A colleague of mine recently introduced me and a group of others to the NEXT update of No Man’s Sky. Having smoothly floated from teasing his early failures, advising the best next path, tracking needed materials and off-screen dangers to ultimately naming and providing a suitably operatic origin story for the little iguana-parrot shaped humanoid we lovingly came to know as Lee Zard Birdman (we are very funny people), our investment and interest in the game gradually deepened, myself especially. Enough to actually play it, a little more obsessively than I’m proud of.
No Man’s Sky manages to maintain an adequate tension while being one of the most relaxing things to play or have in the background; the marvel of space travel and the excitement of pew-pew space dogfighting is matched only by the tedium of breaking rocks down to powder and mashing powders together to make new rocks: a process that creates new machines to process new powders into new rocks used to build new machines for new powders to compress into yet new rocks…. The game delivers the sense of openness it promises in a setting that is still very obviously contrived by human creators palette swapping objects from a limited imagination. These are all fine. Sometimes internal contradictions work well. In the case of No Man’s Sky, Khee Hoon Chan’s analysis of the game as a kind of “post-rock” experimentalism1 in a highly structured pop milieu or Dante Douglass’s brief writeup of the NEXT update2 that greatly expands its scope are both excellent pieces on Paste that dig into the ambulances of the game. From Douglass’s article:
The world of No Man’s Sky, then, is an acceptably large largeness. It’s never big enough to evoke realistic proportions but never small enough to feel too cramped. The downside of this is that, even while I enjoyed my time in the game, I found it often quite… bland.
I agree with him. It’s fun, if a bit of a waste of time. There’s a well-worn idea in popular media consumption that each unit of joy is produced by the hour and the audience is best served by an efficient { effort input : joy output } ratio. Ever go to the movies and hear someone say they wanted those two hours back? Games like No Man’s Sky are supposed to offer massive bounds in which you get to play. A limitless supply of bang for the scarce buck. The catch—and this isn’t a criticism—is that play can’t happen without a scope to constrain what is possible. It isn’t play if you just fuck around, there’s gotta be a condition: you can spin around because it’s fun, but only until you get dizzy; see, now we have a condition that defines how to play, like, what can you do to keep spinning longer, or how can you embrace dizziness in new satisfactory ways? Whatever. Without getting too fixated on our definitions, let’s just say that play is a way of figuring out how to do something within constraints: there are limitations and opportunities with which a person can apply creativity and personal experiences to a goal. Play is good for people because it’s a way of acquiring knowledge and knowledge, I’m told, is cool.
But as much as any game, the kind of play No Man’s Sky offers is really constrained by a specific way of understanding the world. Yeah, it’s probably the closest to date that I’ve been to living my own Spaceman Spiff fantasy but the game also reinscribes a very contemporary narrative of what space travel is and should be. I’m going to keep speaking broadly in case I wander out of my depth here, but space travel in early twentieth science fiction is usually just where adventurers go to find unfamiliar places to have adventures. There was nowhere left on Earth where there be dragons so, fuck it, let’s put the dragons in space. By the cold war/space race, the horizons of outer space did not feel so open. Possibly because more was known about outer space but more likely just because the first half of the century introduced a lot of horror that destabilized the notion of human survivability. Now, imperial projects since the Enlightenment have problematized who survives and under what conditions, but the concentration and danger of selective “development” and the costs of white supremacist globalising are grow extreme and harder to ignore by the 60s. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and 2001: a Space Odyssey,* the only people who get to live in space are those who get commissioned to go there. In the former terrestrial life remains only for those who can’t afford to get off a planet entirely exhausted of resources and in the latter outer space is a vaccuum of unknowable possibilities far too extraordinary for inadequate human cognition.
In Electric Sheep?, Deckard, our hunty boi, spends his entire time craving authentic contact with a living thing. Daily news ads impel Deckard to leave Earth (“Emigrate or Degenerate”) to the remaining human population deemed unfit for the next era of human history (the novel’s other narrator, Isidore, is intellectually disabled and, like the replicants and exhausted husk of the former cities, has no place in the new world). His entire motive is to go on a state-sanctioned killing spree to replace his pet mechanical sheep with a “real” organism. He misidentifies “real” and “artificial” life throughout, he waxes existential, and he never reaches a satisfactory conclusion: the planet, and his place in it, remain ambiguous and messy. The possibility for “authentic” contact with something meaningful is no longer possible in the version of planet Earth described in Electric Sheep?.
Meanwhile the only hope 2001 offers at the end is an accidental ascension from crude, violent physical bodies into a glittering infant among the stars, staring wide-eyed and knowing into a universe it is finally ready for. The monolith that teaches apes how to whack resource competitors with a bone is—a thing? a creature?—made of pure energy that aids lesser species along a path of evolution. Apes touching the monolith learn bone-whack and the same logic sustains them for millenia until the bone is replaced with nuclear missiles: but the core imperative to whack the competitor is in place. It’s only contact with an alien that allows human beings to overcome that.
