woogiewoogie
Personal narrative assignment. ~700 words. It is all about anthropocentrism. [/dork]
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It was a strange, roundabout way that I discovered my strong feelings about anthropocentrism in science fiction. Of course, there is the problem that, until a few years ago, I had never even heard of the word - it is an uncommon one. Sadly, it's not an uncommon trend, and my growing awareness of it has made a ridiculous amount of science fiction nearly unconsumable for my tastes.
Anthropocentrism is, functionally, something one only sees in SF - it's ethnocentrism on the species scale, requiring non-human species for humans to be more important than. Unlike ethnocentrism, most modern writers don't seem to be aware of their own biases regarding humanity, and don't even try to think their way around nonhuman mindsets and cultures. Personally, I first became aware of the idea of ethnocentrism when I was seventeen, playing an old computer game - Star Control 2 (SC2) - for the first time. SC2 was a great inspiration to me, as a writer and world-builder, in no small part because of how they treated the two dozen-some alien species in the game. While the aliens were still distinctly alien, they weren't treated as any less of people just because they weren't human, and though the focus of the game was on the journey of the human viewpoint character, the universe explicitly didn't revolve around humanity as a whole. The aliens clearly had their own stories and motivations, independent from the actions of humanity as a whole, and generally only nudged by the protagonist's perpetual meddling.
After a good decade or so of living with SF that centered the story, the aliens' stories, and the very universe that the stories were based in upon Homo sapiens, SC2 was a mind-boggling awesome fresh take, almost instantly influencing my writing and tastes. That was what I wanted my science fiction to be like! I wanted humans to not be so ridiculously special and different and important that everything was about them, and I wanted stories about aliens that were interesting and moving and had nothing to do with what humans did. This was a complete reversal from the SF I had consumed before, and going back to, say, Alan Dean Foster's Commonwealth universe was almost painful. In those, humans may not have always been innately better than the aliens (though that is definitely something I've seen), but that didn't stop the various alien species from vying for human attention and approval, or stop human children from being more accepting and nice and perfect than adults of any species. (So, basically, humans were just more important than aliens, and Alan Dean Foster has never spent time around children to boot.) Even otherwise fantastic SF, like the book Sheriff of Yernameer, will jolt my suspension of disbelief by stating that humans are people but aliens aren't. (What could be more anthropocentric than that, I ask?)
In truth, the only SF that suits my new tastes, besides the very game that formed them, is Animorphs. It had been one of my favorite series, long before I even knew of SC2, and re-reading it after, I finally realized how much I appreciated how K. A. Applegate handled the aliens in her books. Though the stories themselves mostly focus on the main characters, the majority of which are human, the aliens and universe surrounding them has stories that don't revolve around humans-- and sometimes don't involve them at all. The aliens are free to be people, and to spend time talking about things besides how very something-or-other humans are, in a sort of SF variation on the Bechdel test ("Do two aliens talk together? About something besides humans?").
But why does it bother me so much?
One of my friends argues that science fiction, being written by humans, will always be anthropocentric, will always filter the inhuman through a human lens. I suppose that's true; humans may well be incapable of creating a universe that doesn't reflect the author's thoughts on humanity, and the author's own humanness. But that doesn't mean humans have to have things centered around them all the time, does it? Is the human species so egocentric that we find it nearly impossible to let even fictional species talk about things besides us?
-
It was a strange, roundabout way that I discovered my strong feelings about anthropocentrism in science fiction. Of course, there is the problem that, until a few years ago, I had never even heard of the word - it is an uncommon one. Sadly, it's not an uncommon trend, and my growing awareness of it has made a ridiculous amount of science fiction nearly unconsumable for my tastes.
Anthropocentrism is, functionally, something one only sees in SF - it's ethnocentrism on the species scale, requiring non-human species for humans to be more important than. Unlike ethnocentrism, most modern writers don't seem to be aware of their own biases regarding humanity, and don't even try to think their way around nonhuman mindsets and cultures. Personally, I first became aware of the idea of ethnocentrism when I was seventeen, playing an old computer game - Star Control 2 (SC2) - for the first time. SC2 was a great inspiration to me, as a writer and world-builder, in no small part because of how they treated the two dozen-some alien species in the game. While the aliens were still distinctly alien, they weren't treated as any less of people just because they weren't human, and though the focus of the game was on the journey of the human viewpoint character, the universe explicitly didn't revolve around humanity as a whole. The aliens clearly had their own stories and motivations, independent from the actions of humanity as a whole, and generally only nudged by the protagonist's perpetual meddling.
After a good decade or so of living with SF that centered the story, the aliens' stories, and the very universe that the stories were based in upon Homo sapiens, SC2 was a mind-boggling awesome fresh take, almost instantly influencing my writing and tastes. That was what I wanted my science fiction to be like! I wanted humans to not be so ridiculously special and different and important that everything was about them, and I wanted stories about aliens that were interesting and moving and had nothing to do with what humans did. This was a complete reversal from the SF I had consumed before, and going back to, say, Alan Dean Foster's Commonwealth universe was almost painful. In those, humans may not have always been innately better than the aliens (though that is definitely something I've seen), but that didn't stop the various alien species from vying for human attention and approval, or stop human children from being more accepting and nice and perfect than adults of any species. (So, basically, humans were just more important than aliens, and Alan Dean Foster has never spent time around children to boot.) Even otherwise fantastic SF, like the book Sheriff of Yernameer, will jolt my suspension of disbelief by stating that humans are people but aliens aren't. (What could be more anthropocentric than that, I ask?)
In truth, the only SF that suits my new tastes, besides the very game that formed them, is Animorphs. It had been one of my favorite series, long before I even knew of SC2, and re-reading it after, I finally realized how much I appreciated how K. A. Applegate handled the aliens in her books. Though the stories themselves mostly focus on the main characters, the majority of which are human, the aliens and universe surrounding them has stories that don't revolve around humans-- and sometimes don't involve them at all. The aliens are free to be people, and to spend time talking about things besides how very something-or-other humans are, in a sort of SF variation on the Bechdel test ("Do two aliens talk together? About something besides humans?").
But why does it bother me so much?
One of my friends argues that science fiction, being written by humans, will always be anthropocentric, will always filter the inhuman through a human lens. I suppose that's true; humans may well be incapable of creating a universe that doesn't reflect the author's thoughts on humanity, and the author's own humanness. But that doesn't mean humans have to have things centered around them all the time, does it? Is the human species so egocentric that we find it nearly impossible to let even fictional species talk about things besides us?