Hybridity, Nativism and Transgression

Abstract

The matter of the “hybrid” — the person, the planet, the society — is a common trope in science fiction, so much so that it has become almost a cliché. From Frankenstein’s monster — made from spare human parts — to the alien-hybridized humans in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy to the monstrous hybrid child Dren in the Canadian film Splice (2010), the spectre of the intersection and/or combination of the familiar and the foreign has long haunted the science-fictional imagination. The hybrid is terrifying because it is uncannily both us and not-us, and is wildly hopeful for the same reason: in hybridity lies the potential for humanity to be either subsumed or enhanced, or perhaps both. This dynamic in SF is perhaps best characterized by the “hopeful monster”, a term that encapsulates the simultaneous horror and potential of the hybrid. Used as a scientific term for a mutation with potential benefit, “hopeful monster” is also the title of a story by the Japanese-Canadian writer Hiromi Goto, which tells of a child born with an ambivalent mutation