What are aliens for?

An Essay on Cinema and the Extraterrestrial Imagination

Francisco Oteiza Lacalle - Editorial Sindéresis, 2025

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The cover points toward the book's central argument: the extraterrestrial as a cultural, symbolic and cinematic image of what each period needs to recognize in itself.

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Synopsis

Allegory allows a story to make abstract conflicts visible. Alien cinema contains one of contemporary culture's sharpest allegorical figures: the extraterrestrial as a mirror of ourselves, a device of distance that lets us say what would otherwise remain unsayable.

This essay follows science-fiction cinema across its early forms and into the twenty-first century, analysing how each period has projected its fears and desires onto the figure of the alien. Nuclear paranoia, Lovecraftian and Gigerian horror, the liberal utopia of Star Trek and the spiritual imagination of Contact and Arrival all point to the same claim: aliens have never been predictions of the future so much as symptoms of the present.

Prologue
Chapter 1 - The other has always been here
Chapter 2 - The first screen aliens (1900-1949)
Chapter 3 - Alien invasion: the Cold War
Chapter 4 - Alien invasion: toward the global spectacle
Chapter 5 - First contact: Kubrick and Tarkovsky
Chapter 6 - First contact: spirituality, blockbusters and benevolent aliens
Chapter 7 - Cosmic horror
Chapter 8 - Galactic diplomacy

Publication details

Author: Francisco Oteiza Lacalle
Publisher: Sindéresis
Year: 2025
Pages: ~300
ISBN: 978-84-10120-86-0

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