They're a hominid and belong to our species but are completely alien and terrify humans at a deep, genetic, evolutionary level. I love the way Watts describes Siri's involuntary reaction to the vampire, as though his fear and awareness of being viewed as little more than a potential meal are baked into his biology.
Similar to a newborn duckling that instinctively hides from shadows of a certain shape even though it has no concept of birds of prey, Siri experiences, when he interacts with the vampire, some similarly ancient, autonomic memory from the time when our ancestors were prey animals. We become little more than flighty, paranoid herd animals, jumping at the merest snap of a twig, like deer, when we find ourselves in the presence of an animal that flips the appropriate switch in our biology.
It's a wild, compelling subversion of so many sci-fi tropes and so much self-congratulatory tree-of-life bullshit and so much of our instinctual belief system regarding the way we fit into the world. It's also a completely novel (as far as I know) approach to undermining the notion of humanity's specialness, highlighting the fact that we're just animals -- and that our betters are, too, just as the invading aliens are, in a very different way.
They're a hominid and belong to our species but are completely alien and terrify humans at a deep, genetic, evolutionary level. I love the way Watts describes Siri's involuntary reaction to the vampire, as though his fear and awareness of being viewed as little more than a potential meal are baked into his biology.
Similar to a newborn duckling that instinctively hides from shadows of a certain shape even though it has no concept of birds of prey, Siri experiences, when he interacts with the vampire, some similarly ancient, autonomic memory from the time when our ancestors were prey animals. We become little more than flighty, paranoid herd animals, jumping at the merest snap of a twig, like deer, when we find ourselves in the presence of an animal that flips the appropriate switch in our biology.
It's a wild, compelling subversion of so many sci-fi tropes and so much self-congratulatory tree-of-life bullshit and so much of our instinctual belief system regarding the way we fit into the world. It's also a completely novel (as far as I know) approach to undermining the notion of humanity's specialness, highlighting the fact that we're just animals -- and that our betters are, too, just as the invading aliens are, in a very different way.