"To Serve Man" Review
Aliens who are not exactly honest
Today’s story is Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man”, published in the November 1950 issue of Galaxy Magazine. The name probably sounds familiar — it was adapted as an episode of the original Twilight Zone, which was spoofed in an episode of The Simpsons featuring Kang and Kodos. Chances are that you have a general idea of what how the story goes. Seemingly benevolent aliens arrive and provide amazing technology to improve food production, stop wars and generally make human life better. Eventually they invite humans to visit their planet. And at the very last minute a character figures out that the book “To Serve Man” is a cookbook. It’s a great plot — if Saki had survived the First World War made it to his 80’s and decided to try his hand at science fiction.
The Twilight Zone episode is pretty faithful to the short story, but one important difference is the appearance of the aliens. The aliens in the Twilight Zone episode look like your typical aliens with superior intelligence. In the story, they resemble pigs who may only be wearing clothes as a concession to human prudery:
The Kanamit were short and very hairy — thick, bristly brown-gray hair all over their abominably plump bodies. Their noses were snoutlike and their eyes small, and they had thick hands of three fingers each. They wore green leather harness and green shorts, but I think the shorts were a concession to our notions of public decency. The garments were quite modishly cut, with slash pockets and half-belts in the back. The Kanamit had a sense of humor, anyhow; their clothes proved it.
Knight’s Kanamit are more relatable than the Kanamit of the Twilight Zone episode. In the story, at least they have some resemblance to Earth mammals. The television aliens look like creepy detached aliens with bizarre powers who keep going on about how we’re one of the few intelligent species that kill each other. And then there is the clothing. For some reason, aliens from advanced civilizations wore a lot of lamé in the ’50’s and ’60’s. I’ve always thought that lamé was a bit tacky, but I was born well after polyester made lamé a cheap fabric; in my mind it is the fabric of Barbie clothes, dresses from the disco era and aliens with giant hairless heads. Aliens of that era also really liked long robes that hung off their bodies like monks robes from the dark ages. I’m not sure how advanced a civilization can be if it hasn’t yet figured out tailoring, but that’s what the willing suspension of disbelief is all about. In contrast, aliens that have somehow made lederhosen fashionable are clearly an advanced species and they appreciate the pockets. That said, if they’re wearing leather, they’re clearly not vegetarians and it’s a good idea to be a bit suspicious of their intentions.
I suspect that the hairy appearance of the Kanamit may be partly due to the age of the story — had it been written a few years later, the Kanamit may have been hairless lovers of lamé. This is one of the reasons I love reading older science fiction: it’s a chance to read science fiction before some of our common tropes became engrained. Those tropes can be fun, but they can also be limiting — one of the reasons I enjoyed John Wyndham’s Stowaway to Mars was that it was written in the mid 1930’s and preceded almost all of the famous fictional robots.
Another sign of the times is that the Kanamit have a device that makes land more fertile by 40-100%. This isn’t all that impressive compared to the increases in agricultural production in the last half of the 20th century. Of course, the aliens are providing this wonderful technology to ensure that humans are plentiful — and later promise more technology to make humans taller and stronger, so they want lean meat. It’s also quite retro that the Kanamit land on Earth and address the United Nations. If aliens landed in 1955 and wanted to talk (as opposed to launching an invasion), they’d want to address the UN. And everyone in the UN would listen. There might be some dissent (probably from the Soviets or Chinese), but in the end, that UN speech would be one of the most important things they did. Today? I’m not so sure. If they did decide to address the UN, it would be a publicity stunt rather than an important step forward in human history. I’m sure that some of the more colorful world leaders would make entertaining speeches, but the UN has clearly become less important as an institution since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Our narrator is an American and it is through his work at the UN he meets Gregori, a cynical Soviet. Gregori is skeptical of the results of a test purporting to show that the Kanamit were simply altruistic. He and the narrator work together on the Kanamit language, and of course it is Gregori who translates enough of the book To Serve Man to determine that it’s a cookbook. It is not surprising that it is the Soviet who is most skeptical. Interestingly, in the Twilight Zone episode, it’s the narrator’s all-American love interest who figures out that it’s a cookbook. I think the Soviet translator figuring it out works better. I was also reading The Noise of Time when I read this story and couldn’t help but conclude that Gregori was probably incapable of believing that this supposed benevolence would end as anything other than a tragedy. This cynicism in the main character would have ruined the surprise ending, so “To Serve Man” uses the same narrative technique as the Sherlock Holmes — the narrator is there to observe the actions of another character who is far more interesting. In the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, Gregorio has the best lines. His assessment of the Kanamit is spot on and exactly the kind of foreshadowing I like to read:
“Tomorrow the doctor and his instruments will be back in Paris. Plenty of things can happen before tomorrow. In the name of sanity, man, how can anybody trust a thing that looks as if it ate the baby?”
l was a little annoyed. I said, "Are you sure you're not more worried about their politics than their appearance?”
Prior to this, I hadn’t read anything by Damon Knight, probably because he was mostly a short story writer and not as famous as Ray Bradbury. If “To Serve Man” is typical of his work, I’ll be reading more of his work. Far too often, science fiction stories with excellent plots are constructed to depend entirely on the plot so that the characters are muppets that exist solely to advance the plot — an unfortunate failing in many of Philip K Dicks’ novels. Knight’s characters are fleshed out. The cracks from the characters tell us a lot about them — Gregori at one point dismisses assurances with “cabbage soup”. The reader has an idea of how the characters would respond to various situations, so while the plot twist was probably a surprise to readers, it wasn’t much of a surprise that Gregori was the one who kept working on the Kanamit language until he could determine that the infamous book was a cookbook. It was a fun read and one that doesn’t require a lot of though to appreciate — this isn’t an elaborate allegory or story of ideas.