Are We Traveling Back To The Return of the Body Snatchers?

In her 1965 essay, The Imagination of Disaster, Susan Sontag touched on the role of science fiction in our society.

“Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors, real or anticipated—by an escape into exotic dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings.

But another one of the things that fantasy can do is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it. In the one case, fantasy beautifies the world. In the other, it neutralizes it.”

Science Fiction and Fantasy In Life

This has been the role of science fiction and fantasy in my life -- to engage my imagination in what could otherwise be a difficult conversation. Metaphor is the master of the genre. If I can find meaning in the zombie apocalypse, if there is to be a deeper conversation about why vampires bite, or about why werewolves transform under the full moon, then we should have it.

But while zombies, lycans, and blood suckers are ubiquitous in today’s books, film, and television, another kind of classic horror monster has resurfaced in my mind.

In my novella The Communication Room, humanity is beset by an alien invasion. Meteors crash down around the globe and the strange mineral they’re made of uses a kind of telepathy to lure people to investigate. When they reach out and touch the stuff, they are taken over by a form of remote control, their bodies becoming vessels with which alien overlords begin to decimate the human race.

It’s a riff on a specific type of monster -- the body snatcher. Alone, these “conscripts,” as I call them, act as agents of death. They will kill, by any means available, the closest person to them. Get a few conscripts together and they will coordinate their attacks -- they’ll build a bomb, hijack a plane. When thousands gather, you’ve got yourself an army hell bent on holocausting the rest of the human race.

Sontag suggests that fantasy can provide an easily digestible form for something that plagues the modern world. Author Jack Finney of course coined the phrase in his 1954 novel, The Body Snatchers, but that was a metaphor for a Cold War society, one where benign Pod People mirrored the fear of invading communist hordes.

Finney’s aliens made you part of a soulless pack, they deactivated your sense of self. The 1956 and 1978 film versions of his novel (there have been several iterations) stand up as great sci fi cinema, along with John Carpenter’s The Thing, as well as a particularly effective episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Conspiracy, to name just a few excellent examples.

However, the metaphor of the pod people is, in my opinion, a stale one by today’s standards. The threat is no longer about succumbing to social obsolescence, but instead about something far more terrifying.

Today's Existential Threat: Terrorism

Today, the threat of global terrorism is pervasive. Religious extremist groups like ISIS or Al Queda are in the news daily; domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City or the brothers Tsarnaev at the Boston Marathon have shocked the nation. Entire countries / states have been accused of committing acts of terror against nations -- the Nazis ruled Germany in such a way and the United States has been called terrorist by proxy, for its covert sponsorship of Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s and elsewhere.

The truth is that these are horrific examples in their own right, much less if they took the form of pure fiction. It’s a difficult conversation to have, one where opinions and emotions tend to overshadow all else. Nobody seems to have the answer, but how can we think more constructively about this subject with respect to the modern world?

Growing up in New Jersey, not 30 miles from Manhattan, the attacks of September 11 practically happened in my backyard. On a clear day, we could see the smoldering World Trade Center far, far in the distance. Aside from the horrific images playing in a loop on TV, my greatest memory was the sense of utter shock, the “how could this have happened to us” -ness of it all.

Reactions ranged from instant retaliation (“turn the whole region to molten glass!” some cried) to a slow-burn fear that this was a constant now (my friend’s mom would no longer let him hang out at the mall, social suicide in the Garden State). For a 16 year old kid at the time, my emotions ran the gamut as well. Confusion prevailed. I can remember the first piece of science fiction I consumed that spoke to this.

It was Joe Haldeman’s 1974 classic, The Forever War. Just as Finney’s novel belonged to the generation that feared communism, Haldeman’s was a clear allegory for the Vietnam era. But wrapped in his never ending intergalactic conflict between humans and the unstoppable Taurans, I found a core lesson that brought a sense of peace to the way I was now seeing the world.

The United States invaded Iraq right around the time I read the book, giving birth to Al Queda, which in turn birthed ISIS. Bombs were dropped, figureheads were killed, and administrations were handed over on both sides. The head of the snake was as easily chopped off as a disgraced politician was voted out of office. This war was in fact never ending. Haldeman’s fiction had come to life.

John Walker Lindh, an American citizen who had joined up with Al Queda and captured in November 2001, was used in the media as evidence that the enemy was drafting our very own. To my mind, this meant the enemy could take any and all forms. People ran with this idea and now simply speaking the language of enemy combatants, or wearing clothing that might identify you as a terrorist, or building a homemade clock to school like Ahmed Mohamed in Texas -- could cause people to scream “terrorist,” even if they were completely wrong.

Body Snatchers of Something Else?

To quote Kurt Russel in Carpenter’s 1982 ice-bound thriller, “Somebody in this camp ain't what he appears to be. Right now that may be one or two of us. By spring, it could be all of us!”

My friend’s mom, you could argue, was right to keep her son from shopping at the mall. Sometimes I find myself looking for the emergency exit while running on the treadmill at the gym. Hell, movie theaters aren’t even safe havens anymore.

In the time since 9/11, the gap between acts of terror in the so called free world and those that happen with great frequency in places that seem more far flung has been collapsed by social media and the 24 hour news cycle. To some, this might seem an insurmountable reality, but we cannot pretend otherwise.

It’s easy to change the channel or to test drive the latest Snapchat filter instead of engaging with Sontag’s conclusive hard truth: “From now on to the end of human history, every person [will] spend his individual life not only under the threat of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost unsupportable psychologically—collective incineration and extinction which could come any time, virtually without warning.”

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In “The Communication Room,” my alien conscripts are a clear cypher for a faceless enemy -- they could take the form of a foreign invader, your next door neighbor, your english teacher.

In constructing the story, I found great meaning in finding a modern body snatcher monster relevant for today’s readers. Unlike the feeling I had as teenager in New Jersey watching buildings crumble on TV, writing the novel actually gave me great solace. Alien body snatchers from another planet are still a potent monster.

Mind you, I still haven’t come to a definitive conclusion about the complex subject matter of modern day terrorism, nor should I expect to suddenly be clairvoyant on the issues at hand. Quite the opposite actually. But I do have a prescription for those of you suffering from the same kind of malaise that I am: