The Outer Spaces of Fiction

In the postscript to his bestselling science fiction novel The Three Body Problem (also the subject of a recent Netflix adaptation) the Chinese author Liu Cixin describes encountering the ‘bone-chilling vastness’ of outer space in popular astronomy books as a child. ‘I realised I had a special talent,’ he writes. ‘Scales and existences that far exceeded the bounds of human sensory perception […] could take on concrete forms in my mind. I could touch them and feel them, much like others could touch and feel trees and rocks.’ Later, he claims that the stories of the world of science are superior to those told by literature – ‘only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.’

For Liu, there are two main obstacles to mass cultural or artistic engagement with the subject of outer space – the first being the problem of scale, and the second being the problem of disciplinary access. But there are many more obstacles besides – for outer space is not just a very big subject and a very technical one, it also literally represents the outer limit of the known and the knowable, the felt and the lived, the human and the earthly. If one is to stick even very loosely to the adage ‘write what you know’, then the extra-terrestrial realm is most certainly out of bounds.

Film has always been comfortable with the splendour of space. Many of us commonly understand the night sky as a projection that rotates predictably above our heads, one characterised by the same false depth as the cinema screen; a way of thinking that is drilled into us from our earliest encounters with the subject in the planetarium theatre. It helps, too, that most data we receive about the far reaches of space reaches us as audio-visual material: the sound of Saturn’s rings, a blurry image of a black hole. Even when a million small unseen translations are happening in order to turn machine-collected data into something that we understand as an image or sound bite, the output always looks or sounds like something that we are experiencing directly. Generally speaking, we accept our cameras’ testimonies of outer space as truth.

Literature, by contrast, is both less direct and more multi-dimensional than cinema – and as a result, its approximations are more obviously approximations. Generating a sense of place through text requires more than mere visual description. The presence of sand and sky alone might not convince us we are in a desert, but the grainy sting of the wind might. Many of us have experiences on Earth that help us write about a desert if we have never been to one – but few among us will ever get close to anything like visiting outer space. How does one write convincingly about places where no human body has been?

We know from our present ecological crises that, on Earth, there is no such thing as an ‘away’: the plastics we discard show up again in our water supply and the carbon we pump into our atmosphere settles as a blanket over our heads. Even objects discarded in the darkness beyond our atmosphere tend to get trapped in our orbit, and sometimes find their way back down to us on Earth. But things can ‘get away’ in outer space, at least to where we can no longer imagine their fate. When they do, we are forced to confront what it really means to face the possibility of a true outside to the known. Simply contemplating the scale of the universe can feel like a kind of death, or at least a kind of insanity: the mind gets away – we know not where.

A curiosity about the ‘away-ness’ of outer space links two otherwise very different recent works of fiction that interrogate Earth’s relationship to the extra-terrestrial realm. At their hearts, both offer tales of liberation through expulsion: Ceridwen Dovey’s short story collection Only the Astronauts follows a series of space objects who fall out of the orbit of Earth’s care and attention. In doing so, they escape the tyrannical distinction that separates life from non-life. Meanwhile, Pip Adam’s novel centres on three ‘inhumanly tall’ human characters, banished to outer space, whose exile ultimately allows them to begin anew as aliens.

In Dovey’s Only the Astronauts, space is a very real place, with its own history, its own logic, and its own set of physical possibilities. But in Pip Adam’s Audition, space is a metaphor; the ‘roominess’ of infinity is a constant taunt to its giant characters, who spend most of the novel packed like sardines in a spaceship that feels smaller and smaller as their physical bodies grow larger and larger. If Dovey’s stories are curious about what goes on in the endless realm beyond our thin atmosphere, then Adam’s novel might be described as curious about what the word ‘space’ means on Earth. ‘[W]hat happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room,’ reads the description on the back cover.

The word ‘space’ is made to do a lot of work these days, particularly in describing the ways we relate to one another. We hold space for one another. We give ourselves permission to take space. We notice who takes up space. In many cases, the word ‘space’ could easily be replaced with the word ‘time’, and make just as much sense. But the word ‘space’ has an important advantage over the word ‘time’, which is that it implies its opposite – a cramped, claustrophobic existence. Other words rely on this opposition between space and the lack thereof: the word ‘oppression’, for example, speaks of claustrophobia – being pushed down, compressed, just as Adam’s enormous and growing characters are, within the cramped confines of the spaceship.

