To Hell With Space Elves: Misanthropy in Science Fiction

The Best From Fantastic

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
I just read a short sci-fi story, Final Exam, by an anthropologist named Chad Oliver. It's... hold on, let me quote the introduction:

"Final Exam" should not be considered realistic science fiction, in this day of Mars probes and Lunar landings. Consider it instead an allegory about exploration and conquest-- and what might have happened if the Indians had been a little better equipped when the settlers came.

In short, it's eleven pages of revenge porn. The Martians are stand-ins for native Americans, except instead of dying off due to disease and tribal warfare, they only pretend to die off due to disease. In reality, they number in the millions and they're hiding in secret underground bases, stealing technology from us long enough to build their own rockets and exterminate us. In the meantime, a handful of them stay aboveground and play stupid for the tourists, who they later murder in cold blood.

Chad Oliver tried to do the standard horror movie trick of making you loathe the tourists so much that you want them dead. They're every flavor of stupid, shallow, petty, and vain that you can think of. The problem is, it doesn't work. The elves are still evil little jackasses because they can read minds and aren't susceptible to smallpox, and what they choose to do with those two gifts is lie low and play stupid until they can get their genocide on.

Ordinarily I'd just turn the page and keep reading, but A: The next story in the anthology is written by Ursula K. LeGuin and B: Is it just me, or is the only reason why anyone would write this kind of story is if they're so misanthropic that they think Humanity deserves to get wiped out by the Martians, or rather that Europeans deserved to get wiped out by the Native Americans?

I'm not starting this thread to rant about space elves. The general consensus of Western Civilization is that space elves are a blight upon science fiction, and this opinion has been thus ever since Avatar hit theaters. Since it's not my objective to preach to the choir, I'm just wondering about misanthropy in science fiction. Has anyone else noticed a strong strain of misanthropy and/or Malthusianism running through classic science fiction?

Maybe I'm blowing things out of proportion. I'm reading through an anthology, The Best From Fantastic, which is a collection of the best stories to be published in Fantastic magazine as of 1973*. And if these are the best stories to be published in that magazine over a span of twenty years... I dunno. They're good, but not great. And a lot of the stories are downers.

The first story was I'm Looking For Jeff, by Fritz Leiber, a supernatural horror story. This is followed by another story, Angels in the Jets by Jerome Bixby, which I hated until about thirty seconds ago when I realized it was another horror story. I mean, if you're on a planet where spores in the air will turn you into a stark raving lunatic and you're the only one of the crew who hasn't lost his mind yet, and your oxygen supplies are dwindling, your only option is to join the lunatics without a hope of rescue or regaining your sanity. Well, I guess you could also fire up your aircar and drive it into a mountainside, but our protagonist chose lunacy.

After Angels in the Jets comes Paingod by Harlan Ellison. I haven't read that one yet because Harlan Ellison is a wonderful old bastard who you have to be in the right headspace to enjoy. After Paingod comes Sally, which is the weakest of Isaac Asimov's robot stories. It's generally considered non-canon because it is one of two stories where robots violated the Three Laws of Robotics to kill someone/let someone die, and the other story was a joke.

And then there's The Roller Coaster, wherein time travelers from the future come back to torture us, murder us, and drive us to torture and murder each other. It's a game, you see, like a theme park. The future is perfect, so these time travelers come back to get their Westworld murderboners on. And that's why the 1970's had such an awful violent crime rate- no, wait, this story was published back in 1953!

The Roller Coaster is a good horror story, but it's one of many in an anthology that's supposed to be the best of a 20-year-run of a science fiction magazine**. I'm not finished with the anthology yet, but if I have to rely on Poul Anderson, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Harlan Ellison for uplifting stories, something has gone horribly wrong somewhere.

Science fiction has such wonderful range to it. At its heart, it's about problems and solutions. Sometimes the problems don't have solutions. Sometimes there's a solution in search of a problem. But within the confines of the genre, there is so much you can do. You can make the reader laugh, you can make him cry, you can awe him or horrify him or enrage him.

So why, with this incredible range, are most of the stories in this anthology devoted to horror and anger?

*Fantastic Magazine was a science fiction and fantasy periodical that ran from 1952 to 1980.
**Admittedly, some of those years were full of reprints. Those decades were the heyday of science fiction magazines, but it was a brutal and unforgiving market.
 

