The Invasion We Never Saw | The Screwfly Solution

0:00 There are easier ways to destroy a civilization than invading it. That is the central idea behind the screwfly solution. The story is about a global outbreak of violence against women. But the real subject is vulnerability. Biological vulnerability. The possibility that somewhere inside the machinery of human behavior there is a switch that can be tampered with.

0:28 And that changing that one thing could bring down the entire species. I saw an angel too. This morning. It was big and sparkly, like the man said. Like a Christmas tree without the tree. But I knew it was real because the frog stopped croaking. And the two blue jays gave alarm calls. That's important.

0:52 It was really there. I watched it sitting under my rock. It didn't move much. It sort of bent over and picked up something, leaves or twigs I couldn't see. Then it did something with them around its middle, like putting them into an invisible sample pocket. Let me repeat. If you're reading this, there are things here.

1:16 And I think they've done whatever it is to us. Made us kill ourselves off. Why? Well, it's a nice place. If it wasn't for people, how do you get rid of people? Bombs, death rays, all very primitive, leave a big mess, destroy everything, craters, radioactivity, ruin the place. This way, there is no mus, no fuss.

1:37 Just like what we did to the screwfly. Pinpoint the weak link. Wait a bit while we do it for them. Only a few bones around make good fertilizer. The screwfly solution was written by Alice B. Sheldon, the American science fiction writer and psychologist better known under the name James Tiptree Jr. This story first appeared in June 1977 in an issue of analog science fiction.

2:05 At the time, Sheldon's real identity was largely unknown to the science fiction community. The story went on to win the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, and it was nominated for the Hugo Award, becoming one of the best known works of her career. This video is sponsored by Raycon. I've been using Raycon's Everyday Clip Earbuds, and what I really like about them is the open ear design.

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3:57 Thanks to Raycon for sponsoring this video. Alice B. Sheldon had one of the stranger careers in science fiction. As I said, she began publishing under the name James Tiptree Jr. in the late 1960s, and she became one of the major voices associated with the science fiction new wave era, when writers were pushing the genre towards more psychological, experimental, and socially provocative territories.

4:24 Other New Wave authors include Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune, Ursula Kayla Gwynn who wrote The Left Hand of Darkness, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delaney, Harlan Ellison, who wrote I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. New Wave stories, including hers, often included details that dealt with gender and sexuality and alienation, violence, essentially the darker side of human behavior as well.

4:53 And she went on to win multiple Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards. For years almost nobody knew who she actually was, and Sheldon even became close through correspondence with writers like Ursula Kayla Gwynn and Joanna Russ while keeping her real identity hidden. When it was finally revealed in 1976 that James Tiptree Jr.

5:16 was actually Alice Sheldon, it became one of the most famous reveals in science fiction history, especially because some critics had previously insisted that Tiptree's writing was unmistakably masculine. Sheldon also wrote under the female pseudonym Racuna Sheldon, which is the name she originally used for this short story.

5:40 In the story, the violence begins as something people think that they understand. It looks like extremism. Religious movements appear, men begin talking about purification, about God and the idea that women are somehow preventing humanity from reaching its next stage. Governments and scientists try to explain what is happening through categories that are familiar, like mass hysteria and social instability and fanaticism, but the geography is wrong.

6:16 The outbreaks follow patterns in the atmosphere. Something physical is moving around the planet. And that is where the story gets really interesting. The belief system is not causing the violence. The belief system comes afterward. Something changes inside the men first, and then their minds create reasons for what they're doing.

6:42 Religion becomes an explanation, purity becomes another explanation. The ideology is basically a story the brain is telling itself to make an altered instinct feel reasonable internally. What is interesting is how it works. Aggression and sexual behavior in male animals is not completely separate. They're not separate systems.

7:07 They share patterns of pursuit, arousal, grasping, physical stimulation. Normally those systems are regulated. One behavior gives way to another. But the scientists in the story begin wondering what happens if that transition breaks. What if sexual stimulation stops suppressing aggression and starts producing it instead?

7:28 Desire would still exist, but it would discharge itself through attack. And that is essentially what's happening in the story. Attraction has been rewired into violence. The infected men don't necessarily become mindless. Some of them can still think, some of them can still recognize what is happening.

7:47 The character Alan realizes that he has been infected, and he catches himself holding a knife while thinking about killing his wife. And he understands that the feeling is wrong, but he also experiences what the story calls this terrible rightness, this impulse that feels natural, even when the conscious mind knows that it's monstrous.

8:07 And that phrase terrible rightness might be the most important idea that's in the entire story, because human beings tend to imagine that our deepest instincts must somehow represent our authentic selves. We trust our feelings because they feel like they're coming from an internal place. But an instinct does not have to be true to feel true.

8:31 If the machinery producing the feeling is altered, then something completely foreign can arrive in your mind, wearing the emotional texture of certainty. So in the story, the catastrophe spreads because the attack is aimed at reproduction itself. Humanity does not need to be killed one person at a time, it only needs to be pushed below the point where it can continue reproducing.

8:58 The title of the story itself refers to real pest control logic. Instead of destroying every organism individually, you identify a weak point in its reproductive cycle and exploit it. Once enough of the reproductive cycle fails, the population collapses on its own. The story establishes this idea early through Alan's work with insect populations.

9:23 The way this so-called screw fly solution was enacted in the real world was scientists learned that instead of trying to kill every screw worm fly, they could breed huge numbers of them, sterilize them with radiation, and release them back into the wild, and then these sterile flies would mate but produce no offspring, and eventually the population would collapse.

9:47 And this worked so well, in fact, that the screw worm was eradicated from the United States. That eventually leads to the real reveal. Near the end of the story, Anne, Alan's wife is hiding alone while civilization has almost completely collapsed around her. She sees what the religious groups have been calling an angel, this large luminous being standing in the environment.

10:16 It does not preach nor attack. It simply is collecting samples. The animals are affected by it, the frogs stop making noise, the birds react to it. Whatever she's looking at is physically there. Anne understands the violence was not some natural mutation. Someone did this. An outside intelligence found the reproductive weak point in our species and altered it.

10:47 They did not need armies, they did not need to destroy infrastructure, they introduced a change into human behavior, then stepped back. Humanity carried out the extermination for them. This is what makes the Screwfly Solution such an effective cosmic horror story. The aliens barely participate in our destruction.

11:13 They understand humanity so completely that direct conflict would be unnecessary. We are not treated like a rival civilization, we are treated like an infestation. From their perspective, invading Earth with weapons would be crude. Much better to preserve the property and remove the occupants. At the end of the story, Anne thinks about what humans did to the screwfly, find the weak link, interfere with reproduction and wait.

11:43 The aliens have simply done the same thing to us, and there is no hatred involved, maybe no real interest in humanity at all. And that's what makes the ending really land, because her final description is almost funny. She describes it as a real estate agent, but that's the horror of the story. Earth is valuable, but humanity itself is inconvenient.

12:08 And somewhere something looked at our species and found the smallest flaw it needed and quietly began clearing us out. As a side note, there's also an episode from the most recent 2019 reboot of the Twilight Zone called Not All Men, which I think takes heavy inspiration from this story, but it does not do a very good job of sticking the landing.

12:31 So I don't really recommend the recent Twilight Zone in general. Most of the episodes were a miss for me, but I saw this episode years ago, and when I read this short story, I couldn't help but be reminded of it.