First Japan, then Mars: Percival Lowell’s fascination with alterity
Last week I posted about the relation between my passion for science-fiction and my career in anthropology. I stated that as I was growing up, I often challenged myself to imagine how aliens would look like if they were drastically different from humans. I also expressed my feeling that science-fiction authors, despite trying to imaging extreme otherness in the form of aliens, rarely create something that differs from the Western conceptions of what sentient beings are.