On Pain and Kindred Bodies in US Science Fiction

Throughout its history, science fiction has explored biologies, physiologies, and corporealities as part of its intertext, negotiating different forms of self-other relations. In the US, this intertext has often been connected with the discourse on race. I propose a paper surveying some ways in which transgressions of bodily boundaries – between humans, as well as between humans and animals, aliens, machines, and various kinds of created beings – have articulated notions of identity, equality, and humanity. Around 1960, Cordwainer Smith’s short stories about the “underpeople”, i.e., animals genetically engineered as sentient beings to be used as a slave-like labor force, interrogated the animal-human divide, highlighting both the slaves’ suffering and their claims to a cross-species notion of humanity – a focus shared in some novels by Philip K. Dick, challenging the human-robot distinction (and trickling over in Blade Runner). Race is explicitly a site of corporeal boundaries in Octavia Butler’s novels, from Kindred (1979) to the Xenogenesis trilogy in the late 1980s, staging both a painful conflict and the need for a form of communication in which bodily exchanges are central, with the role of memory a key point. A similar preoccupation, in the same years, shapes the alien scenario of another novel by a crucial feminist author, James Tiptree/Alice B. Sheldon’s Brightness Falls from the Air (1985). In their foregrounding of physical pain, these works endeavor to offer some glimpses of utopian longing.