Bugs and Buggers
At the beginning of the semester, I blogged about the proliferation of bipedal aliens at the expense of any imagination about possible alternate evolutions. In the past week, I've come to regret my impatience. What is up with bugs? Why is there an obsession with highly evolved bugs with centralized brains? In particular, why is there an obsession with wiping out highly evolved bugs with centralized brains?
I guess that can be my new pet peeve. When the aliens are bipedal, we can all just get along (AKA The Dispossessed), but with bugs we need to wipe them out. I can here the admiral of a starfleet saying, "Oh, no, more buglike alienas, get me my intergalactic can of Raid!!" Seriously. Because we're not big fans of bugs on earth, that means we have to wipe out anything in the universe that resembles an earth-bug?
It reminds me of one time when I went to camp with some friends. We all had mosquito netting (summer in New England), but one of my friends took hers down as soon as her parents left, insisting she preferred to sleep without it. Then, when we went to bed, she started screaming because there was a spider above her bed and wanted one of us to rescue her. I feel like all the humans in the stories we read this week are acting the same way: they saw a bug and now they want someone to kill it because it's gonna hurt them. Granted, these bugs haven't been the nicest crowd, but still.
Our story so far... "If a humanoid alien comes to your planet, that's ok. If he looks like a bug, KILL IT! KILL IT! OH, KILL IT! EWW, IT'S GROSS!! IT TOUCHED ME! I THINK IT'S POISONOUS!! KILL IT!"
posted by lennearb @ 12:42 AM
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