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Area 51 must be a busy place; everyone has a theory about what's inside. Aliens. Abductees. Elvis. "I think what's hidden in Area 51 is Kyle MacLachlan's career, particularly after Showgirls," suggests comedian Kevin Murphy, the voice of the robot Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which last week found a new home on the Sci-Fi Channel. "Or how about this? All those socks from all those dryers get sucked through your dryer vents into a porthole, and they end up in Area 51. The government scrapes some of your DNA off the socks to get a genetic encoding. It then puts it into a huge computer so that it always knows what you are doing." Murphy takes a breath. "Of course, I might be just a little paranoid."
Paranoia could be the only sane strategy for getting through the '90s. When sci-fi solon William Gibson is asked if his fiction is an optimistic or pessimistic view of the future, he replies, "A realistic view of the present. I don't think of myself as a futurist. I think of myself as someone who inhabits a baffling and in many ways terrifying present in 1996. Science fiction is always about the year in which it is written. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a McCarthyite fantasy. Today, I think, the alien is inside, a virus of one kind or another." He cites J.G. Ballard's remark: "The only truly alien planet is Earth."
The idea that sci-fi is not so much a window to the stars as a mirror of our dark selves is supported by David Hartwell, an editor at Tor Books. "The alien represents metaphorically what's in the real world. The aliens in '50s films often represented communists--faceless invaders who were going to take over our country. The mysterious beings of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 represent our transcendent future. Independence Day sounds like the old form of sci-fi: the foreign invaders intend to wipe out our cultural heritage--ethnic cleansing. They don't want to come in and settle. They want to take over."
If we are now painting the Other as bad guys in black spaceships, what does it mean? Clive Barker, the author (Sacrament) and filmmaker (Hellraiser), thinks the attitude is dangerously alienating. "It disconnects us from being able to operate in the real world," he says. "There's a sense we're unplugging from political activity, civic duties or even responsibility to our neighbors by saying there are things greater than us and secrets hidden from us. We are a superstitious species, and we need to look outside ourselves for something larger that will bring either calamity or wisdom or maybe both. This is about belief, not just box office."