If, as Kuhn (1999, p.3) contends, the characteristic themes of science fiction “are basically twofold, having to do with technologies on one hand and with modes of societal organization on the other”, then a definitive representation of these characteristics is potently portrayed in a scene from Aliens (1986), when Bishop, the android, places his ‘hand of technology’ over the hand of one of the marines, the ‘hand of the working class’, in order to play a phallically-threatening game, where sharp metal traces human flesh, as Bishop mechanically drives a knife between their fingers, staccato fashion.

After this robotic test of the bravado of human masculinity, Ripley, the woman who would eventually save humankind, openly shuns that ‘replicant’ that is destined to save her ‘adopted’ child, Newt. Ripley’s disdain of the android is not representative of her distrust of technology, but, rather, her prior experience with the android, Ash, in Alien (1979). The android is a servant of the corporation, a power that is so entrenched in capitalistic control, that it will do whatever it must, even at the expense of human life, to improve its own status.

Ironically, in the final battle between human and Alien, Ripley chooses to place herself within a mechanical beast, a ‘power-loader’, becoming virtually cybernetic - half-human, half-machine. The ‘power-loader’, or forklift, is also a tool of the working class, normally used by blue-collar workers in the service of the corporation. Here, it is used, not in service to the corporation, but to destroy that which the corporation covets. Ultimately, Aliens is not so much the heroic tale of human versus ‘creature from another planet’, but more, perhaps, a warning about the horrors that await should we become pawns to corporate capitalism – a tale of the beast borne from our own shores.

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