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- The Guardian,
- Friday July 26 2002
When H G Wells opened the War of the Worlds with the immortal words: "No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own", he also launched Independence Day, Men in Black, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and V, that awful TV series about a world invaded by bipedal lizards in human catsuits.
When Lewis Carroll made Alice in Wonderland sip from a bottle, saying "I do hope it will make me grow large again, for I really am quite tired of being such a little thing," he also launched The Attack of the 50ft Woman, Honey I Shrunk the Kids and The Incredible Voyage. You can probably blame Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Incredible Hulk and The Incredible Shrinking Man on Roentgen and the Curie family, because the idea of mutating radiation has no antecedents in literature. That is, no one dreamed that x-rays were possible until after their discovery, and no one thought radiation could kill or warp until after it had already done a bit of warping and killing.
Infection thrillers - Panic in the Streets, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Outbreak - would not have been possible before Pasteur, because the now-universally accepted germ theory of disease really was a surprise at the time. (Influenza was believed to derive from the influence of the planets, malaria from bad air - or mal aria, in Italian). Bizarrely, the alien invader genre had to wait for Wells and War of the Worlds, but the genre of Star Trek and Star Wars, and Dune - all the other epics of far away and long ago in the galaxy - has very respectable antecedents. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine all believed that other planets were inhabited. Balzac, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain were all aware of the extraterrestrial life debate. And in 1828 a Scottish clergyman called Thomas Dick calculated that there would be 2.4 bn inhabited worlds in the visible universe. If populated at the density of England, with 280 per square mile, that left 8,141 billion people living on the inner and outer rings of Saturn alone. These citizens of Saturn were, according to Voltaire's space traveller Micromegas "mere dwarfs, only a thousand fathoms high or thereabouts".
All this literary history is merely to establish the credentials of the wildest flights of the B-movie imagination. The movie industry - run by those wonderful people who gave you Godzilla, The Attack of the Giant Leeches, Beware! The Blob (directed by Larry Hagman) and Demon Seed, in which poor Julie Christie is ravished by a lecherous computer - did not have to make this stuff up. Most of it was out there already. And most of it was neither true, nor even remotely plausible, before Hollywood got hold of it and made it even more idiotic. So here is a quick cut-out-and-keep guide to the science of the B movie - where the most persistent ideas come from, and what fleeting relationship they might have to reality.
1. Giant insects (and giant people)
Limb strength increases by the square - the cross-section of bone or chitin. Mass increases by the cube. So a giant 10 times as high as an ordinary human, JBS Haldane pointed out in 1927, would also be 10 times as wide and 10 times as thick, and therefore, a thousand times the volume. But the bone cross-sections would only be 100 times as big. Human bones fracture at 10 times the human weight. So giants risk broken legs at every step. Giant spiders and scorpions wouldn't in fact stand a chance against guys with guns. They wouldn't even be able to stand. (Nor would they be able to gasp enough oxygen through their tracheae, the breathing system that limits most insects to the half-inch scale.)
2. Zombies and mummies
At intervals, US scientists propose herbal or animal toxins to explain cataleptic trances punctuated by strange behaviour in Haitian voodoo ritual. The jury may be out for some time. Frankenstein's monster is part of this tradition, though it has a separate starring role. Perambulating and malicious mummies, interestingly, date from Jewel of the Seven Stars, also by Bram Stoker. That makes two good genres from one bad writer. And mummies are really dead: check under the wrappings. Fact: for a while, powdered mummy was commercially available as a dietary supplement.
3. Teleportation
Maddeningly, quantum physicists keep claiming that they have demonstrated it, but only with subatomic particles. To transport Captain Kirk and Mr Spock entire and without error, however, would require exact knowledge of every atom in their bodies, which would require a computer memory capable of holding 10 trillion trillion megabytes for each traveller. The stack of computer disks needed to store this data would - Lawrence Krauss calculated in The Physics of Star Trek, in 1995 - reach a third of the way to the centre of the galaxy, or about five year's travel for Enterprise at warp nine.
4. Intergalactic travel
Faster than light travel - more than 186,000 miles a second - is unthinkable. Acceleration even to near-light speed, using the most implausible technology, would consume unthinkable quantities of energy. Distances even to the nearest star - it takes a beam of light four whole years - are bewilderingly large. Intergalactic travel remains just a nice idea. What ever the technology of an alien civilisation, it still faces the same laws of physics as Scotty in Star Trek. So, if on Alpha Centauri or in the Orion system, there are "intelligences as great as man's, and yet as mortal" they have not been here. They may never get here. They have certainly never kidnapped any earthling, nor invaded their bodily orifices.
5. Sinister comets
One of these kicks off The Day of the Triffids. Professors Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have proposed comets as delivery systems for alien viruses. Three space missions so far are heading for cometary encounters, and seriously expect to find organic chemistry that might serve as precursor material for life. Lucretius, the great Roman poet, proposed 2,000 years ago that the seeds of life might be out there, in the interstellar void. The idea is called Panspermia, and it still has its charms.
6. Clones
They are there in Judge Dredd, in The Boys from Brazil - even in a dopey comedy like Multiplicity. Actually, the idea of clones dates from the warriors sown from dragon's teeth in Jason and the Argonauts. Replicants exist in the vegetable world (potatoes are cloned, most lawns are made from cloned blades of grass). In the existing world, clones are called twins. A human cloned Dolly-fashion (it took 277 embryos to end in Dolly) would take the usual 20 years to reach maturity. You cannot just run a fully-grown one up in a laboratory.
7. Telekinesis
Can thought power control solid objects? If wired up to something, maybe. One German patient with locked-in syndrome demonstrated telekinesis by "writing" a letter to his doctors, manipulating letters on a computer screen via an electrode apparatus on his head. Rats with electrodes have even poured themselves a drink by thinking about it. But that's not the same as the telekinesis of the kids in The Village of the Damned or Patrick Swayze's Ghost. So far, nobody has made that work.
8. Cyborgs
Stand by for Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University, who has once again implanted a chip in himself and mapped his emotions on a computer. (The first time he did it, the chip opened doors for him, and tracked him around the department). But the ultimate marriage of silicon and flesh may never happen; computers will get small enough, neat enough and powerful enough to fit into spectacle frames. Alternatively, computer makers will grow neurons or DNA on computer chips to overcome the limitations of quartz.
9. Sentient computers
Could a computer ever be aware that it was switched on? If so, would you feel like a murderer switching it off? Humans do not know what consciousness really is, so in what sense could anyone imagine a computer knowing it? And if a computer arrived at a sense of its own consciousness, would its faultless logic also tell it that it must be mad? What is intelligence? And what would artificial intelligence look like? This one will run and run. Right now, think of what HAL says to Dave in the open-the-pod-bay-door scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He says "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
10. Time travel
Physicists don't quite rule out travel to the future. A crew on a 10-year mission at light speed would come back and find 25,000 years had elapsed on Earth. So they would be 24,090 years in the future. Travel from the future to the past is a different trip. If that were possible, they would already have been here, wouldn't they? They would run the risk of accidentally murdering their great-grandmothers, so that they would never be born. This paradox provided the McGuffin for the Terminator movies. Hasta la vista, moviegoer.
· Eight Legged Freaks is out on August 9.
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Monday July 29, 2002
We gave the impression in the piece above that Frankenstein was written by Bram Stoker. As we have pointed out before, the credit belongs to Mary Shelley. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.
