Do Synthetics Dream of Perfume?
Reflections on teaching science fiction, Frankenstein, and Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, 2017)
So, I have been thinking a lot about Frankenstein for most of my career as an academic. When I was first hired at the university where I have taught full time since 2012, I taught a course on Science Fiction. I was hired in autumn 2007, at the last minute, and I think I was a warm body in the right place at the right time. I had been to see William Gibson speak at Edinburgh International Book Festival a few weeks prior to my interview and that may well have stood me in good stead at my interview. That, and I had already spent a lifetime answering questions put to me by old dudes trying to explain things to me, and I had gotten very good at parrying their thrusts (so to speak).
So there I was, with nothing but William Gibson’s novels, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Alien trilogy under my belt. And somehow, I made it work. I was lucky to have landed at a university that was trying to do something different, and so I got to shape that course in line with my own interests. I don’t teach this course anymore—I retired it after I had to teach it online during COVID, after teaching it in various forms for well over a decade.
The last time this course ran in autumn 2020, this was the reading list:
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Megan Hunter, The End We Start From
William Gibson’s ‘Burning Chrome’ and ‘The Gernsback Continuum’
China Miéville, ‘Reports of Certain Events in London’
Paul B. Preciado “The Losers Conspiracy”
This was the watch list:
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1928)
Ex_ Machina (Alex Garland, 2014)
Black Mirror episodes: ‘The Entire History of You’ and ‘Be Right Back’
The Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995)
Evolution (Lucile Hadzlilhovic, 2015)
Another Earth (Mike Cahill, 2011)
Teaching this class online during lockdown was, quite frankly, a harrowing experience. So much of what I taught was already so dystopian, and we were living through a horrendously frightening time that already felt like science fiction.
I’ve always loved Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, and it stands up to repeat viewings with its grit and its shadows. I hadn’t particularly noted the appearance of Alien: Covenant in 2017 and had therefore not prioritised seeing it. In fact, I kind of avoided a lot of science fiction after I stopped teaching that class at the end of 2020. But Frankenstein has remained with me, as if I cannot quite let go of the creature. Frankenstein keeps coming back into my hands, and I cannot seem to stop teaching it entirely. So, I was intrigued to see it rear up so discernibly in Alien: Covenant.
Alien: Covenant picks up some years after the conclusion of Prometheus. Another colony mission into deep space, another synthetic person played by the marvellous Michael Fassbender. Much like the first Alien, the ship detours to follow an unusual beacon and the crew find themselves on a habitable planet. Eventually, they encounter David (Fassbender) the synthetic survivor of Prometheus. He has remained alone on the planet for many years, making an elaborate “workshop of filthy creation.” He is the physical twin of Walter (Fassbender) the latest iteration of Weyland-Yutani’s synthetic people, who is part of the Covenant’s ground team.
Unbeknownst to the Covenant crew, this planet has been infected by an enormous viral payload. This virus is airborne and causes numerous deaths and mutations across insect and other animal life forms, and David observes and manages these mutations. David is both an apex predator and the worst culmination of humanity’s colonising actions. Anyone with the slightest awareness of the traditional canon of European classical music or English poetry will be tipped off by David’s fondness for Wagner’s Ring Cycle and PB Shelley’s Ozymandias. Here, Weyland’s creation has been shaped by what he has observed, and by his creator’s acquisitive nature. David has mastered many artistic forms including both music and drawing, but like Victor Frankenstein he is at heart a collector with a cold eye. Nevertheless, he is drawn to Walter, treating him as a brother but also a possible lover.
In an especially unsettling moment, David kisses Walter, telling him “no one will ever love you like I do” and we are forced to reckon with the sinister double so beloved of science fiction; many of the texts I taught on my course dealt with this—Metropolis, Ex-Machina, Be Right Back. When I was still teaching Science Fiction in autumn 2019, a student very memorably said out loud in tutorial “I would definitely shag myself” in response to a discussion of doubles and cyborgs and I remember I laughed because it was said playfully, and this was offered in response to a student-led session on Ex Machina, being done by a group of his friends including the woman who would remain his lover into lockdown the following year.
There is something about this moment in Alien: Covenant of shagging oneself that is sinister and sexy, and this is partly because Fassbender is sexy, but I also think about Bladerunner’s Pris, the “basic pleasure model” and how this motif is so rarely taken up in relation to masc presenting synthetic people. But of course there is also more than a whiff of incest about David’s kissing of Walter, just as there is more than a whiff of incest between Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza, raised as siblings and then romantically involved as adults. I also used to teach Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2009) on my science fiction course, a film that I eventually stopped teaching because some students read it as transphobic. I have always found Splice troubling, not anyone’s example of positive representation of any kind, and that was part of the reason I chose to teach it, but it too crosses boundaries, asking us to consider the responsibilities of creator and creature.
I try to imagine the smell of an unknown planet, of those softly illuminated caves: wet green, stone, and something antiseptic, evocative of the lab. One thing that would be unsettling about David is that he of course wouldn’t have his own natural aroma, but something like Vaunt’s Monomaniac would suit him admirably both in name and nature, with its smoke and leather, something like tar deep and brine in the mix. This kind of dominating fragrance would envelope Walter as David moves towards him, not unlike the strong, aggressive scent notes of whisky which the Covenant team drink to honour their first fallen colleague. Penhaligon used to make a perfume called Blasted Heath, which was described to me as having a hint of sea salt and whiskey to it and this feels like the kind scent that Daniels (Katherine Waterston) might favour, and that this is something she might have chosen to start wearing in the wake of her partner’s death.