Scientific Journeys 2: My Meandering Initiation into Sci-Fi

Editor's note: I'm taking a bit of a summer holiday, so this time in Cosmic Stories we're enjoying another in an occasional series of guest posts on the personal relationships between scientists, science teachers and science fiction - and I thought I'd bring you something a bit different.

This guest post has been written by astrophysicist Anwesha Sahu, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warwick whose research focuses on radio transients and accreting binary stars. And, unlike many of the others I'm hoping will write guest blogs for me, she is not an avid science fiction fan... but she has a fascinating, clear eyed view of the genre and the lessons it teaches, particularly looking at a case study in the recent television series Alien: Earth (2025-present).

Over to Anwesha:

My Meandering Initiation into Sci-fi

Reflections on the genre with a focus on Alien: Earth

When Elizabeth invited her fellow Warwick astrophysicists to act as new guest writers for Cosmic Stories, I almost instinctively signed up - a writing opportunity? How can I give that up? And then, in the solitary silence of my own company a few minutes later, I face-palmed. Why did I sign up to write for a science fiction blog? I never voluntarily read or watch science fiction! I was convinced - I am the wrong person for this. However, I am also a sucker for committing to tasks and seeing them through to completion. So, I sat with myself, several times, in the weeks after signing up to this invitation, racking my brain for some memorable and impactful interaction I’ve had with science fiction. More profoundly, I wanted an answer for myself - why haven’t I found myself to be an aficionado of science fiction, despite being a lover of the sciences ever since I can remember?

I think I will rephrase that. I hadn’t found myself to be an admirer of science fiction, yet. I believe this was because I am quite picky. It took me a while to step out of my preconceived notions of science fiction which I had held since I was a pre-teenager, and find my own footing within this vast genre.

 I pride myself in being a practical, rational human being. This feeling was especially stronger during my school years as my insatiably curious mind always sought an explanation for everything. If something occurs, there must be a practical, rational explanation for it. Whenever I watched sci-fi movies or action movies with family or friends, I think I was a bit of a kill-joy: I couldn’t help but fixate on how incorrect the filmmakers had gotten the physics and science! I did not watch Star Wars until I was 21, in the final year of my master's degree. That changed when two of my coursemates decided that this was simply unacceptable and showed up at my flat with snacks, and made me sit through the main trilogy. I have to admit - I enjoyed it and found the movies quite entertaining. But, I also pounded them with questions such as (bear in mind these two friends were fellow physicists too): so what’s the fuel source of that spaceship? Why is Leia alive despite being exposed to the vacuum of space? How practically feasible is the warp-drive mechanism? How are the speeders on Coruscant levitating? In other words, “Why is the science (and especially the physics) all botched-up in a supposed science-fiction story?” They gave me answers that bordered on - “It’s not meant to be rational, it’s entertainment!”. In other words, they said, it was the Force. I was mighty disappointed.

In the few years since my Star Wars debacle, a handful of life events and career milestones accelerated a change in perspective within me. I gradually found myself to be more accepting of things in their duality; I came to terms with the concept that it is perfectly acceptable to hold two, sometimes differing, opinions of the same phenomenon, in an effort to view the world around me with a perspective as balanced as reasonably possible. As I saw this shift seep into multiple facets of my daily life; it was only a matter of time till my relationship with sci-fi came to the foreground.

I believe it was a Sunday evening in the early summer of 2025, when my fiancé, Sam, excitedly pulled up Disney+ and with great enthusiasm exclaimed that Alien: Earth was finally out. The teaser poster engulfing the homescreen for Disney+ did not reveal much to me - I hardly knew about the Alien franchise and all I could tell from it (excluding the obvious theme of sci-fi) was that it exuded isolation, suspense, and imaginative fear - none of which are my front-runner themes when choosing content. It bemused me when Sam’s subsequent conversation seemed to imply that he expected us to watch it together! When further inquiry revealed to me that it would include a not-insignificant amount of gore (surprise, surprise), I sighed. In a tricky balance of exasperated laughter and concern for hurting his emotions, I mustered together the words to tell him, “Sweetie, I love you, but I’m not going to be able to watch this with you. You can watch it by yourself and I’ll engage myself in some other activity meanwhile.”

That did not happen.

Well it did, for a bit more than half an episode.

