What is real?

It is a straight forward Monday holiday morning. Not much to do except mountains of school work, so I decide to lie in bed, and watch the good ol’TV. Not much on a Monday morning, so flipping channels becomes the entertainment. I switch past Dr. Phil and more surreal news of the day. I stop on the QVC shopping channel. It fascinates me how excited the hosts get about this stuff. Having ordered from them, I know it is good, but it is just stuff.

Honestly, I am only half paying attention, as it is jewelry and costume jewelry at that. Designed by Nolan Miller, mind you, and it looks like very expensive stuff, but it isn’t. Something stuck me though when the designer who was presenting along with the host made a interesting statement. He said, “It isn’t real, but it looks just like the real thing, and that is what matters.” I am sure there is no way Mr. Miller can realize the power of his statement beyond a great selling point, but all this talk about real and imitation in class are what made me sit up and think.

Several of our stories explore the idea of what is real and what is not. John Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” has an alien who imitates other living beings to near perfection. C.L.Moore’s “No Woman Born” has a real woman literally becoming a cyborg. She feels she is real in fact more real now, while her creators debate it. Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris take what is real and not just in the physical but in memory. Whether it is aliens, or robots or something we cannot even name, the question of real and imitation arises. It is in Campbell’s story that the question of real and fake becomes most important; in fact, life or death. Life or death is something we as humans truly understand. Perhaps it is animal, this will to survive or perhaps it is a stronger will from something. No knowing but it is in extremes we often find answers to greyer areas of life, or at least debate.

In Campbell’s story, scientists in Antarctica discover a frozen alien body. While they debate on whether it is alive or dead after being frozen, it de-thaws and comes to life. They soon discover it can fully imitate any living creature it comes in contact with. It destroys them, absorbs them and then becomes them in everyway except it isn’t them. It can speak, walk, and even has similar reactions except for the one biological test that the men discover.
These men, isolated in an alien landscape, debate its abilities. McReady rises “the idea of the creature imitating one of us as fascinating, but unreal…it doesn’t have a human mind (102).” There comes that word again, unreal. It is nothing like us thus it can’t beat us. Cooper has to say otherwise, saying “it has powers of imitation beyond any conception of man (102).”

Looking at these various words; real, unreal, imitation, fake, one can see a variation of words that could mean several things. When talking about Campbell’s ‘monster’, we are implying it was trying to deceive thus it is forgery, not a just a mere imitation but imitation with purpose. Strangely enough, according to Susan Blackmore, imitation is what sets us apart from the animals. All that we know; memories, stories and feelings, we “have learned by imitation from someone else” which is called a meme (Blackmore). Blackmore expanded on Richard Dawkins’s theory of the “selfish gene” and the “meme.” A meme comes from the word ‘Mimeme’ or ‘memory.’ Dawkins saw these memes, such as religion, entertainment, and language, as “parasites infecting a host, treated them as physically realized living structures, and showed how mutually assisting memes will gang together in groups just as genes do (Blackmore).” If this is true, what was so wrong in what the ‘monster’ did? He was merely a more evolved being, and evolved enough that it didn’t get its imitation in an imprecise manner such as speech but in actual taking over of the other being. It was the top of the food chain and thus should have won really

Looking at it all in a wider scope of popular culture, aren’t we all searching for the real and the fake? There use to be a word in my friends’ language called a poser. Notice the only one letter difference between poser and loser. A clever trick of popular language indeed, but I digress. A poser can be taken literally as one who makes poses, i.e. a mime. It is also a person who associates or attempts to associate with a certain subculture to reach some sort of social standing with in it. One particular friend was very adept, if that is the word for it, at picking out the posers. See, we were punk rock skaters before that was cool as it is today. Actually, I guess we were on the cusp of it being cool. We were the real deal. We had friends in crappy punk bands, and we listened to the real punk rockers. We wore our punk leather pyramid studded belts and our chucks till they fell apart, and thus, made us even more real. This real needs perspective though. If what I would consider a real punk, let’s say Sid Vicious for example, would see us or see us then, we would be posers. Are we just attaching to memes and some win out while some don’t? Or are we trying to become like the ‘monster’, dying to absorb and be exactly like everyone else in order to survive.

Works cited

Blackmore, Dr. Susan . "The Meme Machine." UK Memes Central. March 1999. UK Memes Central. 02 Jul. 2005 .


Campbell, Jr., John W. "Who Goes There?." Science Fiction: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology. Ed. Patricia S. Warrick, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greensberg. New York: Longman, 1988. 102.