Alien Invasion

"slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared"

“And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” - HG Wells, The War of the Worlds 1898

I was chatting to M’Learned Friend Johnnie Moore (no, not that Johnnie Moore, calm down) and he read to me the first few sentences of a book:

“Hello my sibling. Did you know that male echidnas have four penises? If I were as smart as an echidna, I could use that factoid to come up with an evolutionary theory about male dominance and project it onto my own species, then sell a truckload of books. It’s not really a fact though—he only has one grotesque dick with four heads, and his mate probably doesn’t want that horrible thing anywhere near either of her vaginas.”

As soon as he had finished I knew that I had to read this book. It is Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta. It does not disappoint. A strong recommend from me. So go off and read it please. It features special guest appearances by Nicholas Gruen (subscriber and occasional commenter here) and Daniel Schmachtenberger (who to my knowledge is not a subscriber but does feature extensively in this post). I am particularly pleased by Schmachtenberger’s appearance because he tells a pointed joke that subverts my expectations of him.

I have no interest in reviewing the book. Lets riff.

There is a phrase that appears in the book. When I run a search on it, I only find it 12 times which is surprisingly few, I thought it was more. “Right relation”. To be in right relation to other people, to you ancestors, to other living beings, to the land itself, to times, and to spaces.

At times, Yunkaporta’s book reminds me of the Théorie de l'Acteur-Réseau of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, the rhizomes of Delueze and Guattari, and the wanderings of Michel Serres. Particularly Serres. Yunkaporta spends a lot of his time travelling with us in a canoe. Serres was the son of a barge man* and spent time as a naval officer before becoming whatever he was for most of his career. Technically he was a historian and philosopher of science - but that is like calling Yunkaporta a canoeist. His work is replete with images of water travel: The North-West Passage, the rivers and canals of Detachment, the ship fire that begins The Five Senses. Knowledge is a sea that is a whole ecology, interconnected with the land and the sky through evaporation and rain and rivers. Knowledge is the water that makes up 70% of the earth’s surface and the human body and makes possible the chemical reactions that allow life. Knowledge is protean, turbulent. We have had the (Navier-Stokes) equations to model fluids since the 19th century and yet we still do not know so much about them. $1m for you if you want to have a crack.

What’s it like to be a settler colonialist alien invader? Not as awesome as I had hoped. I don’t have a space ship. The most I can stretch to is a GoGet Kia Picanto every second Thursday. I have yet to destroy anything of note with it as it doesn’t even have a death ray. Some of the other aliens insist on starting our meetings with an Acknowledgement of Planet: “I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today, the Ewe Sith Whales of the Strayan Nation (I think I got that right) and pay my respects to Elders past and present.” I’ve never met Strayan although I sometimes see them on public transport with their weird red, white, and blue flags and their ceremonial kriket bats and sacred footee bolls. Sad really. I always hold on to my belongings a little tighter around then as they are all on drugs. I believe we have commissioned some human art work for the boardroom. Keith told me that he thinks a 200-year old child with 4 of their tentacles tied behind their back could do better but he would never say anything in front of HR. We are a progressive house, we haven’t eaten any humans for months. Surely that means something these days?

In most alien invasion stories, we plucky humans beat the invaders with our brains and our guts and our pudgy human fists. Wells has a much bleaker view of human capability. The humans are useless. The aliens are killed: “after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth”. The aliens die because they are not part of terrestrial ecology. The earth kills them as an intrusion, an infection from the outside. When will we have transformed ourselves to the point that the earth no longer recognises us as her own?

“Ah hate cunts like that. Cunts like Begbie. Cunts that are intae baseball-batting every fucker that's different; pakis, poofs n what huv ye. Fucking failures in a country ay failures. It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wit the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.” - Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting, 1993

I was going to post a picture of an echidna penis here but I don’t want to spoil your fun when you can google it for yourselves.

*My dad was a stoker in the navy. He grew up far from the sea, ran away to it, and then spent most of his life near it. That’s where some of his ashes are.