177. Monsters and Humanity in Fiction with Surekha Davies

“It all started with too much Star Trek, although you could say that that's a lie because there is never too much Star Trek.” - Surekha Davies

In the latest How To Write the Future podcast, titled “Monsters and Humanity in Fiction with Surekha Davies,” host Beth Barany talks to science and art historian, monster consultant, and author, Surekha Davies. Together they discuss why understanding monsters matters, how they function as boundary-markers for humanity, and how writer’s can apply an historian’s perspective on monsters to deepen their storytelling. 

ABOUT SUREKHA DAVIES

Surekha Davies is a historian of science, art, and ideas, a speaker, and a monster consultant for TV, film and radio. She is the author of "Humans: A Monstrous History" just out from the University of California Press, and writes the free newsletter, "Strange and Wondrous: Notes From a Science Historian." Her first book, "Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters," won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. Her work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon Magazine.

For a free excerpt from HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY sign up for my newsletter, "Strange and Wondrous": https://buttondown.com/surekhadavies

Website: https://www.surekhadavies.org/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/surekhadavies/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/surekha-davies-53711753/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@surekhadavies?lang=en

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Transcript

177. Monsters and Humanity in Fiction with Surekha Davies

Introduction and Host's Background

BETH BARANY: Hi everyone. Welcome to How To Write the Future Podcast. I'm your host, Beth Barany. I am an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer, also creativity coach, writing teacher and editor, and also filmmaker, and of course podcaster. And I believe that with our creativity and our imagination and our diligence, we can create stories that actually can remake the world. And I love interviewing people for my podcast, thinkers, creatives, futurists, forward thinkers. And today I'm so excited to bring to you a special guest, uh, Surekha Davis. 

Surekha, can you please introduce yourself for us and then we'll, we'll dive into questions. 

[00:47] Guest Introduction: Surekha Davies

SUREKHA DAVIES: Hello everyone. Very happy to be here. I am a historian of science, art, and ideas. I'm also a bit of a monster consultant for radio, tv, that kind of thing. And, I became a historian of exploration and, um, broadened that out into thinking about monsters through time for the book that's just come out, Humans: A Monstrous History, which is a history of humanity from antiquity to the present, and yes, it has a very cool mirror on it. 

[01:21] Exploring the Fascination with Monsters

BETH BARANY:  Maybe you can tell us like what brought you into studying monsters? Because I, I, I immediately gravitated toward it as a storyteller. I have a whole story series I wanna build around monsters, a TV show actually with my heroine, Henrietta The Dragon Slayer, and the Monsters. 

And so it I see a lot of women writers also really going deep into the monsters and there's this whole thing evolving and it's, it's fascinating. So, yeah. If you could tell us a little bit about your evolution and what brought you to this topic. 

[01:54] Star Trek and the Evolution of Monsters

SUREKHA DAVIES: It all started with, uh, too much Star Trek, although you could say that that's a lie because there is never too much Star Trek.

I, you know, as a small child was just watching Star Trek Next Generation and Cosmos and, uh, Deep Space Nine as soon as it came out. And all I wanted to do was be an intergalactic explorer because like what better thing could you possibly want to do than to be Jean-Luc Picard?

And so my original major when I started university was theoretical physics, but too much Star Trek. By the end of the first year, I realized, you know, once I'd taken a quantum mechanics class, that there wasn't going to be warp drive in my own lifetime. So why was I doing this? It had all been about being in this space of wonder when faced with beings who were incomprehensible and exciting.

I'm, I won't even go camping. I, uh, swapped to history and philosophy of science, which was a very easy swap, at Cambridge where I was an undergrad. 

[02:58] Monsters in History and Maps

And, I found myself working on the history of exploration and that, took me to the 16th century, to a moment that was in a very small way one of those meeting aliens, you know, on both sides of the encounter in that, the, the two hemispheres had been mostly separate for as long as humans have been around. And so I studied that those encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples. And one of the things I noticed was that there were illustrations on maps and, you know, I became a curator at the British Library while I was trying to figure out what to do my PhD on and an exhibition that I curated when, you know, there was a, there was a gap in the calendar and somebody needed to be thrown in to do it, was on 16th century maps with images of monsters, simply because I ran into the reading room, opened all the, all the reference books in haste 'cause I had to come up with a topic by the end of the week. So I looked at the 16th century stuff and thought, wait a minute, there are monsters on these maps.