Audition unfolds in three sections, the first of which takes place entirely in dialogue as the giants speak to one another in stilted yet ceaseless conversation through the spacecraft walls. At first, the three characters are as homogenous as a Greek chorus, their speech patterns just as artificial, and just as expositional —

The novel opens after a revolt has taken place aboard the ship. We learn that in a strike turned suicide mission, its giant occupants ceased making the noise that drove it forward. Without the ship’s gravity to keep their growth at bay, they got bigger, until each of them found themselves jammed ‘up into corners and walls’ in the ‘last room [they] could fit in’. As they keep up the endless conversation that curbs their growth and keeps them from ‘exploding the ship’, we learn that they were cast away from Earth when they grew ‘too big’, and that prior to their launch they had been in a ‘classroom’ with many others of their kind.

The first third of the book, in particular, feels claustrophobic in ways that are psychological and linguistic, as well as physical. Sentences loop and repeat, often returning to statements of adoration for the spaceship – as much an effect of the continual need to keep talking as of the brainwashing they were subject to on Earth:

As the story progresses, and we learn that two of the characters were incarcerated at the point they began to ‘grow’, the spaceship Audition reveals itself to be less a literal spaceship and more an allegorical extension of the prison walls – and of the wider social and economic conditions that keep people imprisoned in unliveable lives. Meanwhile, the outer space surrounding the ship presents both a psychological and physical release; the ecstasy of having enough room.

This idea isn’t unique to Audition. In the music, writings, and performances of Sun Ra, and many of the other artists associated with Afrofuturism, the cosmos becomes a setting for futures where colonial logic no longer holds. But where Afrofuturism has always been excited about the aesthetic and literary possibilities of making art about space exploration, Audition feels strangely indifferent to what being in a spaceship might actually be like. The near-lobotomised condition of its three protagonists permits a fog of vagueness to settle over the first half of the story: we know nearly nothing of how the spaceship looks or feels, and there are only generic references to the view through its windows. Of course, the story isn’t really about a spaceship, and the story isn’t really science fiction. ‘This book is about the abolition of prisons and our present punishment-based justice system’, writes Adam in the acknowledgements. But then why set it in space at all?

It’s possible to argue that all space tales are ultimately geared towards answering questions about life on Earth – including The Three Body Problem, which deploys highly detailed descriptions of alien technology, future space travel, and interstellar physics to tell its story about humankind’s hypothetical response to an existential threat. But if one is going to go through the trouble of overcoming the many obstacles that space presents to writers (the problem of scale, the problem of unknowability, the problem of language which refers us always back to Earth) then one might expect the realm of outer space – its physics, its strange beauty, its pressures on the physical body – to be of some inherent interest to the author.

Comprising five stories narrated by human-made objects sent into space, Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Astronauts is both speculative and rigorously researched. As is the case with the giants of Audition, the further the object-narrators travel from Earth’s culture, the closer they come to encountering their own sense of worth and being. The fact that they are deemed disposable is precisely what allows them to venture where human bodies cannot. Only the Astronauts functions as a follow-up to Dovey’s previous collection, Only the Animals, in which the souls of ten animals killed in human conflicts recount the stories of their deaths. Across both collections, Dovey’s work interrogates the criteria by which Western anthropocentrism distinguishes between the living and the inanimate, as well as the way in which these expectations find their way into literary norms. If the human is often thought to exist at one end of a spectrum (representing life), and the object at the other (representing non-life), then the animal is largely understood as something in the middle. The move to the object-narrator, then, is a journey to the outer limit of what might be deemed a useful perspective or a valid authorial voice.

It is the human-created objects of Only the Astronauts who seem to be sentient, not the natural objects: there are talking and thinking mannequins, space stations, probes, and even space tampons, but no talking asteroids. As is often the case with object-narrators (the toys in Toy Story, the cars in Cars, the appliances of The Brave Little Toaster), these objects are oriented affectionately towards humans, operating under the belief that to be put to use is to be honoured. This trope makes sense: so many of humankind’s technologies are devised as proxies and prosthetics, and our relationship with them is one of extreme intimacy. The tragicomedy of Dovey’s collection arises from this affection and intimacy being largely one-way. Our objects hold us, support us, extend, and stand in for our bodies. They do so until they break – at which point, for the most part, we throw them away.

