Saga

Guest post by Peter Martin, see also Old Rope blog: https://oldrope.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/saga/

A comic about an alien family on the lamb in a flying tree in space? You had me at comic, but yes, obviously I want to read that. It’s been going since 2012? Why has no one told me about this sooner? My dear friend Giro recommended me the curious tale of the Saga, er, saga. Yeah, it’s not a great name I grant you, but to quote Lisa Simpson, it’s apt – APT! At the time of writing, the 54 issues of the series have been collected into nine volumes, with six comics comprising each story arc. The series is planned to finish at 108 issues or 18 volumes. I have read four so far and it is these that inform the below.

Drawn by Fiona Staples and written by Brian K Vaughn, Saga follows the plights of Alana and Marko, a couple who are on the run from both sides of an intergalactic war. Their crime is falling in love with the enemy and having an interracial baby, a political affront to the two extraterrestrial species embroiled in the long-standing conflict. They hop from planet to planet, hunted by soldiers, hired assassins, irate parents and disgruntled exes, all the while just trying to live a normal family life.

Saga is no ordinary comic and not just because it is narrated by a baby. Though it would be disingenuous to say that the medium is all unsubtle macho superhero fodder – and also conceding that I am no expert – it’s rare to get something so rich and varied in the mainstream (it’s published by Image, one of the big three publishing houses). Saga’s themes of family, motherhood, racism, war, politics and sex, while by no means unique to this book, are a rich and refreshing blend. Not only are the heroes young struggling parents, they are actively refusing to fight in the war that rages around them, setting this story apart from much of the work we might wish to compare it to. Pacifism is seldom at the forefront of popular sci-fi, bristling with blasters, troopers, space-battles and laser-swords, nor its fantasy counterparts with whopping big blades, magic and monsters. That’s not to say that Saga doesn’t have its fair share of any of the above – it does in spades – and barely an issue goes by without some form of gratuitous, albeit funny, violence.

Our protagonists are basically sexy alt-rock tattoos come to life. Alana, with her dyed fringe and unlikely post-natal smoking bod, is from the planet Landfall where the locals sport delicate insect-like wings. Her beau is Marko, all brooding brows, trench coats and a massive pair of curly goat horns. Phwoar! Don’t worry, they regularly go at it like hammer and tongs, as if unable to resist the collective yearning of hundreds of thousands of swooning readers. Sex is never shied away from throughout the pages of Saga, be it the impossibly hot and passionate form in the early days of Alana and Marko’s relationship, the lovesick longing of the hit man loner reminiscing of his time getting it on with an armless spiderwoman (armless not harmless, she too is a deadly hired assassin) or the seedy underbelly of alien sex work where anything goes. Taboo is a strong undercurrent, from forbidden love in the prism of societal racism lived by our heroes or the homophobia experienced by journalists Upsher and Doff, to alien fetishism, subversive literature and indeed the belief in peace in a time of war.

Taboo also bleeds into real life with several instances of censorship affecting the book. As a young mother, Alana is regularly shown breast-feeding Hazel – tolerable until it graced the cover of the hardback edition prompting squeamishness from retailers. Digital editions of the book were also briefly censored for an act of homosexual fellatio, shown on a blurred TV screen. The American Library Association included Saga in its 2014 list of the ten most frequently challenged books that year, for containing nudity, offensive language and for being “anti-family, … sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group.” And people wonder why it sold so well.

Like many endearing works of serialised fiction, one of Saga’s strengths is its cast of thousands. Alana and Marko may be recognisable lead characters – fit, loveable, morally right – but they are ably supported by a bonkers, imaginative and genuinely diverse bunch: Izabel the disembodied severed-at-the-waist war casualty teen baby-sitter, a sort of floating ghost with hanging entrails; Prince Robot IV, from a breed of royal androids with TVs for heads; the Freelancers, with their distinctive definite articles, The Will, The Stalk, The Brand; Marko’s relatably in-the-way mum and dad, but doting grandparents to Hazel; Lying Cat – a giant feline who speaks only to tell if someone is fibbing or not; whatever the heck loveable fan-favourite Ghüs is; and of course D. Oswald Heist, author of the dangerous polemic that ‘radicalised’ Alana and Marko.

A Night Time Smoke, the fictional novel by Heist, is shown in glimpses through the perspectives of characters on all sides of the war. From what we know of it, at face value it’s a fairly trashy affair, akin to pulp fiction or throwaway romance of the Mills and Boon ilk. Coursing through its pages, however, is the outrageous message that war is – get this – ‘bad’ and worse, the cover art shows us that the principal characters, Contessa and Eames the rock monster are from different races.