And so that was at the back of my mind, and then I wrote my first book on images of Peoples of the Americas in 16th century maps and how the category of the human changed in the Renaissance as people tried to figure out who or what was over there because, you know, ancient knowledge had predicted that in distant places with very, very different climates, humans would basically be monstrous. 

And so I got into the monsters when I noticed that so much of the visual material about the Americas, about peoples in those early centuries, early decades, were either, you know, headless men or giants or eaters of human flesh. And these ideas were bound up with maps because, you know, the kinda way of thinking about the body then was that it was malleable. We weren't these fixed beings, but we were vulnerable, if you will, to the climate and ancient Greek naturalists, Roman nationalists had talked about monstrous peoples at the edges of the world where the climate was harsh.

And so once you're actually traveling everywhere, you've gotta ask where's the boundary between human space and monster space? Once you start putting people on maps in different places, that makes differences of people, with latitude, very visible and comparable. 

So I got into monsters because I saw them, and then I realized that, you know, the very idea of human is bound up with ideas about monsters because what's, where's the limit to human in terms of the kind of body, the kind of behavior, uh, where does human end and animal begin? Where does human end and God begin? And I realized there’s a history to how people have thought about those boundaries between human, an animal God machine, Extraterrestrial and that boundary is always moving. 

And who sits on that boundary? They're the category disruptors. They're the category problems. And you, if you call them monsters, you can have your tidy categories on either side, your animals, your humans, your machines. So long as you have a word for human cross with machine.

And that word is cyborg. So the cyborg then is effectively a monster. So it started with Star Trek and it's come right, right back around to Star Trek again. 

BETH BARANY: Wow. I love that. I have to admit to all that are listening. I too am a huge, huge trekky and it deeply influences, my, my science fiction and probably all of my storytelling.

So let's, let's move into fiction because our main audience here is science fiction and fantasy writers primarily.

But, and anyone who cares about the future and anyone who, I mean, I invite all listeners to explore their creativity. What would you say makes a good monster for fiction writers?

And, and maybe we could stick to science fiction and fantasy since that's the genre that, that I know the best. And, and as an avid star trekker, you know, you know it quite well as well.

So yeah. Thoughts on that? 

SUREKHA DAVIES: Yeah, sure. So what makes you know a good monster in science fiction? In fantasy? I'd say, you know, maybe, you know, I wanna start with, with, I have to start with a Star Trek example and say, I'd say look no further than the Borg Collective when they first appear in Star Trek, next generation.

So for anyone who's, who, who's not a Trek, you know, the summary is there are, the borg are cyborgs. They're vaguely human shaped, partially organic, partially machine, but they, their, their, their organic bodies are made up of all the species they have assimilated. So they assimilate people and, and, and, absorb their, their uniqueness into the Borg.

And maybe the, the key element that makes the borg terrifying and monstrous is that they trouble the boundary, not just between human and machine, like all cyborgs, you know, because they go around assimilating species, you, the viewer, the characters on the show, they aren't safe either. That is maybe a, a fundamental thing that, that fictional monsters that are very powerful and also narratives in the present about monster making share, which is a, creating a sense of an existential threat posed by this being, they're not just a villain.

They pose a threat to the integrity of your body, not just because they might shoot you with bullets and you might die, but because you might no longer be the same once you've spent time in their presence. So they might disrupt your body, they also have disrupted how you think about the life that exists on Earth.

So, oh my goodness, there's a species that goes on absorbing other species and you know, they've got this deathly pallor, so of course the, the other, the, the other extreme is the, just the visceral effect of how they look. And there's, you know, so much care has gone into this. As of course with, with Star Trek and all of their aliens, you know, they, the, when a person becomes turned into a Borg, they, you know, they have things injected into them. Nano probes, tiny robots, and their skin color changes. And maybe one of the things that that's gonna maybe powerful today is we also kind of think about how otherness is framed through what skin looks like, even when everything else is kind of the same.

Uh, they have prosthetics that have special tools stuck on them, and, to go again from the, the very physical to the mental. They have something of a hive mind. And that, again, is really terrifying because not only do we now fear the integrity of our body in case we're in assimilated, but our mind won't be private either because all the drones as they're called, could hear one another.

