Blog Entry #2

I find myself in a very weird place...and no I have not been taken over by a passenger within the last 48 hours...At least that I know of. This week we delve into the stories "Passengers" by Robert Silverberg and Nancy Kress' "Out of All Them Bright Stars," to discuss the alien encounter trope, and how the relations between humans and the aliens are played out the way they are in each story, as well as other human relations. In Silverberg's "Passengers," The story is about a man living in a world where their is a freak occurence when some other-earthly entity enters the human mind and force the person within the body and mind to blackout as they take control for random lengths of time, using the body for any which urge the entity wants to use it for, then leaves and the original person within the body comes back to consciousness. These entities are called Passengers, and give absolutely no rhyme or reason for the actions they choose to do within the bodies once they take over. In my opinion, I believe that the Passengers stand as a metaphor for the uncontrollable urges humans act upon without reason, and that most of the humans apathetic and content ignorance to the problem within the story is just a symbol for the ignorance most humans hold within daily life about a lot of the odd habits and urges humans have without much reason. Throughout the story it is shown that they live in a world bolstered with reliance on technology for most things in their life (I.E the purple liquid, the main character asking the device in the beginning what time it was, other news, etc.), and that within this convenience grows a lack of desire to try and attempt to deal with issues or tasks that require any form of skill. I would say that the other story has a bit of a different spin as to what could happen with the Alien-human interaction. In that story, their is a huge amount of symbolism to the racism issues that we deal with on earth when in the story it deals with an Alien from another planet tries to interact with someone from Earth and they get rejected from being different, but also noticeable are the correlations to conformity as alluded when people get mad at the woman that wants to help the Alien life form at the restaurant, and she decides not to help it because of what the other people might do, even though she knows they are in the wrong. Either story, you get the idea that Aliens are to represent either a thought or person or thing we generally find not comforting to deal with or understand, but could symbolize the very things we need to understand about ourselves to progress and become better human beings. Who knew it would take an Alien to figure that out...