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for a text within a text. From The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by Hawthorne Abendsen (Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle), to K/L. Callan’s Marx, Christ and Satan United In Struggle (Stewart Home’s Red London), to The Benefit Of Christ Crucified (Luther Blissett’s Q), to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), to the endless quotations of Stewpot Hauser and Out To Lunch (Ben Watson’s Shitkicks and Doughballs), to the book within the book within the book within the book neo-pulp madness of Bobo the Monkey (Steven Well’s Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty). It’s all good baby and super meta.

Returning briefly to the issue of diversity, something that many well-known comics have struggled with in recent years. Though I am sure there are plenty of books telling stories other than those of hetro-normative, mostly white massive ab-ed and big boobed superheroes, it’s fair to say that many of the medium’s biggest sellers still have room for improvement. Clumsy attempts to make minor characters ‘come out’ still result in shitfits from keyboard warriors lamenting the fact that writers can’t make new, minor, LGBQT or POC heroes that they can ignore. Saga shouldn’t need to be lauded for starring loads of women (including breastfeeding mums), gay characters and every kind of alien-sexual preference you can think of, but it does feel uncommonly vibrant.

It’s not all politics, proxy wars, racism towards ‘horns and wings’ and baby McGuffins. Much of the story is about how hard it is to be a parent, the challenges of keeping relationships afloat and the pressures of daily life. There is much that is relatable despite the fantastical settings. Gun for hire The Will munches space-cereal and sulkingly blanks his ex’s calls. There are translation problems (the Horns speak some sort of Latinate, Esperanto language). Alana gets an acting gig on a space soap opera. Marko takes their toddler on play-dates. Unions struggle against employers. Mums – albeit ones with TV screens for faces – take their kids to the beach. People have baths. This is key to making the world of Saga appealing and enduring. It’s not all decapitations and saggy-testicled ogres, there’s hues of real life in all its humorous mundanity. And it does make you laugh. Liar Cat and the Royals with TV heads are the gifts that keep on giving and Staples’ artwork veers between heart-string tugging poetry and mischievous comedy.

Vaughn has made clear that much of the inspiration behind the narrative of the book came from the birth of his own child. Let’s leave the final word to him:

I realized that making comics and making babies were kind of the same thing and if I could combine the two, it would be less boring if I set it in a crazy sci-fi fantasy universe and not just have anecdotes about diaper bags … I didn’t want to tell a Star Wars adventure with these noble heroes fighting an empire. These are people on the outskirts of the story who want out of this never-ending galactic war … I’m part of the generation that all we do is complain about the prequels and how they let us down … And if every one of us who complained about how the prequels didn’t live up to our expectations would just make our own sci-fi fantasy, then it would be a much better use of our time.

Earth-sized Planets Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star

It was around this time last year, when I posted about exoplanets and the possibility of habitable life beyond Earth. Perhaps, then, a year on, is an apt time to revisit this theme and one of my favourite space stories from 2017 – the discovery of exoplanets found orbiting Trappist-1. Trappist-1 is a red dwarf star, located 39 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. As such, it is one of our nearest neighbours in the Milky Way.

2015 was the year of the first discovery of Earth-sized planets orbiting Trappist-1 but, early in 2017, astronomers announced the news of additional exoplanets around the star, seven in total. The Guardian first published a story on the discovery in February, with follow-up stories in May and August.

The seven planets are, to date, the largest number of exoplanets found orbiting a neighbouring star, raising hopes that the search for alien life might be within reach using the next generation of astronomical telescopes. Trappist-1 shines with a light 2000 times fainter than our sun, meaning that the planets are more likely to hold liquid water and surface life. Researchers hope to obtain this information within the next decade.

One of the most exciting aspects of the story – alongside the possibility of discovering aliens, or a planet capable of supporting human life – was the incredible orbits of the planets and the prospect of the Trappist-1 star looming large in the sky from the planets’ surface (see illustration below). Because the planets are so much closer to the cool Trappist-1 star, each of their orbits is more compact than those of the planets orbiting our sun – the closest with a very short orbit of one and a half days, the furthest away taking 20 days.

Illustration of the view of Trappist-1 from the fifth planet by Nasa/JPL-Caltech.

