The Only Good Alien is a Dead Alien: Science Fiction and the Metaphysics of Indian‐Hating on the High Frontier

Abstract

Students of myth and culture have long been interested in the cycle of national fables. Born of the womb of cultural necessity, myths commonly mature and adapt to fit changing cultural conditions, until, after sometimes centuries of service, they outlive their usefulness and die away. The most persistent myth in American culture, that of the frontier, has shown remarkable resiliency in its life cycle. Emerging first in the 18th century as an explanative device for defining and rationalizing the expansion of the United States westward, the frontier myth dominated the popular culture of the nation throughout the 19th century and has played a major role in helping to shape national expressions of self in the 20th. As early as the 1890s, historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner described the loss of the physical characteristics on which the myth was based, and some assumed that the end of the frontier implied the demise of its attendant mythology (Turner 1). But myths rarely die easily, and the frontier myth has retained its validity as an allegorical device for explaining the spiritual mission of the culture despite the erasure of its material preconditions. Early-20th-century promoters breathed new life into an aging myth, for instance, by encouraging the search for frontiers beyond the California coast, particularly in imperialistic forays into the Pacific rim (Drinnon 307-32). But the tired myth was revitalized more fully still by the discovery of new territories for the extension of mythopoeic impulses--this time not in geographic space but in outer space. This particular manifestation of the myth suggests the important relationship between technological innovation and the extension of myth life-cycles. It was improved means of transportation (the Conestoga wagon, the steamboat, the railroad) that gave new life to the frontier myth in the 19th century by allowing nearly all Americans to envision the West as a physical and accessible place rather than merely as an abstract, mythic construction. The invention of the airplane only a decade after the closing of the frontier created a similar sense of connection to mythic place, even if the average American of that era never experienced in the stratosphere. Like so much prairie wilderness, the skies appeared to be at least a potentially viable place for the renewal of expansionary American impulses associated with Manifest Destiny and world domination. As early as the first decade of the twentieth century, the United States government was actively involved in the development of technologies necessary for the control of lower space, and by the second decade of the century, American domination of the skies was credited as a major factor in the Allied victory in World War I. Military and later passenger air travel were embraced by Americans long before they were by Europeans, in part because the promotional language on behalf of control of space by airline advertisers seemed so familiar to Americans accustomed to the boosterism of frontier boomtown agents. Americans simply projected upward and outward where they had once projected westward. It should come as no surprise to find that in this process of mythic conversion, the language of the western frontier was adapted to fit the needs of a new generation of entrepreneurs and champions of the popular culture of space. When promoters searched for an appropriate vocabulary to describe the new sphere of American domination, that is, they found a ready-made one in the tired but still functional traditions of the western. The connections between western flight and aeronautic flight had already been anticipated by dime novelists, some of whom found it easy enough to transform western cowboys into space cowboys, high-noon gunfights into celestial shootouts, and frontier expansion into the politics of space ownership on the high frontier. The author of late-19th-century dime novel, the Brave and Bold (Figure 1), for instance, allowed readers to imagine that white settlers trapped inescapably along high cliffs might elude their Indian pursuers by fashioning crude mechanical wings and gliding to safety. …