ISSUE 4.5
IN THIS ISSUE:
SPACE SHIT IS HOT RIGHT NOW... letter from the editor BIG ALIEN WOMAN playlist LET’S TALK ABOUT: extant
BIG ALIEN WOMAN art editorial SCI—FI NOVELS favorites
letter from the editor This is the supplemental issue of caro entitled ‘Goths Surviving Summer’. And yes this issue is literally months late, but God has smiled on me, since this past Fall has been one of the hottest on record and it’s so hot and muggy that it feels like the middle of May., so everything I wrote in May still applies :| As the Florida sun beats down, you may have noticed the repetition of the theme of aliens and space in the table of contents. It’s not just because space shit is hot right now. The theme of extraterrestrial life and space travel are used to express my feelings of disconnection and displacement and the need for escape. These last two years have been… troubling, in regards to race, in regards to gender and sexuality, in regards to economic inequality… The violence is real. The terror is real. The need for seemingly-otherworldly intervention in the fate of Black Americans is… real. And the idea of a space in space, of being Other and Alien and In This World but Not of It, of stepping out of this time and era for something in the future or in an alternate universe that could be sweeter, or just kind of different… I haven’t been able to escape it. What does it mean to show through word, deed, action, and apparel that you are confronting the unknown within yourself and within everyone around you? What does it mean to reach for the future with both hands? Where do we have to go to survive, when nowhere on Earth seems to be an option? I don’t know what it all means, but I’m using this space, this issue of caro to reflect and bend and turnover this idea.
As always, dear reader, you’re welcome to join me.
A PLAYLIST For when you’re about to be abducted & when you’re doing the abducting https://soundcloud.com/manicsoutherncoloredpixie/sets/big-alien-woman
1. Kara Remembers // Bear McCreary 5. Blooming Sky Portals // Lowleaf 2. Beginning (Remix) // VV Brown and Grimes 6. Goodness Gracious // Lowleaf & Zeroh 3. BBHMM (E_SCRAAATCH EDIT 3) /4Sere- 7. Water Pharaoh // Two Parent Home na // E_SCRAAATCH 8. Barcelona Linn Reprise // Lockah 4. Rewind // Kelela 9. Daydream // P. Morris
Halle Berry. Artificial intelligence. Budding supernatural powers. A mysterious pregnancy. A Black female protagonist. Actual suspense. A really smart Black female protagonist. Yeah, even though the CBS summer show Extant was cancelled, the two season that were produced (by Halle Berry) have been pretty much everything I want to see on TV right now. If you’re like me, the you’ve probably only been watching shows with an a certain number of Black and Brown people. What that certain number is, you may not know, but you do know when a show feels... right. In fact, it may be that there’s getting to be enough shows with relatively diverse casts that you’ve started to realize that you can be choosy (goodbye Scandal and The Mindy Project; hello HTGAWM, Empire, and the special Netflix
wonder that is Sense8). So, if you’ve seen a commercial for Extant, or a tweet about Humanichs, or a tumblr post of Halle Berry with glowing eyes, and you’re starting to ask yourself if this show is for you, let me provide you with a few criteria and you can decide for yourself: If you’ve been missing Halle Berry than Extant is definitely for you. If you like shows that explore what survival really means in the face evolution, than Extant is for you. If you need a TV show that confronts the tricky ethical details of artificial intelligence in a creative way and you’re tired of watching Caprica and Almost Human over and over again, then Extant is for you. (Con nued on page 7)
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If you like reading Octavia Butler and the idea of an alien-human hybrid race made up of beautiful brown and beige curly headed people lead by the mother of the new race (yep, it’s Halle Berry) is exciting to you, then Extant is the show for you. ~~~ For a long time in science fiction the alien invasion scenario has served as an analog for white writers and readers to discuss the horrors of colonization without actually discussing colonization. That the fear of the Alien Other coming to Earth and enslaving it inhabitants (or, worse, killing off humanity entirely to make room for their own agenda) has smacked of white paranoia of karmic retaliation for the genocide is not a new concept. It’s also not new that such stories almost always focus on white protagonists. However, when the focus is switched to protagonists of color,, the possible ways a story can play out and then be interpreted multiply and shift, especially if the writers are shrewd enough to take into account how race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status might play into how a character will interpret their situation and respond to it. The main reason I find Extant so compelling is that I think it puts forward the question that I’ve heard bandied about between Black nerds for awhile: what happens if there’s an alien invasion and it’s not that bad for Us? What if whatever the Aliens offer is better than Black life as it exists today? What if the changes they want to make mean the end of patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy forever? Would Black Americans join the supposed universal human fight against alien domination? Would they join the aliens in their implementing their takeover (if that’s an option)? Or would they just step back and see what comes and who wins, resigned to dealing with the aftermath? Of course not all Black people agree on what a better world looks like, and different people would respond to the global crisis differently. In season 1 of Extant, the question is made more personal: Molly Woods (played by Halle Berry) is a multiracial astronaut, married to John Woods a white roboticist. In the pilot she is (Con nued on page 8)
