Cancer with the Stars: On the Space Western, the Alien Series, and Gothic Marxism

The $5 matinee kept me in touch with culture for decades.

One of the watershed moments for so-called Nerd Culture in the past twenty years was the Firefly series. I first encountered it after it was dead and gone in the form of the film Serenity, seen on a college movie night at a movie theater I had been fired from and which I now work across the street from the ruins of. From a storytelling standpoint, Serenity is a well-constructed film; it worked as both a conclusion to and an introduction to the series, following a band of scrappy outlaws as they try to make their living after a disastrous civil war. It was also my first encounter with future Academy Award Winner Chiwetel Ejiofor, who played the villain (honestly, the most interesting character out of the lot, being a principled monster that had echoes of the Mirror-Universe Spock.)

The series itself was famously mismanaged by Fox: it was a precursor to a lot of the prestige television in that it had an overarching plot that many Fox affiliates scrambled, treating like an episodic action-comedy something that had a fairly coherent structure when viewed in order.

Despite the inclusion of Chinese characters, as far as I’m aware no asian people appeared in Firefly or Serenity. Syfy wrote a piece here on it.

Now, this piece isn’t going to be about Firefly, but a lot of contemporary science fiction owes a debt to it. I can’t help but feel that it popularized a lot of libertarian ideas in fandom circles, and revived a genre that was on its last legs – that being said, it also borrowed a lot from two anime series that I think are worth noting, Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star. The former much more so than the latter, and the former is honestly a lot better than the latter. All three are examples of the Space Western, which is essentially “Han Solo: the genre.”

Now, Space Westerns are fairly common – I can’t help but say that I look forward to the debut of the Netflix adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, if only because it will stitch elements of Hong Kong action movies into the genre and hopefully lead to some changes in its DNA.

The mythic structure of the Space Western is fairly common and easy to make into an episodic series:

1. You start with a band of scrappy outlaws on a cool starship that has seen better days, traveling from planet to planet and job to job. Generally there’s some personality clashes in the group, possibly some sexual tension here and there.

2. They are given a job that is either fully or partially illegal. Generally speaking, this involves spitting in the eye of a government, corporation, or crime syndicate.

3. The job seems to go smoothly, until it doesn’t.

4. There is an action set-piece that showcases the scrappy outlaw crew’s cleverness or facility with violence.

5. In the course of the set-piece (the only obligatory set piece; others often crop up) they either bungle the job, exposing themselves to greater danger, or are betrayed by their employer (either actively, through being made a target or abandoned, or passively, through important information being withheld.)

6. As a result of this bungling/betrayal, they are given much less of a reward than they were promised and limp along to the next job.

The above describes most Cowboy Bebop episodes. Somehow, I don’t mind, honestly.

I think it’s important to note that, while these characters are often smugglers or thieves, the most common profession for this type of character is the bounty hunter, and one of the most common reversals is for the bounty to have been placed on an innocent person. Generally, the bounty hunters – people who make their living by enforcing arbitrary laws through violence – suddenly grow a conscience and let the innocent person go.

This is all a structure that only makes sense in the context of capitalism: you can’t have a post-scarcity Space Western, because scarcity is the motor for the plot. However, it is a particular kind of Scarcity – that of the frontier. On a frontier, especially as constructed in the American sense, resources are not scarce, access to civilization is. That is because no one owns the resources on the frontier, it’s the shockwave edge of civilization passing into non-civilization, preparing everything to be extracted and converted and consumed.

Never mind that this happened in only three places in the real-world historical record: Iceland (where there may have been Irish monks, but no real native populations) and New Zealand (the first time, when the Maori settled it,) and Madagascar (ditto, but with the Malagasy, not the Maori.) Every other time, it was a violent assault on an indigenous people, and every time this is acknowledged within the Space Western genre it comes across as dehumanizing to indigenous people, because they’re suddenly being literally portrayed by nonhumans.

