Popular Culture Review Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 2015 | Page 63

here again, we are in the presence of the most traditional motifs of science fiction - three astronauts, a spaceship and a crash on a distant planet - the tension is created by the unexplainable, even within a reality which by definition is different from ours for it is that of the science fiction mode.16 The phenomenon confronted by the three astronauts escapes their episteme and hence creates a rupture in their own reality, however different it might be from ours. The exploration of different worlds and the encount er with strange creatures, which can be treated in the space-operatic mode, Star-Trek style,17 or in a dystopian, somewhat more mature mode, such as in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, suffice to create narrative tension in the science fiction or space-operatic modes; in “Death Ship,” however, the conflict that generates narrative authority and justifies the narration depends neither upon exotic encounters in outer space, nor upon disenchanted anticipations of what the future of the human race might be, but upon the irruption of an unexplainable phenomenon within a controlled environment: the spaceship could indeed be replaced by a simple plane and the crew of astronauts by regular aviators without affecting in the least the general balance of the story. The narrative authority of “Death Ship” does not rely upon the development of the science fiction paradigms it uses, but rather upon the binary opposition between what we are ready to understand and what is out of the limits of our epistemology - throughout the entire episode, the members of the crew attempt to understand how this disturbing replica of both their ship and their bodies can exist. Some of their speculations, such as the possibility of a hypnotic defense mechanism developed by the planet in order to protect itself from invaders, seem to lead the narration into science fiction, and are somewhat reminiscent of Lem’s Solaris, however, they remain underdeveloped in the economy of the narration, which relies mainly upon maintaining the opposition between what could be acceptable, even in a futuristic spaceship, and what remains unexplainable.18 Behind the guise of a science fiction narration, Death Ship is an updated treatment of the theme of the double, or doppelganger, associated with death in traditional folklore and used more or less directly in several canonical fantastic narrations, such as Maupassant’s Le Horla or Lui? demonstrating that the fantastic is not in the paradigms in 16 The intricacies of science fiction as a prospective by opposition to realistic narrative mode are well detailed in Moreno’s massive Teoria de la ciencia ficcion. 17 It could be argued that Star Trek belongs to a sub-genre of the marvelous, for it structurally corresponds to the traditional travel adventure narrations of the marvelous kind, such as S inb a d ’s Travels or The Hobbit. 18 Similarly, the unexplainable betrayal of the computer HAL in Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey could be considered as fantastic, for it escapes the laws of the narrative universe, even if said laws reflect a different state of technology. 59