These phenomena put me in mind of SF narratives that hinge on inter-world relationships, and the planetary astrophysics underpinning such stories. A famous example is Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’, a 1941 short story, later adapted into a novel with Robert Silverberg. The action takes place on Lagash, a planet located in a multiple star system with six suns, which keeps it constantly illuminated. The coming of an eclipse is a cause for concern for the planet's scientists, who fear that the general population will be unable to cope with the darkness. However, ultimately, it is the discovery of other stars and planets, which become visible during the eclipse, that sends Lagash's inhabitants into a frenzy.

The double planet (or binary planet) system of Urras and Anarres in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is another memorable example, in which the juxtaposition of capitalist Urras and anarchist Anarres functions as a device for Le Guin’s exploration of ‘ambiguous’ utopias. In a variation of this theme, the planet Solaris, in the novel of the same name, orbits a binary star system with one red-coloured and one blue-coloured sun.

Geographies of the double planet system Urras and Anarres.

Finally, returning to our solar system, the Twilight Zone episode, ‘Midnight Sun’, imagines a scenario in which the Earth's orbit has been disturbed, causing it to move slowly towards the sun. In the end, it transpires that this was only a fever dream experienced by the protagonist Norma, and the Earth is in fact, inexplicably, moving further away from the sun.

SF experimentation with different star systems and planetary configurations adds to the other-worldliness of the stories, even while often offering a critical lens on real world issues. The Trappist-1 discovery begins to shed light on just how distant or close such other worlds may be.

Mysterious Star Discovered in our Solar System

The recent hype over galaxies far, far away in the wake of the new Star Wars film reminded me of this story from back in October. Scientists announced the discovery of a mysterious star in the Milky Way amid a swirling constellation of objects that could be a swarm of alien megastructures. Catchily dubbed KIC 8462852, it has also been called Tabby’s Star after Tabetha Boyajian, one of the researchers who discovered it.

The Kepler Space Telescope first picked up the star in 2009 and the swirling mass was initially thought to be bad data movement. However, over time, it became clearer that a cluster of objects was orbiting KIC 8462852, because of the light pattern emitted by it. In fact, further investigation of the star was partly thanks to several citizen scientists on the Planet Hunters project, who flagged up its strange and interesting formation. Boyajian and her colleagues published a paper on KIC 8462852 that models natural scenarios to try and explain this, for example a giant ring system or fragments due to the break-up of a large comet. Yet other hypotheses remain, one being that it is a set of alien megastructures for harvesting light from the star. Of course, such theories are part of the reason KIC 8462852 attracted so much press attention. Nevertheless, significant funding goes into maintaining the search for alien life. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute has focused on looking for potential intelligent signals for over half a century, and astronomer Jason Wright was quoted as saying that KIC 8462852 is ‘the best SETI target I've ever seen or heard of’. Wright is publishing a paper with an alternative interpretation of the star’s light pattern, which also considers how to distinguish possible artificial megastructures from other anomalous objects. The paper is available to view here.

KIC 8462852

The news of KIC 8462852 coincided with a similarly exciting October event I attended, Andrew Rushby’s talk, ‘Exoplanets and the Apocalypse’, as part of the Café Scientifique public lecture series. Rushby, who is set to take up a post at NASA in 2016, gave an overview of his research on exoplanets, which are planets that orbit other stars beyond our solar system. His research investigated Earth-like (or habitable) exoplanets and their lifespans, in order to model what might happen when the world ends (about 22 billion years from now). One of the most interesting asides to the talk was about the possibility that some of these Earth-like planets might support life as we know it, i.e. carbon-based life. Rushby suggested that the development of an instrument sensitive enough to reliably analyse planets’ atmospheres could lead to the detection of chemicals such as cfcs. This would constitute evidence of artificially generated gases and hence intelligent, industrialised life. Personally, I find the idea of aliens burning non-renewable energy sources a bit disheartening; on the other hand, the thought of a giant light harvester perhaps offers a glimmer of extra-terrestrial hope.

The Guardian's Art from Mars

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Texas A&M/Cornell

This beautiful feature from the Guardian represents the best pictures sent back from NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity, over a decade spent photographing Mars.

From dazzling dunes to vast craters to space blueberries, these amazing shots are full of imaginative possibilities and offer a glimpse of life on the Red Planet.