When the living room is located at the heart of the home in between the bedrooms and the kitchen (where my foodie heart lives), it’s inevitable for one to be distracted by the narrative of what’s happening on the TV. And, I fell for this trap: hook, line and sinker. The impressive cinematography, music scores, and perfectly curated cast, each of whom performed compellingly, held it all together. If like me at that time, you too have been unheeding of the Alien franchise [1] and Alien: Earth in particular, here’s a brief synopsis, sans the pivotal underlying messages for society:

• It’s the year 2120 and governments as we know them have dissolved. Instead, Earth is now governed by five corporations and augmented human/humanoid lifeforms.

• The two main corporations we are concerned with are Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani.
  

  

  

• The augmented human/humanoids we want to familiarise ourselves with are cyborgs (humans with cybernetic implants), synthetics (AI-brained fully artificial beings with human appearances), and the heart of this series, hybrids.

• Hybrids are a novel technology in 2120; they feature the consciousness of real humans who once existed and bodies of synthetics. Wendy is the first hybrid and marks the start of the race towards immortality. Wendy, and all the other hybrids, have the consciousness of a terminally ill child, whose existence on Earth as a human was finite.

• The story begins when Weyland-Yutani’s research spaceship carrying alien specimens to Earth crash lands in Prodigy Corporation’s city, resulting in an outbreak of aliens needing to be contained. Wendy and the other prototype hybrids are to help contain them utilising their human logic and emotions, and superhuman physical prowess.

• The tale unfolds as the “children” develop in their new synthetic bodies, learning how to navigate the complex (and often disgustingly egocentric) ethics of the capitalistic world they’re thrust into, or rather tricked into.

I must admit, when I saw my first glimpses of the pilot episode I expected to see gory aliens and frequent filler arcs involving action scenes not too meaningful to the story, with little to learn from. What I did not expect was to see heart-touching interactions leaving my mind with painful questions of where humanity was headed, and why love and humility must be the cornerstones of every act of technological advancement.

Moral grey zones are highly uncomfortable, and I do not know where to begin my exploration of just how many of these grey zones Alien: Earth touches on so I'll break it down into some of the biggest questions that stayed with me:

Question 1: To what extent does the premise that “children are their own individuals” really apply?

By definition, children occupy the interval between the development periods of infancy and puberty. Which in my interpretation, implies that children are actively forming their own perspectives and are heavily influenced by the social and intellectual interactions they have, rather than by their own brain’s volition. Social and intellectual interaction skills are learned and young humans pick this up externally. So, children might be their own individuals but even more than that, they are bipedal mirrors of the society in which they are immersed. How they choose to interpret their immersion in said society develops as their neural networks mature, with life experience under the influence of the genetics they are born with. They are capable of making their own decisions and taking a stand for themselves but they do so because that is influenced by externalities.

When, as in the Alien: Earth paradigm, a dying child’s mind, memories, and thought pattern (in the form of neural connections) is transferred into a synthetic carbon-silicon brain, or rather “processor”, this raises a whole new set of dilemmas. Especially since what you now have is the maturity level of an already tormented pre-adolescent in the body of a super-strong adult, where the child has not yet developed impulse control, nor the ability to see beneath adults’ toxic shrouds of manipulation: double-sided “goodness”.

"Don't say 'It's complicated'—that is what powerless people say to make doing nothing OK.”, one of the (child) hybrids, to the Boy Genius

The result? Confused, tormented children with little inkling who to trust or how to regulate their emotions. The ensuing chaos for everyone involved makes for a strong narrative. Alien: Earth nails this portrayal.

We meet Wendy, who is portrayed as the favourite hybrid of the Boy Genius who heads the Prodigy corporation and as the natural leader of the group. We meet Curly, an ambitiously unpredictable yet envious hybrid who is determined to be Boy Genius’s pet. We meet Nibs, the tormented trauma-ridden hybrid with mental health difficulties who struggles to grapple with her new undead reality. We meet Slightly, a sensitive child who is vastly unaware of how he is being manipulated in the war that wages between Weyland-Yutani and Prodigy. Any adult who has interacted with children will tell you that these behaviours are classic case studies for child psychology. However the psychologists involved are complicit in the problem and driven by corporate ideology:

