Science fiction endows the alien Other with limited intelligence to justify its defeat

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

• XREF: Extends the book’s monster-figure analysis: the science-fiction alien operates as a modern secular descendant of the medieval Muslim monster, always dangerous but never superior.