Reading Matter for Aliens
Created | Updated Mar 14, 2010
You are lying in bed, content with your dream about doughnuts, blissfully unaware that random postings on h2g2 were being monitored from afar by people who innocuously logged in as 'Orange-Green Bug-Eyed Aliens From Planet Google.' Suddenly, you feel a rumble that starts in your baby toes and that, by the time it wakes you, is gently edging your tableside Orangina nearer to the precipice . . .
Suddenly, the menacing rumbling and humming is replaced by an equally menacing silence, and then by an increasingly menacing blue-green light pouring in from behind your bedroom door.
Your door flies open, and a short being with green-orange skin, bug-eyes, and a flash spacesuit made out of what looks like 'platinum gold tin foil' steps into your room. He informs you that you have been chosen as a representative of your race to come and teach his people about human beings and human nature.
As you are stuffing your towel into your satchel, and struggling into your best travelling bathrobe, you decide to grab one book which you think typifies the human condition. Throughout history, many have tried to hold a mirror up to humanity and show us ourselves. 'Mimesis' (that is: the art of trying to mimic reality) is one of the basic tenants of literature, the other being fantasy, which is the art of trying to create a reality which is different from our own.
Do you choose a religious work? The Torah, Bible and Koran peer at you from your nick-knack encrusted shelves... or a serious work of dramatic fiction such as
The Colour Purple, or Anne of Green Gables? Do you pick a work that shows the best of human nature, like Little Women; or do you take Heart of Darkness and show them the depths to which we can sink. Do you think that real history can capture
the image of humanity better than fiction, or do you think that well-tailored characters can evoke more emotion than true, albeit impersonal, facts? Do you believe that human nature is best observed by analogy from the more objective viewpoint of fantasy? Do 'Hobbits' and 'Paranoid Androids' tell us more about ourselves than 'Cowboys and Indians'?
Which book do you choose?
Answers and explanations, if you will, to this forum:
The BooKNooK.