Hlaalu Agent

Nerevar going to let you down
Founder
Yeah. Could be a sign of the times, because the Vietnam War and the surrounding culture war weighed down pretty heavily on the science fiction community, or so I've been told.

That would make sense, but it seems the whole Space Elves thing is timeless. Timeless enough that people will keep beating that dead horse for well... time will eventually tell.
 

S'task

Renegade Philosopher
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
Were there any Space Elves stories being written before the 1930s?
Well, one could argue that Red Martians from the Barsoom series can kinda quality, depending on what you mean by "space elves", those were first published in 1912. If we use a broad enough idea then perhaps the Eloi from The Time Machine might also count, pushing the date back to 1895.

But it all depends on what you mean by "space elves".
 

The Name of Love

Far Right Nutjob
Well, one could argue that Red Martians from the Barsoom series can kinda quality, depending on what you mean by "space elves", those were first published in 1912. If we use a broad enough idea then perhaps the Eloi from The Time Machine might also count, pushing the date back to 1895.

But it all depends on what you mean by "space elves".
Well, the archetypical space elves play the same role as the elves in LOTR did, but in science fiction. They were a race treated as superior in almost every way to man (especially morally). Peter Kreeft, a Catholic philosopher that studied Tolkien, noted that Tolkien's depiction of elves was an exploration of whether there was a hypothetical middle ground between man and angel. An example of space elves in fiction would be the Na'vi from Avatar. I don't think the Red Martians from the Barsoom series count, as I don't believe that they are depicted as being superior to humans. Neither are the Eloi from The Time Machine depicted as anything less than a regression of humanity.
 

Terthna

Professional Lurker
Well, one could argue that Red Martians from the Barsoom series can kinda quality, depending on what you mean by "space elves", those were first published in 1912. If we use a broad enough idea then perhaps the Eloi from The Time Machine might also count, pushing the date back to 1895.

But it all depends on what you mean by "space elves".
Whenever I hear the words "space elves", I always think of this pretty lady:
922df86c450e862cbf3e500aefdf423f8132677b.jpg
 

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
Were there any Space Elves stories being written before the 1930s?
Yeah. The Noble Savage myth is as old as Rome, believe it or not. I would hazard a guess that it's as old as Gilgamesh, but you'd have to ask @S'task about that.

There is also a sub-genre of Utopian fiction which dates back to the 1800s. The conceit is that there is a small society out there where Humans or some kind of fantastic creature have built a Utopian society for themselves, and the story is a travelogue written by someone who stumbled into the society and either left or was thrown out for not conforming.

The societies don't have to be Utopian. Some of the ones I've read were decidedly dystopian, or at least the author wasn't afraid to show the flaws of this make-believe society. But some authors wrote Utopian fiction, and if their stories had a strong element of naturalism as well, I would call them Space Elves.
 

The Name of Love

Far Right Nutjob
Yeah. The Noble Savage myth is as old as Rome, believe it or not. I would hazard a guess that it's as old as Gilgamesh, but you'd have to ask @S'task about that.

There is also a sub-genre of Utopian fiction which dates back to the 1800s. The conceit is that there is a small society out there where Humans or some kind of fantastic creature have built a Utopian society for themselves, and the story is a travelogue written by someone who stumbled into the society and either left or was thrown out for not conforming.

The societies don't have to be Utopian. Some of the ones I've read were decidedly dystopian, or at least the author wasn't afraid to show the flaws of this make-believe society. But some authors wrote Utopian fiction, and if their stories had a strong element of naturalism as well, I would call them Space Elves.
So we can assume that a lot of this space elf trope comes from depictions of exotic utopian societies, right?
 

Doomsought

Well-known member
This brings back memories of the BDSM space elves that a certain author asserted were morally superior to humans in a certain spacebattles thread:
I think the worst of it was the "Innocent ones" who were basically wild hunt villain sues that he asserted were morally good because they didn't understand the difference between right and wrong.
 