I could go on for forever there, but I'll, I'll stop for the moment and say there's a perfection that comes with really activating all the ways in which a monster might destabilize the viewer and, and you know what, the Borg story does is it draws in the way we already think about what's normal and what's not, but also draws on what we already know about the Star Trek universe and what the other foes and rivals look like.

Even from when you look at the ships, the, the, the Klingons have ships called Birds of Prey, and they are elegant and bird-like. And the, the, the, the Romulan’s who are kind of the enemies, their ships are kind of green, so that's spookier and snake-like, but the Borg have got cubes. So it's like, oh my God, where is this the ship ever not been round? So even within the universe of, of Star Trek and its imaginary ships, they found a way to make them, you know, really uncanny. 

BETH BARANY: Yeah. Very and very, uh, unusual and confounding. Yeah. I love that you use the Borg as a, as a great example of a terrifying monster in inside of the Star Trek universe.

[11:52] Monsters in Fiction and Media

SUREKHA DAVIES: Something I've learned something, a way in which I've maybe can change a little bit in the process of writing this book is that I don't call people monsters, even in my head, you know, it's like, you know, I, you know, it's of course one shouldn't call people things anyway, but you know, I, I don't, that isn't a category I use on sociopaths or mass murderers or anyone for a couple of reasons. One, you know, I don't wanna dignify, for example, tech billionaire losers with a word like monster that just makes them too important, frankly. 

It also, it's too easy to label someone like, I don't know, a school shooter and say, oh gosh, they're a monster, and it somehow absorbs the rest of society from wondering whether anybody else in that society might become a tool school shooter or murder people. It, it gets in the way of addressing systemic problems, like radicalization of young people, you know, wholesale misogyny, the rise of the acceptability of using violence, and so, uh, I've now half forgotten your question. 

Oh, yes. Well, what does it mean if people call others monsters? Yeah. I think it's, for me that, that word as a, as a tool to use has kind of lost its power because it, it gets in the way of, of recognizing all the things that need to be done to change and stop those kinds of actions happening and it also, it's too easy to then panic because someone has terrified you because they're a monster, so don't give them the power that the Borg have because then you can't function. You can't resist them, um, you can't make jokes, uh, you, you can't poke fun of the dictator at, if you give them too much power.

Um, uh, but you know, the, but a lot of my book is about what I, something I call monsterfication or monster making, which is telling stories about individuals or groups, in such a way as to frame them as falling outside of the category of human. So, and, and this is where, when, when stories are told about how, for example, all Latin American immigrants are allegedly, serious criminals, I mean that those are stories of monsterfication, which are used to justify, for example kidnapping people off the streets and trafficking them to gulags overseas without due process, actual US citizens have had this happen to them. 

Um, so whoa. Oh yeah, the, the calling people monsters and I guess to go back to the start of your question, which is, how am I defining monster? I define the word, very broadly and very, very generally to simply mean category disruptor. So everybody has, so we say a taxonomy of like stuff there is in the world. There are apes and cats and dogs and lions and so on, um, and machines and robots. 

And if you, you have, we have a finite set of categories, things in the world. And so what that means is if you run across something that transcends a couple of them, that straddles a couple of them, that is kinda technically a monster. That doesn't mean you have to run around and have a nervous breakdown, it just means you've come across something that isn't from, you know, your, your categories. 

And so you know what, as you look at the history of how of history of taxonomy, if you will, you can see that people, there have been a lot of examples of fictional or religious, or actual physical in the world beings who have crossed either ca um, the boundary between human and some other kind of category altogether, like machine, or God, or, they crossed and challenged social categories between men and women, between faiths, between different nations of course, and the invention of race. 

And the third kind of circle category breakers are at, are the individuals and groups who societies used to define the parameters of normal for an individual human body.

So what there are, quote unquote normal heights to be, what are normal things that someone can do? And so the kinda language of, of, of ability and disability, is one with which societies decide what the parameters of normal are. So monster making isn't simply about, say, ethnic and racial monsterfication and discrimination, monsters can also be, perfectly neutral. 

Um, I'm not sure we, we, we would call werewolf neutral exactly, but, but you know, it's not always real things in the political world, but there are also very positive, positive monsters. And, you know, the Muppet Show is a place where one can see modeled a different way of engaging with, complete variety and hybridity.

BETH BARANY: Also, um, the movie Monsters Inc. 

