Possible Shapes and Forms of Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life
In 1951, the brilliant science fiction illustrator Edd Cartier created a remarkable gallery of extraterrestrials for presentation as color plates in a hardcover, multiauthor story collection called Travelers of Space. The anthology came from Gnome Press, one of the legendary postwar publishers of high-quality science fiction. The imprint was owned by David Kyle, and Cartier’s illustrations accompanied a wry Kyle story called “The Interstellar Zoo.” (The tale’s premise, that intelligent extraterrestrials volunteer for limited stays at Earth zoos, to foster better understanding between species, unfolds like a museum catalogue expressed in dialogue, as a mother and her two young children tour the exhibits and remark on each creature.) The sixteen color plates illustrating “The Interplanetary Zoo” are truly, deeply alien: a bulge-eyed, upright worm with a serrated chest plate above an arched lower body edged with graceful, fin-like papillomata; a floating, bifurcated bag of gas suspending a closely massed cluster that looks like grapes but is, unnervingly, probably an array of sex organs; an ambulatory mushroom sporting an attractively contoured trunk and topside sense organs reminiscent of insect legs; a vaguely humanoid horror (complete with rakish cowl piece and quasi-military tunic) supported by reverse- jointed legs and arms, and an outsized head with angry, bulged eyes. The creature’s combination nose-mouth is adorned with plump cilia. Cartier’s imagination went on like this, one fanciful invention after another, the creatures incorporating all the rainbow’s colors and looking as juicy and squeezable as water-filled soft rubber.
Cartier’s aliens were uniquely his own, of course, but the artist was firmly grounded in the SF-pulp tradition of BEMs: bug-eyed monsters. Good-natured repulsiveness was integral to Cartier’s bag of tricks, and that sort of approach has typified much of our speculation about the physical natures of extraterrestrials. For every winsomely slender, doe-eyed alien in the Close Encounters style, we have imagined whole armies of beings with angry mouths, insectoid bodies, and bulged brains.
Popularly accepted notions of alien physiognomy come from sources as diverse as stone-mask makers of pre-Columbian Mexico, EC Comics artist Wallace Wood, Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, moviemakers, and the aforementioned pulp artists of the 1930s and ’40s. When illustrator Howard V. Brown painted the cover of the June 1933 issue of Astounding Stories, he depicted extraterrestrials with enlarged heads, oversized eyes, and small, slit-like mouths—what UFOlogist Michael Grosso characterized as anticipating the “fetus-like” conceptions popularized after World War II. Grosso has written smartly about what he calls these aliens, and their peculiar appeal: startling in their strangeness, yet sympathetic because they evoke starving children.