This brings back memories of the BDSM space elves that a certain author asserted were morally superior to humans in a certain spacebattles thread:
I think the worst of it was the "Innocent ones" who were basically wild hunt villain sues that he asserted were morally good because they didn't understand the difference between right and wrong.
Eh, I like that for the "Sauron" snippet, a clone-grown space elf + cyborg implements that is wholly loyal to humanity is a very great concept.
But yeah, fuck the rest of that in principle lol. I kind of want to get another thread and deconstruct it totally by having a very... transhumanity civilisation contacting those dogmatic hypocrite (the elves' gods)
 

S'task

Renegade Philosopher
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
Well, the archetypical space elves play the same role as the elves in LOTR did, but in science fiction. They were a race treated as superior in almost every way to man (especially morally). Peter Kreeft, a Catholic philosopher that studied Tolkien, noted that Tolkien's depiction of elves was an exploration of whether there was a hypothetical middle ground between man and angel. An example of space elves in fiction would be the Na'vi from Avatar. I don't think the Red Martians from the Barsoom series count, as I don't believe that they are depicted as being superior to humans. Neither are the Eloi from The Time Machine depicted as anything less than a regression of humanity.
Well, if that's your ideal then... you're not going to find many instances pre-Tolkien? After all, "elves" in that sense are ENTIRELY a creation of Tolkien. There are certainly noble savage idealization that has longer roots in western literature, tracing back to the Romantic Movement of the 19th century, and those play into many Elven tropes (more mystical, in touch with nature, not as technologically advanced but more noble) and certainly informed, for instance, the portrayal of Red Martians and Green Martians in the Barsoom stories, and the Eloi were also very much tapping into those same ideals (though, to be fair, as a criticism or perhaps "take that", as Wells was no Romantic).

But by including that "portrayed as superior" trait, I think you actually cut out a lot of ACTUAL space elf races in Science Fiction. The Vulcans in Star Trek, are very much Space Elves, but are never really portrayed as superior, at least in morality, to humans just different. Of course, in Season 1 and 2 of TNG one could argue that the HUMANS are the Space Elves in Trek, given the way the series was written. Likewise the Abh from the Crest of the Stars series that Terthna referenced might see themselves as superior to humans, but the actual novels and anime series take a much more neutral stance on if they actually ARE, and one can argue they are certainly portrayed as morally inferior to humans in many respects too.

To be frank, I'm not sure we agree on what "Space Elves" even are, as I don't see the Na'vi as being "space elves" in that sense, since they tap much more into the romantic "noble savage" archetype and the "mystical native american" tropes than they do most classic Elven tropes. To me, to be "space elves" a society has to have be different than the human society and set apart from it, but an EQUAL to it. It has to have a certain level of mysticism that conflicts with the human worldview, but is not inherently contrary to it, and usually be sympathetic towards humans and willing to work WITH them, rather than against them, or at least a faction of them. Bonus points for if the Space Elves have a dark reflection of their own society in the setting too, so you have both Space Elves and Space Dark Elves*.

Yes, by this definition, the Na'vi aren't Space Elves... as I said, I don't really think they are, they are much more in the mold of Space Native Americans than Space Elves, and the entire story of Avatar is just a thinly disguised variant on the various Indian War stories (there's a reason it's nicknamed "Dances with Wolves in Spaaaaaace!").
 

Doomsought

Well-known member
People who hate themselves project that hate outward to try to stave off having to face that self hatred.


That's really all it is.
There is a bit more to it than that. People naturally assume that other people think the same way they do. In most cases, this is actually a pretty good assumption to make, however it is rendered invalid when you travel to foreign cultures or have a very unusual thought pattern.

So basically, the people who are extremely misanthropic are horrible people, and assume that everyone else is also just as horrible as they are.
 

Despite

Active member
Is Space Elves from TV tropes or something? I don't recognise the phrase. The Eldar are clearly Space Elves for instance, but only the Exodites vaguely resemble the Na'vi, and their World Spirit predates Ewa by decades.
 

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
Founder
Is Space Elves from TV tropes or something? I don't recognise the phrase. The Eldar are clearly Space Elves for instance, but only the Exodites vaguely resemble the Na'vi, and their World Spirit predates Ewa by decades.
It's more a recent term for a theme in stories that is rather popular among hacks, namely the idea that Humanity is fundamentally bad and deserves its extinction. Rather than going to church and talk to the priest about these thoughts, they put these thoughts to paper and try to convince everyone else to be as miserable as they are.

That's all there is to it. It's just self-loathing put into fiction.
 

Despite

Active member
It's more a recent term for a theme in stories that is rather popular among hacks, namely the idea that Humanity is fundamentally bad and deserves its extinction. Rather than going to church and talk to the priest about these thoughts, they put these thoughts to paper and try to convince everyone else to be as miserable as they are.

That's all there is to it. It's just self-loathing put into fiction.


A lot of the Eldar would be okay with this philosophy.
 

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