 “We ended death. Now we have to make their quality of life better. Otherwise, all we've done is make consumers immortal." - Dame Sylvia, the hybrids’ psychologist at Prodigy Corporation

At times, it was challenging believing that the beings in adult-like bodies are actually children. Each of the characters introduced above was a terminally-ill child who had seen the pains that their mortal, biological families had been through, while experiencing it for themselves. The fact that Prodigy decide to use this group of sensitive children as their testbed for a new technology under the pretense of “you have the gift of being able to progress all of mankind” was sickening and I strongly believe that such inhumane experimentation on children cannot be permitted despite the pretext on which it occurred. Prodigy’s reasoning is that these children would die anyway, so their families have nothing to lose, and would rather gain the relief of knowing that their child (or rather the consciousness of their child) is still alive.

Was that thin shell of relief constructed for the purpose of bringing peace to the disease-ridden children or to the parents' and Prodigy’s questionable morals? That brings me to the next question...

Question 2: Are we human because of our biology or because of consciousness? (and are they two different things?)

 The hybrid Wendy asks a key question: “If I’m not human, what am I?” 

I do not know the answer. I will leave this as an open-ended question which I would welcome answers for, for discussion. Am I human because I have a heart that pumps blood, eyes that see the world, ears that hear, and a brain that coordinates all bodily systems? Or, am I human because I can think. I can feel. I can cry and I can smile and I can hold a conversation and study the Universe for a living. Does that make me human? Consequently, is Wendy human?

And what does being human really involve?

Question 3: If we continue playing God, will we doom ourselves?

Boy Genius took great pride in being the creator of hybrids. Hands-down, he is the most narcissistic, egotistical fictional character I have come across. He revelled in his reality where the hybrids essentially worship him and see him as their saviour from a life of human torment and death, giving them the chance to do everything they please (or so they felt). This arrogance was at the root of his short-sightedness in being unable to see that one day, those very hybrids and the neural networks he worked on transferring would become independent.

It is clear to me that humans are mortal for a reason - give us long enough to live and we will destroy ourselves and all in our vicinity: mortality is the boon, not immortality.

Force your way into things and what you get is imbalance, because we simply do not have the capacity to understand every single implication that an action could have (chaos theory anyone?). Not even the most advanced of computational networks can assess this. So, surely it's better to let nature lead its way. The non-human characters in Alien: Earth have a view on that too:

“You used to be food, you know. Humanity. Your lives were short and filled with fear... You stopped being food. Or, I should say, you told yourself, you weren't food anymore. But in the animal kingdom, there is always someone bigger, or smaller, who would eat you alive if they had the chance.” - Kirsh, Synthetic, Prodigy Corporation

Nature isn’t all pristine and green and tranquil. It is stained and violent and alarmingly brutal. Everything is cyclical - the universe might be too - and by interfering with the natural order of things in the illusion that we are ‘augmenting’ them, we also augment the pitfalls. It is true that it is inevitable to make progress, and challenging not to hurt something or someone in the process, but take it too far and you get tales of entire species and lands being wiped off the face of the Earth. Relevant case studies include the gruesome tales of the dodo, the declining penguin populations (some of which could be extinct before the end of the century), the Pacific garbage patch, microplastics in mothers’ milk, the rise of social intolerance, sedentary lifestyle issues, etc. The world has become shinier and seemingly more efficient, on the outside. On the inside, we’re ridden with things nature never intended for us to live with.

Alien: Earth confronts these big questions.

The aliens themselves, from the facehugger to the towering xenomorph, are not the primary focus of this show. They are a powerful backdrop that mirrors the aggressive curiosity that feeds humankind’s thirst for development.

The antagonist isn’t the alien xenomorph, it is the humans leading the race.

I couldn’t be happier that Alien: Earth was my turning point into admiring sci-fi. What I needed was the right combination of factors - life events reducing my ability to be prejudiced against things, and an intense story forcing me to face some of the toughest questions every 21st century citizen must grapple with. I thoroughly enjoy a proper brain tickle. After that first episode, I couldn’t keep myself away from Sam every time he sat down to watch Alien: Earth. Granted, I would cover my eyes with his hands every time something gory came on, but the change in perspective I’ve had due to this story has been profound.

I even found myself reading a moving sci-fi fiction a few months later, and it made it to my top reads of 2025. The book is the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel. I might just return to tell you all about it.