Luckhurst and Alien Abduction Narratives

Roger Luckhurst did say in the beginning of his work Science Fiction, that he'd be discussing Sf in terms of it's origins stemming from our human reaction to technology, and considering that he did state it, I probably shouldn't have been surprised that he included Alien Abduction Narratives in that analysis. I had never considered these stories as narratives to be included in the Sf genre, though, possibly because they're stories that many people believe. They're told that way, celebrated and feared as potential terrifying or wondrous reality, and yet at the same time those stories have been the inspiration for many films, television series' and written fictions.

Even so, I was surprised. And then incredibly intrigued, because Luckhurst doesn't include them in the genre because they involve aliens, or the possible element of fantasy or fiction, but because they reveal another layer of human reaction to technology, and especially because they reveal the inseparable entanglement of technology and our experience and understanding of time.

"Every stage of abduction concerns technology. Where memory stops and the gap begins is marked by the electrical failures of the car, or power surges that scramble TVs, radios, telephones: you reawake to the flashing zeros of your digital clock. The distress of 'missing time' is in fact one predominant motif of contemporaneous discussions of the technologized lifeworlds of the 1990's: technology promises to save time, 'a mastery...through lifting the burden of our existence in linear time.' Missing time as a sign of abduction is a science-fictionalized account of the space-time compression noted by sociologists of postmodernity, and its penetration into intimate spaces - the car, the home, the bedroom -- is frequently discussed in terms of its traumatic effects. Abductees embody the 'implantation' of the machinic into the human world. Literally so: the body is stuffed with tracking devices and microchips by alien masters."

-Roger Luckhurst, 235

 He goes on to say that a major "defining determinant of abduction narrative" are conspiracy theories, and that this is yet another elaboration of a reaction to the rapid changes that modernity brings with it. The trauma and stress of living in a world that changes so quickly  because of near constant technological innovation is translated into the abduction narrative or the abduction conspiracy narrative. He also mentions the link between sexual abuse and 'missing time,' and a few other theories that it might result from if those narratives are to be taken as examples of psychological trauma and not real accounts, which I appreciated, but the link between modernity, technology and the stress of rapid change in relation to the human experience or awareness of time was particularly interesting for me. 

Part of survival involves forgetting certain traumatic events, but we find so many ways of expressing that trauma anyway. The repressed always returns, in some form or another. In this case, it's in the form of an Sf narrative.

I'm still hesitant to discount the possibility that those abductions actually happened. It doesn't seem likely, but who am I to tell anyone what to believe?