Life in Wax: Teaching Collections at Leeds

Still from Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

For many years now, arguably since the advent of the SF genre, insects have enjoyed an association with aliens in the popular imagination. From the archetypal bug-eyed monster depicted on the covers of early SF magazines, to the nightmarish insectoids of Starship Troopers, to the ant-like physiology of the creatures in Quatermass' pit, writers and filmmakers have drawn much inspiration from the insect world in their representation of martians, forms often regarded as frightening and strange.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the first thing I thought of when I saw the wax models of Hydrophilus piceus, or 'The Great Water Beatle' (see image below) were dormant, chrysalis-like aliens. These are part of the collection at the University of Leeds' Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and were formerly used in University teaching from the late 19th century onwards. What is unique about Hydrophilus is that it is the only insect to have been reproduced by the noted embryo modeler Adolf Ziegler (1820-1889). Louis Compton Miall (1842-1921), former Professor of Biology at Leeds, was widely acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost experts on The Great Water Beatle, second only to Karl Heider (1856-1935), who provided the drawings that the wax series was based on.

Hydrophilus piceus, or 'The Great Water Beatle'

While scaled up in size, the models replicate even the minutest features of the beetle throughout different stages of its life cycle, making them ideal for the study of biology and zoology, since they could be observed by a class of students. With real specimens being both expensive and difficult to present, wax models provided a clear visual aid to teachers trying to explain the development of human and animal embryos as three-dimensional structures.

During the latter part of the 19th century, wax models became instruments not just for teaching, but for research. Embryological development was called upon as key evidence in evolutionary debates and the models' great detail and accuracy meant they could be used in new investigations. Due to the public interest in embryology, wax models, along with text and print images, were displayed in a number of private and public museum collections. 

As well as Ziegler's water beetle, the collection holds series detailing the development of the pig, the vertebrate eye, the human heart, and the convolutions of the human brain. For further information, please visit: http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/museum-of-hstm/  

The Uncanny in Science Fiction

Quatermass and the Pit
Special Collections (Uni of Leeds)

The relationship between science fiction and the supernatural provides the basis of Quatermass and the Pit, the 1959 TV series that is one of scriptwriter Nigel Kneale's best-known works. The plot deals with the origins of the human conception of evil and society's creation of the 'horned devil' as the embodiment of that evil. Throughout the story, instances of what can be termed the 'uncanny' are revealed to be simply knowledge hitherto unknown to human understanding.

The definition of the uncanny as that which is 'weird' or 'beyond what is normal' (OED), applies to the story's premise. Quatermass and the Pit begins with the discovery of strange skeletal remains during the construction of a London Underground station. The skeletons are at first assumed to be evidence of the missing link in human evolution, but the further discovery of a large cylindrical object arouses suspicions of an unexploded WWII bomb. However, this theory is soon disregarded once it is found the object is not made of any metal known to man. Kneale shrouds the excavation in a layer of urban folklore: the station is being developed at a place named 'Hobbs Lane', 'hob' being another name for the devil, while the scientist Quatermass's investigations reveal that many of the houses in the area have been empty for years. There is also a long history of ghost sightings, poltergiest activity, and rioting, all connected to disturbances of the ground. 

The use of the pentagram, found inside what is revealed to be a spaceship, further develops this link between the uncanny and the unknown: the human association of the pentagram with evil is ultimately revealed to be a race memory, implanted by the dying Martian race at the beginning of man's evolution - the pentagram being a Martian symbol. The physical appearance of the Martians, after the discovery of some of their remains within the spaceship, shows them to be an insect-like race, complete with horns, thus giving rise to the notion of the horned devil as a figure of evil and fear. Indeed, it is the apparent sighting of such creatures that gave rise to the naming of the area as Hobbs Lane. The revelation that these sightings are the result of genetic intervention in human evolution is ultimately shown to be the cause of the supernatural phenomena, and this accounts for certain humans responding to the psychic power remnant in the spaceship.

The mass psychosis that follows from the excavation is eventually defeated by making a connection between folklore and science: the knowledge that demons have an aversion to iron prompts the protagonists to assume that the way to defeat the mass of energy consuming the populace, the nucleus of which is a giant image of a horned Martian, is to throw an iron chain into the image, thus dispersing the energy into the earth. Consequently, the energy ceases to consume the population. 

Quatermass and the Pit bridges the gap between science fiction and the uncanny by seeking to rationalise the unknown and give a face to nameless fears. In so doing, Kneale seems to be arguing that it is only by facing what is in the 'pit' of our collective fears that we can begin to reason with and overcome that which we regard as uncanny.

Happy New Year!