SUREKHA DAVIES: Oh my goodness. Yeah, that is such a favorite movie of mine. It came out just as I was beginning my PhD and that's another place where you can see absolutely I think, fantastic monsters. I think there are like three quite different kinds of monsters in there. There are the classic, children's bedtime horror story monsters, you know, the big blue fairy hairy animal and you know, the what? Giant single eyed, funny round guy. 

So they're, they're, they're the heroes, you know, Mike and Sully. And then there is the, another kind of classic monster, which is gonna Randall the, the, the arch villain who is reptilian. And that is again, really activating an ancient kinda human fear.

Reptiles are kind of creepy and he has a great many, you know, limbs. He can turn invisible. So he's uncanny. But I think the top monster in there is the small child, the toddler, Boo. Because when you enter Monstropolis, you know, through a child's closet door for example, you, it's like going through the mirror, going through the looking glass 'cause in Monstropolis everyone is who we would think of as a monster, and they just go about their lives and it looks like New York City. And for them, human children are terrifying, dangerous, toxic beings who, who live on the other side of these doors. But Monstropolis runs on the power of their screams.

And so what makes Boo with a little 2-year-old kid, an amazing monster is 'cause the way she looks and acts on one level, she's the opposite of monster. Isn't she the target? I mean, she's two. She's got pigtails. She's only got one sock and no shoes. She's dressed in pink. I mean, you know, isn't this the ultimate like monster fodder? But no, I mean, people like run screaming from her because one, they think the mythology, the monsterfication mythology, they think all human children are toxic and they'll die if they touch her. But she herself, you know, she, she enters this world where everybody looks like the monsters for a 2-year-old.

They're all kind of terrifying. And all she sees is all, you know, things of joy and wonder. You know, she calls one of the scariest monsters Kitty 'cause he's just a giant cat to her. And so she, she models a different way of looking at difference and surprising beings. Um, while at the, at the same time, kind of, kind of showing us how, you know, when we monsterfy others, how wrong we might be.

BETH BARANY: I love that. Thank you so much for that fabulous summary and analysis of, of that movie, which is also dearly beloved in our house. Uh and this also comes to this fabulous idea of the ethics of thinking about monsters and how we tell stories about them. You know, are we gonna be like Boo and, and be, amazed?

And another character in Fiction who is amazed by monsters is Dr. Who. At every encounter, Dr. Who is like, hello, I have never seen one like you before. Wow, even though the monster's like, you know, I want to eat you, and Dr. Who is in whatever form they're in, they're like, wow. And, and that brave wonder and, and curiosity toward monsters or, you know, the terror, the vilification, the just blanket assumptions, you know, and, and I'm wondering if there's more nuances here around the ethics, because I feel like humanity is our, and I wanna call it an evolution, one, of learning that difference is interesting and wondrous versus horrifying, and, and it's going to eat us and destroy our, our sense of everything we hold dear.

So I, I really feel like humanity's on that cusp and maybe has been since, you know, the fifteen hundreds when, when our, the westerners were sailing out beyond their boundaries. I say Europeans because there were other cultures that also sailed beyond their boundaries, that, that, you know, the Pacific Islanders also sailed beyond their boundaries. The Chinese did as well, you know, but those aren't the dominant stories these days anyway. 

Yeah, if you could speak to the ethics a bit of how we go about making monsters of others that would be very interesting. 

SUREKHA DAVIES: On the one hand, um, I mean maybe, you know, a lot of people read fiction for fun, you know, then, and not to have, people hectoring them about how not to monsterfy.

So we can start by saying, you know, kinda that books in, in every genre have, you know, the, there's a, the whole consolation of, of moments and in people's lives when they read them and like different thing reasons they may be reading a book at a, at a particular time. That said, you know, whatever we write fiction or nonfiction and put out into the world, it, it's going out at a moment in a context, which people are going to interact with it in that place and time. 

I mean, who knows in fifty years how people will interact, but we don't care about that, not yet anyway. Even if you are writing something that you see as, you know, a, a light beach read, I mean, we all think about our audiences because we want our books to connect with them.

