Introduction to Part I

Summary

A soil sample, taken by a probe on Mars, returns a single dormant cell to an international space station, where an exo-biologist revives the cell, which quickly grows into a multi-cellular organism. The world celebrates the discovery of life beyond Earth, school children win the honor of naming the organism ‘Calvin,’ and the cooperative team of scientists from the US, UK, Russia, and Japan congratulate each other. What follows, however, is the typical space drama: Calvin is intelligent and turns on the scientists, devouring them and growing each time until it stows away with the last surviving members on an escape pod to Earth. Life (2017), directed by Daniel Espinosa, may seem like a random place to begin discussing sport in sf since there is no sport in the film other than a brief reference from Ryan Reynolds's character to playing catcher in Tee Ball as he maneuvers the station's arm to catch the probe. It might seem more appropriate to begin with the representations of sport in novels such as Heinlein's Space Cadet or Starship Troopers, with their seemingly self-evident link to war and nationalism. But this link is precisely the reason to begin elsewhere. Sport is more than competition, winning/losing, and certainly more than a socially constructed, essentialist masculinity fueling perpetual preparation for war. In its amplification of the physicality of the body, sf sport resonates with other representations of body in sf, as well as ongoing discussions in sf studies, in complex and surprising ways.

Immediately, Life places the viewer beyond the gender essentialism that has plagued discussions of both sport and sf. That is not to suggest this film somehow portrays a miraculously un-gendered space. Naming the creature Calvin, for instance, does tend to inscribe it in the discursive system to which constructivists relegate the body as a semiotic node. And yet the crew—importantly led by two women in succession— only ever refer to Calvin with the gender-neutral pronoun ‘it.’ Unlike Heinlein's texts with their ‘space cowboys,’ this film is not so easily organized according to the essentialist hard/masculine or soft/feminine science fictional binary. In the logocentric act of naming, there may well be a sense of the essentialist bodies that a critic such as Attebery discusses: ‘The hardness of hard science is that of the male body—or rather that body socially constructed, as the opposite of female pliancy and permeability’ (47).