In both cases “contact”—that is, an authentic intellectual experience of the universe through a different living being—is sacred. Either because it is unrecognizable or because it is beyond human capacity, there’s something unearthly about contact because it can’t be found on Earth. There’s a kind of contrast in Solaris, Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel or Andrei Tarkovski’s 1972 adaptation. Though they diverge thematically in a several ways** they share a vision of what “contact” is. Each story focuses on a small team of scientists studying a planet called Solaris, which may or may not be a planet sized consciousness, may or may not be psychic and may or may not be studying the researchers with equal curiosity. In each adaptation, the solarisists treat the universe as a frontier humans can push further away and civilize. That kind of practice is a form of Manifest Destiny. Solaris and Space exist for humans to exploit. These passages from early in the novel illustrate how the main characters think about the universe:
Many people in the world of science, however, especially among the young, had unconsciously come to regard [Solaris] as a touchstone of individual values. All things considered, they claimed, it was not simply a question of penetrating Solarist civilization, it was essentially a test of ourselves, of the limitations of human knowledge. (Lem 23)
Solaristics takes “penetrating Solaris civilization” as the ultimate expression and validation of human Reason. This is a colonial conquest of the Other, this is Henry Stanly and Sigmund Freud agreeing that the mysterious Africa and the illusive female orgasm are so beyond the capacities of Reason that they agree to call them “the Dark Continent.” It is a masculine fear and conquest of something unlike itself. That urge to “contact” something else is a yearning to assimilate alternatives: to accept anything unfamiliar as necessarily degenerate. One character, Snaut, has this to say on the subject:
We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange.
This is just another way of saying slavery: a more egotistical way of framing a colonial mindset. All the universe is understandable by associating it with Earth, and that which is unlike Earth is made like Earth. Expansion through Reason is a project of conquest. From the same passage:
We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence (72)
I really like this passage. Where Electric Sheep? condemns the earth to a state of decay and alienation, with the abject remains of human society creating mechanical imitations of the life that no longer exists, and 2001 promises that “we” are just one touch away from Enlightenment if only we can survive long enough to open our eyes to the ineffable wonders of the universe, Solaris reminds us that all our efforts to (re)relate to the universe are justifications for the tendency of social power to forcefully impose itself on something different. Yet, in very different ways, the novel and film versions of Solaris end optimistically. Both suggest that the search for and contact with alterity doesn’t need to be a gesture of overtaking what’s already there. But I really don’t know how the writers managed to pull off that kind of message.
So with all this, let’s go back to No Man’s Sky. In No Man’s Sky, the player-character begins his adventure as a human asshole in an orange cosmonaut suit, before reaching the first space station and the orange asshole can properly customize their appearance. Honestly, I think this really reflects a lot of the logic underlying No Man’s Sky. You’re just some orange asshole: yeah, there are hints of strangeness in the universe—robots, energy creatures with snow globes for heads, a warrior race with shark vaginas on their faces, avian reptiles with hearts of gold—and the player can even occupy the bodies of such strangeness. But it’s all constrained by what’s familiar, everything is just a copy of something familiar with something else familiar stapled on top of it. The thin plot of the game is about the orange asshole’s lost memory and search for a lost civilization. The player is shepherded from province to metropole. You could stay put on one planet or system, but very quickly each location will have offered everything it possibly can to you. Nature as you’ve found it stops offering things to you and there’s really no other reason to stick around.
This the Manifest Destiny I’ve been talking about. Stay put and you’re like Deckard, lingering in society’s detritus, so you journey out like David Bowman in 2001 because it holds the promise of enlightenment but, like Solaris‘s Kris Kelvin, all that space questing turns out to just be for what is already known and understood. I’m not saying No Man’s Sky is bad because of any of this. It’s just that the constraints of how you play are guided by a process that assumes the infinite possibilities of space are just another frontier to conquer, all possible avenues of play lead to a colonising imperative. And maybe that’s something that is so deeply embedded in science fiction storytelling that it can’t be avoided.
I don’t know what to do with that.
I wish I knew how to search for alterity without co-opting it. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place for that.
On the other hand, in my headcanon I named my amphibioid character Froggeric Ribbitowski and I’m really proud of that.
*Both Electric Sheep? and the film adaptation of 2001 were published in 1968. I probably could have been more consistent if I stuck to one medium but I wanted to restrict my discussion to the 60s.
**Lem felt the depth of his novel was abandoned in the movie, for what it’s worth I disagree with him.
1 Chan, Khee Hoon. “The Post-Rock Aesthetic of No Man’s Sky” Paste. Sep 7, 2016.
2 Douglass, Dante. “No Man’s Sky‘s Massive Scope Is One of the Best and Worst Things About It.” Paste. Aug 3, 2018.
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