The Xenofeminist Manifesto claims, among many things, rationalism and technology as core to a renewed futurist feminist project. However, given the provenance of its moniker and its 'pro-enlightenment' position, Annie Goh asks, WTF exactly is XF?

There was only one thing that I didn't like. In the very back of the garage, near the canisters, I could see something silvery. That hadn't been there before.

80 textless movie posters

In a New Yorker essay a few weeks back, Laura Miller considered the various ways in which science fiction writers have imagined aliens, from the 18th century through today. Perhaps inevitably, the way we think about the alien tends to say something about us: “These aliens may not all be made in the image of their creator,” Miller observed, “but each one is a child of our psyche.”

Ian Bogost begins his recent book Alien Phenomenology by noting the speculative fascination with the stubborn old rumor of flying saucer remains hidden away at Roswell Army Airfield. But his real point is that we are immersed in the alien already. In fact, almost every thing is alien to us, except us: We have no idea what it’s like to be a tree, a bat, a coffee mug, a skyscraper. And unlike human-imagined aliens, they exist. “The alien isn’t in the Roswell military morgue, or in the galactic far reaches,” Bogost writes. “It’s everywhere.”

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometh

Kane

by Slavoj Zizek

For any avid cinema-goer, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that he has already seen all this. Lacan's description not only reminds one of the nightmare creatures in horror movies; more specifically, it can be read, point by point, as describing a movie shot more than a decade after he wrote those words, Ridley Scott's Alien. The monstrous "alien" in the film so closely resembles Lacan's lamella that it cannot but evoke the impression that Lacan somehow saw the film before it was even made. Everything Lacan talks about is there: the monster appears indestructible; if one cuts it into pieces, it merely multiplies; it is something extra-flat that all of a sudden flies off and envelops your face; with infinite plasticity, it can morph itself into a multitude of shapes; in it, pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence. The "alien" is effectively libido as pure life, indestructible and immortal. To quote Stephen Mulhall:

In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he described as 'counting codes'. Having just detected cosmic radio signals for the first time, Tesla immediately believed them to be attempted communications from an intelligent life-form on either Venus or Mars, and later said of the experience, 'The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another'.

The next year, Tesla was asked by the Red Cross to predict man's greatest possible achievement over the next century. The letter below was his reply.

A much-needed transcript follows.

REdYOdA

This is a custom figure I purchased about 6 years ago...maker unknown. Kenner had made prototypes for 3 3/14 inch figures and had already released the 18" Alien that was quickly pulled from the shelves because parents felt it was too frightening for the kiddies.( lol, and look how far we've come now...Alien is nothing!) Sadly, that put a stop to the carded Alien action figure production.