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returning to John and their child Ethan, from a thirteen-month solo trip to a space station. Ethan is an artificial intelligence called a Humanich created an d developed by John and his assistant/protégé Julie Gelineau. From the beginning we see that Molly is experiencing strange phenomena, including being visited by what seems to be the ghost of her dead ex-boyfriend. Molly finds out that she is pregnant which should be an impossibility both because of her long trip to space and because of her inability to conceive, which is what lead John to the creation of a robotic AI that would grow and learn like human children. It turns out that Molly was actually impregnated while in space by an alien spore on the verge of extinction seeking to replicate itself. The child that results is a fast-growing human-alien hybrid with powers of telepathy, superhuman strength. In the meantime Ethan the Humanich is busy learning about human life and behavior. While Molly struggles with identifying Ethan as her child she also searches to retrieve the alien-human hybrid, after he is extracted from her by the ISEA, the government program over space travel and for which Molly works. Even in season 1, Molly loyalties were constantly being pulled in several directions: she was impregnated without her consent by an alien species with who knows what plans. Should she ignore all that’s going on and fcus on her life with John and Ethan? Should she ignore that she was ever pregnant and let ISEA do whatever they want with the hybrid? Or should she retrieve her child and expose the ISEA’s negligence in sending her to space in the first place when previous similar incidents had occurred? Fast-forwarding to season 2, we see the solidification of Molly as a mother figure to the two emerging “races” of alien-human hybrids and the Humanichs. John Woods has died in a freak car accident, possibly killed, her hybrid son escapes from ISEA, and Ethan’s memories of Molly are erased by Julie when she takes custody him after Molly is checked into a mental health facility against her will (Molly is told that Ethan wasturned off and disposed of). To get out of the facility, Molly at first helps the ISEA seek out the hybrids because they are impregnating and killing women. However, when Molly finally meets (Con nued on page 9)
the hybrid, he introduces himself as her son Adhu and shows up with several generations of hybrids most already looking like elementary/middle school aged children, all with glowing eyes brown skin and curly hair. Adhu says that the women who died from the hybrid pregnancies were unintentional and that he and the other reproducing hybrids have changed their methods so that the pregnancies aren’t dangerous to human women and that they are just trying to survive. Molly is torn between protecting earth from an alien invasion and protecting what are essentially her children., all while fighting for custody of Ethan when she finds out that he is in fact still functioning, though without memories of her as his mother. Meanwhile the Humanichs program has been taken over by military contractors and Julie is working on developing a second Humanich named Lucy that Molly’s husband John was working on before he died. Lucy is like Ethan but her learning is advanced and through series of mishaps and bad decisions she’s not given ethical and behavioral limiters that would make up for the fact that she didn’t have the chance learn about life and ethics and morality in the same way Ethan did, through trial and error in low-stakes situations. Lucy, like the hybrids is brown-skinned and curly haired, as John meant to model her after Molly. However, Lucy was specifically developed to seek out and kill the alien-human hybrids who are for the most part indistinguishable from humans. Lucy constantly tests and pushes Ethan’s ideas of appropriate human-Humanichs relations, challenging what it means to be an AI and a person. Even though his memories of Molly were erased, he has occasional flashes of Molly and Lucy helps him locate and make contact with her. Even though race is never mentioned explicitly in Extant, the casting choices overall, the dilemma Molly Woods faces particularly in season 2, and the framing of the story adds up to a hint of Afrofuturist flavoring that I’m not used to seeing and wasn’t expecting in a mainstream television show. But I was pleasantly surprised by it and I hope that other SciFi shows and movies explore this line of questioning /story-telling more often. I especially hope that more Black producers, writers, directors, and actors get the chance to tackle such stories and maybe expand on these ideas more explicitly.
