After finishing E.C. Osondu’s Alien Stories, a collection of 18 stories of multifarious aliens, I found myself asking: According to this book, what is an alien and what is an alien like? The collection smartly refuses to answer either leg of the question clearly.
To the first, an alien is both a creature from another planet and a human from another place. In Alien Stories the line between the two tends to be blurred. And many of the stories draw their might from this blurring and a refusal to resolve it.
As for what they are like. Aliens are emigrating Africans. Aliens are nosey white Americans. Aliens are sad skinny green creatures who annoy members of a focus group. Other members of the same focus group think that aliens are simply evolved forms of humans, that we’ll all be aliens someday. Aliens abduct and they enslave. Employees at a themed amusement park enact “aliens” from all the continents of the world, doing their best to conform to the American guests’ idea of their alien cultures. Aliens must be hung in ritual sacrifices. Children must be sacrificed every year to appease aliens. Aliens move to small towns in America and cannot explain why they are there but for chance. They just want to live peaceful, quiet, healthful lives. One alien experiences technical difficulties and leaves his spaceship in the middle of an African village, where the ship embodies the projected joys and fears of the villagers. The blue beam of another spaceship randomly shines down on a loud, promiscuous women in a small African village suddenly turning her plain and torpid, as she goes to view the blue beam alone every night. One might interpret the beam as the domesticating influence of the television or smartphone, but such an interpretation is unprovable and barely gestured too. The blue beam is a blue beam. Aliens take trains and get stuck sitting across from nosey old white men who cannot help but comment on what they like about alien culture. Their strange names, how they don’t age, how polite they are, how they share their lunches.
By casting such a wide net and by using space aliens as stand-ins for othered individuals, races, and species, Osondu manages to “enact” specific and particular othered experiences under the guise of this abstracted alien realm. The narration, like an alien craft, hovers nebulously above the particular, giving the stories an allegorical aura. I say aura because the stories don’t direct us to specific lessons or moral truths. They remain in the realm of lived experience, the lived experience of aliens in societies rife with confusions about them. Still, that aura helps lift the stories from acute contemporary reflections to more timeless glimpses of our human foibles.
The story “Child’s Play” epitomizes this style. In it, a brother and sister in an African village find by holding each other’s hands and spinning faster and faster that “the ground would open up and we would find ourselves in a new place where we would play with our new friends all day.” Every day when their mother went to the market, the narrator and his sister would exhaust themselves playing with these new friends. When the narrator tells his mother how they go to this new world to play with these new friends, she looks at him, her eyes tearing, and says, “Ah, this child has malaria.” The collection is rich with such quietly funny lines.
As the children continue visiting, they return home more and more exhausted, falling asleep at the dinner table. So, the mother disallows them from going. But the children had been busy building trees for these new friends and so they decide to go one last time. For hours, they affix branches to the trees they’d started previously, but when they try to return home they find they cannot. Their “friends” say the branches need leaves. “Thousands and thousands of leaves to cover many trees.” From this new world, the children hear their mother calling out: “Where have these children gone? It’s growing dark and they have not come back home. It is growing dark. So dark.” The children are afraid. But their friends reassure them. “Over here it never grows dark,” they say. Is there a lesson here? Maybe, Listen to your mother.
There is a wide spectrum of technological sophistication in these stories. From fabled speaking drums to AI friends, spaceships to a mysterious glowing object that grants great wealth. Still,despite the aliens and the occasional advanced technology Alien Stories is not a sci-fi collection. Osondu’s stories are not interested in exploring speculative futures or the effects of the alien’s technology. Many of the stories are village tales told in a traditional form, leaning closer to fantastical fables.
