Science fiction always makes its alien enemies dangerous but never superior to humans.
Evidence
Once clearly identified as aggressive, or implacable, or too “different” to coexist peacefully with an enlightened humanity, then the Other becomes a legitimate target. It is at this point that the process of stereotypical manipulation in SF, when faced with the Other, often defeats its own attempts at heroism. To create a resourceful enemy, the alien is endowed with a varied and heterogeneous degree of intelligence. However, it is rarely an intelligence that humans would find incomprehensible and, most significantly, it is hardly ever an intelligence superior to humankind’s. From a postcolonial perspective, the misrepresentation of the Other is almost complete. The alien first exoticized and distant, then identifiably different, has now become a quantifiable and dangerous known, sufficiently intelligent to pose a danger but never sufficiently superior to overcome the wiles of Homo sapiens. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 685
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Directly parallels Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis of the Orient as knowable, containable, inferior; the alien’s intelligence ceiling mirrors the manufactured Muslim monster’s glass ceiling in Western depictions.
- SEED: Article angle: ‘The glass ceiling of the manufactured enemy’ — how Western imagination permits its monsters intelligence enough to threaten but never to win, across the Muslim monster, the communist, and the movie alien as one continuous projection.
Related
- Science fiction endows the alien Other with limited intelligence to justify its defeat (similarity 0.92)
- Science fiction aliens are always dangerously intelligent yet never smarter than humans (similarity 0.92)
- Science fiction aliens substituted Islam for Communism after Soviet power ended (similarity 0.81)
- Science fiction aliens replaced the Communist threat with Islam after 1991. (similarity 0.80)