched in syrup, and packed into single-serving cups, which are then shipped to the United States to be sold for a profit, we must remind ourselves that our planet has not always seemed so small. There was a time when a trip from Europe to America would have seemed like a trip to the far side of the Moon, and the discovery that things in America were not so different from the Old World was absolutely paradigm-defining. If the people of America—a land as alien as another planet—turned out to be fellow humans, no different from the inhabitants of Europe, then was it such a stretch to believe that reasoning creatures on Mars and Jupiter might also have hands and stand on two feet?
Xenoreflection is both liberating and confining because the alien is our mirror. We cannot imagine the alien without reference to ourselves; we also cannot imagine ourselves without thinking about the alien. Knowledge of the planetary and knowledge of the extraterrestrial act as two legs of a compass, each enabling the other to trace out bold new curves, but simultaneously circumscribing the other’s range.
Cosmotheoros is but one example of the historical shift in xenoreflection wherein as knowledge about our own planet changed, so did our aliens. When colonial empires carved up the globe and subjugated indigenous populations with violence, we imagined extraterrestrials doing the same to Earth in War of the Worlds. When indigenous peoples rose up and drove out terrestrial colonial oppressors, we dreamed the same dream in space through The Word for World is Forest. This shift isn’t limited to fiction. As we have learned more about the extreme forms life takes and the extreme conditions under which life thrives on our world, we have also changed how and where we look for life elsewhere.
The opposite movement in xenoreflection, wherein knowledge of the alien changes our imagination of ourselves, is perhaps even more relevant to our moment. As human explorers and robotic probes visited the Moon and the other planets over the last two centuries, we were greeted with wonder after wonder, but never any signs of life. Instead of the alternate Earths filled with exotic animals and inventive ETs imagined by Huygens, the other planets turned out to be only “Lifeless Heaps of inanimate Bodies.” Centuries after the Copernican Revolution, we’ve been forced to recalibrate our conception of the Earth yet again. Despite the superficial appeal of the Principle of Plenitude, which states that a perfect, fecund God would not leave so much of Creation empty, there does appear to be something unique about our planet (at least in our Solar System). After 4.6 billion years, as of this moment, Earth remains the only place where life exists, sentient or otherwise, as far as we know. The Blue Marble, insignificant as it may be in the grand scheme of the universe, is nonetheless the center of our experience, every bit as precious as Eden. Future de-centerings will, in turn, bring about further re-centerings, but our imagination, spiraling upward, will describe ever-larger spheres as we bounce between the planetary and the extraterrestrial.
The more we learn about our own planet, the better the questions we ask about other worlds. Conversely, the more we know about the alien, the better we can imagine ourselves. The greatest challenge in xenoreflection, in Huygens’s time as now, is to ask ever bolder questions that stretch the boundaries of our imagination and move the compass to new points.
Footnotes
Christiaan Huygens, The Celestial Worlds Discover’d : Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets (London: Printed for James Knapton, 1722), 21-22.
Huygens, 37.
Huygens, 99.
Huygens, 126-27.
Huygens, 51-52.
Huygens, 30.
Huygens, 32.
Huygens, 64-65.
Huygens, 1-2.
Huygens, 23.
Huygens, 20.