The first story, ‘Starman’, is a kind of Pinocchio tale in which a mannequin, bolted into position and launched into space in a midnight-cherry Tesla convertible, pines for his human astronaut lover. In the collection’s final story, ‘Hackgold | Hacksilver’, Starman reappears on an alien planet, spurned and embittered. Coming across the golden record carried by Voyager II, he feels the historic compilation to be ‘a record only of the human tyranny over other things, living and non-living’. Meanwhile, Voyager II contemplates the cruelty of the fact that it has been engineered to communicate with humans on Earth but not with its ‘twin sister’, the only other ‘thing’ that might understand its decades-long solitary quest across the universe. In ‘Requiem’, the International Space Station prepares to be decommissioned and buried in the ocean. ‘In my low orbit, I’m not immune to the pull of Earth’s atmosphere’, it reflects mournfully. ‘I’ve had a taste of what it will be like to give in to that pull, to stop resisting.’

No one knows a human butt better than a chair. No human knows a tooth like a toothbrush does, nor skin like a band-aid, nor a hand like a smartphone. The ISS-narrator of ‘Requiem’ watches its inhabitants with curiosity and affection, witnessing small triumphs, failures, and challenges that are both relatable and minutely specific to the experience of living in a space station. One astronaut watches a sitcom and laughs so hard she cries, the sight of her floating teardrops setting off a new uncontrollable bout of laughter. Another writes down a sexual dream, and is so aghast at the idea that someone might find it that he scrunches the paper into a ball and swallows it. Another finds himself ‘thinking about the psychological impact of astronauts needing to be aware of their bodies at all times while constantly denying the fact of their bodies by being required to suppress all awareness of themselves as sexual beings’.

In imagining their tender one-sided observations on human life, Dovey also acts as an attentive witness to the intimate lives of her fictional objects: the object-narrator, in other words, is not simply an empty vessel for human musings, but a real thing – made of metal and plastic and cotton, just as we are made of blood and water and calcium carbonate. It’s not just a gimmick. There are advantages to inhabiting an object’s perspective, not least a much broader reach in where that perspective can go. The human body cannot exist in outer space without being insulated within a suit, but the object-narrator can float in space and truly feel the void. In ‘Hackgold | Hacksilver’, Voyager II describes its passage towards the inner Oort cloud: 

Voyager II feels ‘the forces of both the Sun, more weakly, and other stars – more strongly – working upon me’. From the probe’s perspective, the abstract realm of outer space – which in the human imagination remains so visually determined – becomes as tangible and multi-sensorial as weather. While the object-narrator viewpoint of Only the Astronauts is confined to human-made objects, then, it also raises wider questions about exactly how the border between object and being is constructed, understood, and maintained. What might it mean to consider that the seemingly lifeless expanse of matter, anti-matter, and energy that surrounds our planet might be alive after all, albeit in a very different way to us? Why should the very specific biosphere of Earth be the only criteria by which life is measured? Is not all energy a form of life force, and does not the very life force of Earth itself (sunlight) come from outer space?

These questions are addressed more directly in the collection’s final story, ‘Hackgold | Hacksilver’, which stages an encounter with an extra-terrestrial civilisation. By the time Voyager II is collected by the inhabitants of the inner Oort cloud (beings it refers to as ‘Oortians’), it has already lost contact with Earth. No human will know of this encounter, but multiple objects do. Voyager II finds Starman and a tortoise named Plautus living among the Oortians. Starman tells Voyager II he must tell his story to Plautus – whose shell has been entirely encased in silver – so that she may pass on the message to the Oortians. ‘Throughout this telling of my story’, Voyager II recounts, 'Plautus did not give any indication she was awake, let alone alive. Yet I felt glad to have communicated these things regardless’. Starman reassures Voyager II that the tortoise is indeed alive, though he admits he doesn’t know ‘how she’s survived on so little oxygen’.

The ambiguous status of Plautus (alive? Dead?) gestures to the state of the Oortians themselves, who have interest only in objects made of metal, and who walk ‘without complaint across the solid ice surface of Sedna’. Dovey spends an entire page describing the physical form of these aliens, as sensed by the machine Voyager II. Their faces bear ‘a pattern of gemstones embedded in their silver carapace like scales’. There is a ‘small quantity of some kind of radioactive jelly’ at their core, ‘where the human heart would be’. They are humanoid but have no noses or mouths. ‘Does the nature of their constituent materials – metal and plutonium – matter more than their form?’ wonders Voyager II, addressing its long-lost twin sister. ‘Are they more like you and me than humans ever were?’ Perhaps the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence has been guided by the wrong criteria. Perhaps we are wrong to assume that the hierarchies of matter on Earth – by which water, blood, and bone are deemed more alive than metal and mineral – would be the same in the far reaches of space.