Because space goes on forever, this sort of story is, in short, a petty bourgeois vision of endless opportunity, with the scrappy outlaw crew being figures that can generally be identified with. Consider: many of these stories involve humanity showing up and finding a near-endless supply of habitable worlds with minimal sentient alien life. It’s all ripe for the picking.

The aesthetic is on point, but it’s still falling behind Disco Elysium for me.

A recent critique of this can be found in Obsidian Entertainment’s Outer Worlds, a rather fun little game that plays like Fallout: New Vegas, and seems to me to be very similar to Firefly with the serial numbers filed off (an assessment that Joel, our last guest columnist, disagrees with,) and came out with sort of a Borderlands-meets-Bioshock: Infinite aesthetic. It acknowledges the problems with capitalism, examines the ways that unfettered exploitation might function in a space-colonial environment, and gets somewhat wheels-off at points. It is, after all, made by the crew that did the original Fallout games, which have a very particular sense of the weird.

All of this being said, Outer Worlds still accepts many of the fundamental premises of the Space Western, and I feel it can best be considered as a critique, rather than an inversion. As a critique, I’m not sure it goes quite far enough, but I’m glad it’s being made, and it’s nice to find a game that doesn’t just buy into the gray-and-brown-means-realism thing.

Ellen Ripley needs a day off, honestly — the three original movies take place over a century, but she was only awake for like a week of it, and it was awful the whole time.

For a true inversion of the Space Western, we have to look at the Alien series (ignoring the crossovers with Predator, but inclusive of Prometheus.) Here, space is not an endless pool of resources to be tapped, but a complex and dangerous labyrinth that must be navigated. While there are certainly resources to be extracted, it is more likely that the characters are victims of extraction (within the confines of the films; presumably there are billions of people who are just having regular terrible days, and not becoming flesh-cocoons for an alien murder-beast.)

So here, the motor that drives people outward – which is framed within the Alien movies not as scarcity but as greed – is the real problem: the universe of the Alien movies would be reasonably safe if we just stayed away from the ruins, and we could cautiously expand to a number of worlds that are not immediately inimical to human life. It is the bottomless hunger of the Capitalist system that forces the various protagonists into contact with the monsters from outside, and so many of these characters are ground down to dust.

Part of why I like Alien – and to a lesser extent the other movies in the series – more than most other horror movies is that the characters generally make choices that I can understand. As such, the deaths of the characters take on a more tragic air: they did the right thing and they still died (a situation with some generational resonance.) Part of the problem with Prometheus is just how much it was infected by standard horror tropes, where the characters invite their own destruction (such as not backing away from an unfamiliar animal making an obvious threat-display, or taking off their helmets just because the air is breathable.)

The Space Western I described above is a fantasy for libertarians; Alien is a nightmare for socialists (to an extent, other, Alien-influenced media could be counted similarly, but I don’t have as much experience with Dead Space and the like.) The horror here is that Late Capitalism slipped the surly bonds of Earth and is spreading throughout space, consuming everything it touches.

Cover of Leviathan Wakes, book 1 of the Expanse.

The point on the Venn diagram between these two approaches might be best represented by the Expanse series, which I recently caught up with in book form and which I’m looking forward to the fourth season of. I think I even once described it as “like Firefly meets Dead Space” to someone, shortly after reading the first book.

There are other possible spaces between these two poles, ways of handling the ideas without committing to a full Star Trek-like post-scarcity future (though, I will admit, I find the idea of a post-scarcity society more compelling than the idea of some kind of Space Ostern.) I will admit that I tend to find both more interesting than Military Science Fiction, which tends to duck the issue of our economic future by implicitly embracing the imperialistic status quo but setting everything within the confines of a hyper-efficient command economy (which the US military is an example of – it’s the largest, most successful centrally planned economy in the world [F-35 notwithstanding], followed up by Walmart.)

But why is it so hard to imagine, in an infinite universe, those who do not wish to live under the domination of corporate interests or a tyrannical government simply fleeing beyond the edge of known space, making a leap of faith into the unknown? This seems to me to be the real untapped potential of space-based science fiction: why do people think that, when the walls come down, we will stay in the enclosure?

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