We want people to want to read them to love them, to tell other people about them. So we are thinking about how the books are, are going to land and I guess when it comes to fashioning, kind of heroes and villains and characters and monsters, it's worth kinda remembering that the characteristics we give them, also, you know, to, to, to, you know, to make sure that the, the biases and preconceptions of the present, that we don't simply go and replicate them without thinking. But, there are also, there are also, there's so much potential to, to model, hopeful ways for the future to be, and it doesn't even have to be because you've envisioned a a a a utopian future, like Star Trek.

It can also be more set in the present, like something like Spider-Man. And I think, I'm gonna call him Jerry McGuire, and that is of course not his name, the Spiderman who played against with James Franco. 

BETH BARANY:  All right. 

SUREKHA DAVIES: Toby McGuire. 

BETH BARANY: Toby McGuire. That's right. 

SUREKHA DAVIES: And it was McGuire, wasn't it? I was not completely coming out of, you know, another dimension.

Um, I mean, it's a great job as as Spider-Man. And of course it's, it's a, that wonderful kind of comic book, hyper reality 'cause it's kind of our world, and then you have all these like, extraordinary characters with, with, superpowers I mean. But, you know, Spider-Man is, is the protagonist yet he's, you know, bullied in school in this very, this really mundane, you know, school playground kind of monsterfication, you know, that kind of low level teasing, but it is about alienating someone and creating a kind of threatening environment for them 'cause it is kind of physically harassed as well. It's very low level, but it's, it's something that everybody has kind of seen in their lives.

Um, so there's a possibility with fiction to engender empathy, in different kinds of people. And the more incredible and amazing and great your story, the more that's going to stay with people. And I think the TV series, Gotham, is extraordinary for how it shows you how people became some of the villains that crop up later in, you know, all kinds of movie franchises, so it's sort of a prequel of before Batman was grown up. And as you go through the series, various characters, some of them start out as good guys and the others are bad guys. And then like, things happen to them along the way and it really unsettles that boundary between good and bad, in ways that I think help people think about how not to, how to fix, you know, sectarian violence.

Um, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of, maybe exaggerating, but, 

BETH BARANY: Well, it's about, like you were saying, having empathy and recognizing that the people we might want to label as monsters, well they're people and things and circumstances and choices and, you know.

SUREKHA DAVIES: Yeah. 

BETH BARANY: You watch a lot of cop shows and they're always saying like, you never know who might be violent in a certain situation. They, uh, we don't, we can't predict how we might behave. 

SUREKHA DAVIES: Yeah. Yeah. And, and I guess, I guess the, the, the, the other kind of dimension of the ethics is today it's usually not that each one of us is running around, you know, monsterfying other people, but, you know, there are, but you know, people with power and influence and, and platforms uh, monsterfy entire groups. And so it behooves us to recognize when we, when we notice this happening, uh, when stories are told about how entire groups of people who, and it's always the same, it's always some kind of group that's always been marginalized. Women, people who don't fit, who were not gender conforming, immigrants, you know, a century ago it was Irish immigrants and, and, and Jewish immigrants.

And so that's one of the ways in which these monsterfying stories in the real world of powers because they attach themselves to earlier, you know, prejudices and re reactivate them. So I've seen something that an ethical possibility with, with storytelling is to make people more attuned to seeing that maybe that's also a future of storytelling to more kind of explicitly show monsterfication in action.

And, uh, you know, show that there, you know, people have a choice, and you know, they can notice how, their fears of, you know, legitimate fears of, the financial security might be actually, um, co-opted so that they're not actually paying attention to why they might be financially insecure, which is that incoming inequality is growing and, and, you know, there are far too many billionaires.

BETH BARANY: Yeah. Well, I, I feel like you and I could, could keep going as, as we have in the past when we first met and we talked for hours. 

SUREKHA DAVIES: We have. Yes. Yeah. 

[28:14] Concluding Thoughts and Final Question

BETH BARANY: Yeah. So, um, I wanna ask you one last question that I like to ask people off the cuff, um, before we wrap up, which is when you hear how to write the future, that, that phrase, what does that evoke for you?

SUREKHA DAVIES: It sounds hopeful. It's like, oh, something I can do, the future isn't written in stone, which I love. 

BETH BARANY: Oh, I love that. I love that so much. Well, thank you so much, Surekha for being a guest. Surekha, uh, I really appreciate it. I hope we get a chance to talk again, and I just wanna say to everybody that is listening, write long and prosper.

SUREKHA DAVIES: Thank you so much for having me. 

BETH BARANY: Thank you.