Literary Whedon
Yunno, I don't think I've come across any other category of being in science fiction like Joss Whedon's 'reavers'. Dan Simmons has a kind of invasion force of genetically altered humans called 'ousters' in his Hyperion cycle, but they are nothing like this reaver idea. If anything, the ousters are a benign form of human monster, a strange consideration of what it might be like if humans altered themselves to survive on different worlds. They do this rather than terra-forming such worlds to support humanity in its current configuration and are thus violently opposed by a kind of 'humans-only'imperium. The similarities between the Pax of the Hyperion Cycle and Firefly's Alliance are interesting in and of themselves, but back to the reavers.
Biological modifications could become common-place sometime in the future, which is something of a horror to bio-ethicists like Franci Fukuyama ("Our Post-Human Future"). Tinkering with the physiology of the brain is an ethical mine-field. I'm fascinated by how Whedon speaks to this issue in Firefly/Serenity without going into the boring and tedious details that Star Trek would. The reavers are hardly ever seen or described. They act as a negative space in the narrative. We get so little information about them, that the brain fills in the blank, adding to the terror of the idea. I don't think we have had such a perfect depiction of the bogeyman since Beowulf's Grendel.
If our civilization did ever succeed in creating some sort of 'anti-mensch' to Nietzche's 'uber-mensch', I think the word 'reaver' would be a ready-made term to use. 'Beast' doesn't work because of confusions with the four-legged variety. Terms like 'psycho', 'socio-path', 'whacko', or simply 'monster', don't quite get to the same wide-eyed uttered word in Firefly. All of them connote some sort of dangerous lone individual, not a society of ravening murderers. Maybe the closest word we have to 'reavers' is 'terrorists', but that term still assumes that the enemy can reason like we do and that they use language. Terrorists may be the monsters of our time, but we at least know what to expect from them. They make intelligible demands in concert with carefully conducted mayhem and carnage. Reavers just skip the first part of that sentence and go right to the old 'ultra-violence'. I guess part of me is glad they cancelled Firefly, because if they had gone any further in the story it might have been too tempting explore the levels of depravity with the reavers. Films and television are already doing too extensive a job of that as it is. Sometimes it seems like we are beginning to reveal ourselves as the modern equivalent to what Jonathan Swift describes as 'yahoos' in Gulliver's Travels. I certainly hope that 'reaver' doesn't become a household word, but sometimes I wonder.
Q
Biological modifications could become common-place sometime in the future, which is something of a horror to bio-ethicists like Franci Fukuyama ("Our Post-Human Future"). Tinkering with the physiology of the brain is an ethical mine-field. I'm fascinated by how Whedon speaks to this issue in Firefly/Serenity without going into the boring and tedious details that Star Trek would. The reavers are hardly ever seen or described. They act as a negative space in the narrative. We get so little information about them, that the brain fills in the blank, adding to the terror of the idea. I don't think we have had such a perfect depiction of the bogeyman since Beowulf's Grendel.
If our civilization did ever succeed in creating some sort of 'anti-mensch' to Nietzche's 'uber-mensch', I think the word 'reaver' would be a ready-made term to use. 'Beast' doesn't work because of confusions with the four-legged variety. Terms like 'psycho', 'socio-path', 'whacko', or simply 'monster', don't quite get to the same wide-eyed uttered word in Firefly. All of them connote some sort of dangerous lone individual, not a society of ravening murderers. Maybe the closest word we have to 'reavers' is 'terrorists', but that term still assumes that the enemy can reason like we do and that they use language. Terrorists may be the monsters of our time, but we at least know what to expect from them. They make intelligible demands in concert with carefully conducted mayhem and carnage. Reavers just skip the first part of that sentence and go right to the old 'ultra-violence'. I guess part of me is glad they cancelled Firefly, because if they had gone any further in the story it might have been too tempting explore the levels of depravity with the reavers. Films and television are already doing too extensive a job of that as it is. Sometimes it seems like we are beginning to reveal ourselves as the modern equivalent to what Jonathan Swift describes as 'yahoos' in Gulliver's Travels. I certainly hope that 'reaver' doesn't become a household word, but sometimes I wonder.
Q