In the first story of the collection, “Alien Enactors,” Osondu, who studied under George Saunders at Syracuse, offers something of a sendup to “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” in the mode of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenya(another Syracuse/Saunders alum). In “Alien Enactors” non-Americans are expected to perform their alien cultures for white visitors, who in turn rate the performance and thereby determine the enactor’s career as an alien performer. The narrator successfully offers his white audience generic African platitudes that earn him high ratings. Meanwhile Ling, a Chinese enactor, receives low ratings because she refuses to discuss Chinese food, which is all her white audience seems to crave. Here, the bind “alien” writers find themselves in is laid bare. Expected to enact their cultures for the average (white American) reader, pushed by publishers to create safely exotic books.
“Memory Store,” the second story in the collection, nudges you towards a similar interpretation. In it, a quasi-Nigerian man emigrates to America and toils away in a somewhat dead end job cleaning cars. Then he finds the Memory Store, where he can sell his best memories of home for large sums of money. The catch: Every time he sells a memory he loses it. The memory becomes the memory of whoever wants to buy it. But the money is good. And so, America lures him into the malaise of its creature comforts by offering him cash if he’ll sell off the precious, marketable moments his past, piece by piece.
The most haunting story of the collection is “Feast”. Only five pages long, the story sketches the festival atmosphere before a town’s annual ritual hanging of a space alien. We follow a cluster of children (an alien organism in its own right) through the games and activities before the hanging and attendant feast. The kids obsess over the alien’s notorious Last Meal, and the infinite lengths the Alien Feast organizers will supposedly go to supply the alien with any food it desires.
Osondu captures their childish logic well:
“Just before the hanging the alien could request for any kind of food or drink. Any quantity and it would be provided. They still found it somewhat difficult to wrap their heads around this fact. That it was even remotely possible to request for a food or drink or a type of candy and it would be provided with no questions asked. These children lived in a world where it seemed like they were always asking for things and in this world it was always the job of the adults to say no to their requests. Perhaps, the fate of the alien was not a bad one, really when you thought about it.”
Moments later, a speaker says (to who? the crowd, the heavens, aliens?), “Accept our little sacrifice which we offer up on to you.” The hanging is done quickly, in a business-like manner: “The alien was led to the stage. The rope was fastened around the alien’s neck. The lever was pulled. The neck snapped. The alien was dead.”
The Feast commences. And soon after we learn, “What no one could argue about was that after the hanging of an alien everyone always slept soundly.” The strange washing of the children’s minds, the fervorous cruelty of the town, and the focus on how the spectators sleep after, recalls, in its alien way, Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man”.
In all of these stories, aliens and their spaceships are barely news-worthy. They are confusing curiosities, causes for conversation and speculation and complaint, sources of good or (usually) bad luck. People regard them as strange and foreign and other, but they are rarely seen as frightening or even threatening. Even a story like “Sacrifice” in which aliens come every year expecting a child to be given to them as a sacrifice, the aliens turn out to be quite reasonable, even if inscrutable. The mother of one of the children chosen as sacrifice insists on joining her son on their spaceship. The frightened villagers accuse the mother of threatening the village’s very existence, but the aliens—ever misunderstood—just boot the mother and child out of their craft then disappear, forever. There are no repercussions except that no child will ever be sacrificed again. Another of the quiet, clean endings to these humble, enlightening stories.
I say this with the greatest respect—the stories in this collection were not built to wow. They were built to last. They are quiet, true, strange, and timeless.
Writing now, I find myself less concerned with my initial question: What is an alien like? For the answer is, of course, that they are surely as different from one another as humans are.
Instead, I have found myself wondering: What would an alien think humans are like? For this is the question Alien Stories often takes aim at.
If an alien were to come came upon this collection of stories and use them to make their deduction, I suspect the alien would think: How superstitious they are. How full of curiosity. How generous and yet how silly And my god, how strange they become when they are afraid, afraid of us.
Don’t worry human, they might say, You too are just a visitor on planet Earth.
Sam Schieren received his MFA from UC Davis. Winner of the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction, his stories have been published in or are forthcoming from The Iowa Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gulf Coast, and Southern Humanities Review, among other journals. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches at VCU.