The Openness Toward the Alien and the Hard Human Regeneration in Clifford Simak's Way Station
Abstract
The extraterrestrial alien is one of the basic archetypical icons of science-fiction narrative, a symbolic space for unconscious projections of the human soul, from its fears to its hopes. While the classic representation of the alien tends to be negative, as the well-known image of the wicked monster that threatens humanity, the evil to eradicate, there are also positive representations that make of it almost a divine model.
Clifford Simak's work surely belongs to the latter tendency. For him, the alien is the result of a process of abstraction and condensation of the best human qualities.
Way Station represents a whole alien community which, for its features, has to be interpreted as a future wishful humanity; a humanity placed at a superior evolutionary stage that concerns the moral rather than the physical qualities and that has allowed the construction of a utopian society. Simak's utopia serves two goals: the first is the critical comparison with actual human society; the second in an ethical plea. What is offered here is a new system of values that is the hallmark of alien society which, through the development of knowledge and the direct access to transcendence, manages to interpret the relationship to diversity as an indispensable resource directed toward mutual enrichment. The alien is symbolically a tool of elevation for humanity: it is used to practice and enhance the feeling of respectful living together characterized by the comprehension of the holiness of life. It is an urge for the ideal that imposes on humanity great sacrifices and that reveals itself as a painful tension towards a renewal.
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