In Audition, too, an alien planet is the endpoint of the giants’ interstellar journey, but unlike the Oortians of Only the Astronauts, it is nearly impossible to picture what these aliens or their planet look like. Throughout the book, Adam’s literary voice tends towards the non-specific. We know that the brainwashing facility known as ‘the classroom’ encompassed outdoor spaces and big halls to accommodate for the participants’ growing sizes, but that is all the physical sense we have of it. If brainwashing was the pretext for such vagueness in the first two-thirds of the novel, then towards the end, the pretext lies in the limited ability of human language to adequately describe an alien planet. It’s possible to read this as Adam wanting to resist foreclosure, thus preserving the category of the ‘alien’ as a zone of endless possibility. But for the reader, the absence of any tangible description at all makes for frustrating reading. Here, for example, is Audition’s crash landing on the alien planet: 

The non-committal language here masks the fact that there’s not much invention happening at all: ‘clouds […] maybe a desert land, maybe some green…’ – we may as well be on Earth. Any diversions from the familiar are gestured to rather than identified. The aliens that greet the protagonists are ‘covered in skin and hair grows from their heads [...] they’re slightly off but so earthling-shaped. Earthling-shaped but in a performative way.’ One of them is wearing ‘a baby-blue T-shirt with a hand-drawn animal like none Alba has ever seen’. The space they are in is a ‘huge room’, but: ‘the word “room” seems so wrong. There are no walls or end to it. They are standing. Like, the sensation is standing but there is no floor.’ Later, they come to a city, where the buildings are ‘soft and labial and float’. They pass ‘a herd of small and beautiful animals [...] Soft and floating somehow rather than standing on the fragrant ground’. What do these animals look like? Like soft animals, I suppose.

This kind of description takes up most of the last third of the book, in which the psychodramas of Alba unfold against an indecipherably vague story of alien assimilation. While Adam nods at the ‘colonial’ tropes of alien imaginaries, the novel also seems to fall into that exact trap, conjuring up the foggy outline of a soft and ‘labile’ botanic planet reminiscent of a certain James Cameron franchise, bathed in the ‘type of light’ that Alba has seen ‘in advertisements for holidays in the Pacific Islands’.

The fact that the giant named Alba apparently has enough presence of mind to generate these sparse analogies, as well as to ponder whether Stanley still loves her, and to feel excluded from Stanley and Drew’s camaraderie, seems at odds with the idea that our narrators are too overwhelmed by the novelty of everything to perceive or describe anything in any kind of detail. Utopias are most compelling and useful when they are specific about the conditions that make them utopic: but in this case, the exact nature of the happy ending that the giants find on this alien planet seems less important to Adam than the fact that they find a happy ending, period. The giants experience some kind of accelerated evolution and wade out of the primordial swamp before settling in a forest of ‘trees’ (‘at least that’s the word Alba thinks in response to them’). Then they have a threesome. The story ends. It’s a metaphor, of course.

Leo Tolstoy famously said that all the stories in the world can be broken down into two categories: a hero takes a journey, or a stranger comes to town. The alien is perhaps the ultimate ‘stranger’ – as a literary figure, it can be made to do almost anything. Unless this alien is allowed to assume some sort of specificity, though, it cannot do any work at all. This specificity need not be physical; the Tri-solaran aliens in Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy are never described appearance-wise, but the humans on Earth hear them, they receive their technologies, and they come to a rudimentary understanding of their world.

Part of the problem with Audition, for me, is that it does not really want to leave Earth. It remains too attached to its status as literary fiction, attached to its realism and adamant in its avoidance of the appellation ‘sci-fi’. A vaguely described alien planet is more ‘realistic’ than a precisely described one: it is unlikely that any human would be able to accurately dream up an extra-terrestrial being from the confines of a human brain. But it is also more boring to read.

The realm of outer space is scary to authors because it is ultimately the space of fiction itself, the space of pure invention. It is the blank space beyond language and the blank page that pre-exists it. You can make anything happen in outer space and call it plausible. At the same time, nearly nothing set in outer space is ever really plausible, because faced with an infinity of possibilities, the author confronts the limits of their own mind, finds that even their most outlandish ideas are mired in clichés and tropes after all, and that every ‘alien’ they try to dream up ends up looking a bit like a human or an animal. It is a humbling exercise. No wonder ‘serious’ writers tend to avoid it!

But to me at least, even the clichés and tropes of outer space are exciting. A stranger comes to town, and that stranger is a little green man with large almond-shaped eyes. What message does he have for us? Would we even be able to understand him, if he were to speak? What does it mean for our conception of ourselves to encounter such an intensely other-like other? These questions are important and generative whether or not one believes that such an encounter is ever likely to happen.