Abstract
Human biology creates empathy through storytelling and emulation. Throughout history, humans have honed their capacity to understand optimum storytelling and relate to others in new ways. The bioethical concepts of Leon Kass’s Wisdom of Repugnance and Arthur Caplan’s Yuck Factor attempt to describe, and in Kass’s case even support, society’s abhorrence of that which is strange, against God or nature, or simply the “other.” However, speculative fiction has been assessing the “other” for as long as we’ve told speculative stories. The last thousand years of social liberalization and technological progress in Western civilization can be linked to these stories through feedback loops of storytelling, technological inspiration and acceptance, and social change by growing the audience’s empathy for these speculative characters. Selecting highlights of speculative fiction as far back as the Bible and as recently as the latest movie blockbusters, society has grappled back and forth on whether monsters, superhumans, aliens, and the “other” are considered villainous, frightening and yucky, or heroic, aspirational and yummy. The larger historical arc of speculative fiction, technological acceptance and history demonstrates the clear shift from yucky to yummy. Works include The Bible, Talmud, stories of alchemists and the Brazen Head, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, gothic horror films of Germany and the U.S., Superman and the Golden Age of comics, and recent blockbusters, among others.
Highlights
Human biology creates empathy through storytelling and emulation
The movie was in an old-fashioned sub-genre of speculative fiction called “science fantasy,” meaning there are futuristic or technological elements, but there’s magic, monarchies and monsters
Princess Leia represented the beginning for many women of my generation of a flowering of female protagonists, like Ripley in Alien, Sarah Connor in Terminator, and Eleanor Arroway in Contact
Summary
In 1977, I was a 12-year-old science fiction and fantasy fan and saw a movie that changed me forever. The movie was in an old-fashioned sub-genre of speculative fiction called “science fantasy,” meaning there are futuristic or technological elements, but there’s magic, monarchies and monsters. Princess Leia represented the beginning for many women of my generation of a flowering of female protagonists, like Ripley in Alien, Sarah Connor in Terminator, and Eleanor Arroway in Contact These women changed how young women like us viewed our place in the world and said we could save the universe, regardless of how it needed saving. While working in film and TV (again, I chose my professions because of Star Wars), I became fascinated by how stories changed our personal ethical perceptions, and society’s views of social structures, morality and ethics, economics and social class, race, colonization and immigration
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