You’re probably wondering about the title of this editorial; to be honest I am, too. What does it mean to be a Big Alien Woman. Well invisibility is a part of it. Will I am an indisputably big woman size 22 at last check, it was hard to find appropriate pictures even for this set of collages. After a while, I (Con nued on page 14)
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abandoned the search all together and instead decided to feature this lack of visibility. All the women are traditionally thin here. Even in their Otherness they are not Other enough. The only work that’s different is the self -portrait at the very end of this series. In each collage the women are Black and they are positioned disorienting ways meant to emphasize a transcendence of laws, both physical and social. Women float above the ground, they observe cities from (Con nued on page 17)
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impossible angles, they stand around, outside, and below planetary bodies Even among the alien women, Bigness is still a trait that is despised. Even among those existing in ways that defy space and time, taking up space is sin enough to render the Big ones nonexistent, except to (Con nued on page 19)
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themselves their own o
s; unrecorded, except in observation.
by Marie Annetoinette (origina lly pu blished in The Voya ger Zine Issu e 2, N ovember 2014; http ://www.p olyvore.com/ voya ger_issu e_02/collection? id=4110596 )
My favorite sci-fi and fantasy novels are usually ones that feature black and female protagonists. As a kid and teenager I read widely, any story it didn't matter, if the plot was interesting I would read it. After awhile, though I became disheartened by how many books didn't have any female characters of color, or if the did they were background, sidekicks, sidelined characters. I began to actively look for non-white characters, female characters and look for the same in authors. The books that were diverse and intrigued me the most were usually science fiction.
I fell in love with science fiction, not so much for the adventure
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(though I enjoyed that too) but for the ethical, philosophical, ultimately existential questions that were often raised by the premise of theses stories. They made me think, about myself, about the universe, about God and humanity, about right and wrong... They stretched not only my imagination but my understanding and I believe made me a better more thoughtful person. Octavia Butler and Madeline L'engle share the #1 spot in heart for favorite sci-fi authors so all the books here are by them.
Another aspect of Science Fiction that attracted me to the novels was the COVER ART. OMG the cover art so the book covers for my two favorite authors are also by three of my favorite artists.
Even if you haven't heard of Leo and Diane Dillon I can pretty much promise that you've seen their art somewhere. This husband-and-wife illustration duo is best known for their illustrations of children's books and science fiction novels. Their art had a *heavy* hand in shaping my aesthetic and artistic taste, their emphasis on rich colors, use geometric patterns to create texture, their collage/multimedia approach, use of art nouveau elements, fantastical imaginative tableaus, and the fact that they often illustrated books with diverse characters... ugh everything they've ever done is my favorite! Their covers pulled me into the world the author was trying to create and left me with sense of magic just by looking at their art. Sometimes just looking at their book covers gives me that gutpunnchy nostalgic feeling that makes me want to cry... not from sadness but from longing. I felt that if I stared long enough I could become apart of the world they and the author had created together. Unfortunately Leo Dillion passed away in 2012.
John Jude Palencar is another more recent favorite. I encountered his art when I found the Exogenesis series by Octavia Butler (which I am still in the process of reading). Because he is a more recent favorite I refer you, dear reader, to his website for more biographical info, but as for tone? Heavy, monumental, statuesque, are all words (Con nued on page 22)
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that come to mind. Many of his illustrations give the effect of characters and objects being frozen mid-action and turned into marble. There's a sense of suspended drama that I think especially suits Octavia Butler's work.
THE BOOKS:
Mind of My Mind Wildseed Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
A Wrinkle in Time A Wind in the Door A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle
creator/editor
about caro
MARIE ANNETOINETTE
Sometimes you just need an outlet for all the questions; caro is an invitation for brain dump and discussion, to marvel and to reason together.
~ mercastle.com ~ marieannetoinette@ gmail.com