The beautifully crafted science fiction short story, Midnight News, by Lisa Goldstein, is not only an endlessly entertaining tale of invasion from outer space, it also offers a sharp criticism of modern American and Western culture. In it, just below the surface of the tale, Goldstein satirizes everything from the power of the media to the ways in which seniors and women are treated, from violence on television to crime and war between nations. Amid the seemingly outrageous circumstance of aliens threatening humankind’s very existence, Goldstein forces us to take a much harder look at that existence—and what we find isn’t always pretty.
The story begins with the arrival of an alien force with massive powers of destruction, whose first order of business is not to go to the president or the military or any other obvious choice for the leaders of our world, but to the media. After apparently observing the human race for a month, they call a meeting, “and only twenty reporters would be allowed on board” (Goldstein 820). Already, we have a potent statement on the condition of our country: the highest status of authority and influence belongs not to the government, but to the press. Whether or not this is a good thing depends entirely on the press itself, of course, but today’s mass media seems obsessed with sensationalism and pop culture—perhaps not always the best “news” for the public interest.
Next in the story, we are introduced to the aliens’ choice for humanity’s savior: eighty-four year old Helena Johnson. Here, too, Goldstein subtly portrays the conditions to which we subject our elders. Helena was found living alone and neglected “in a state-sponsored nursing home” (821) in Arizona, going without treatment for an ulcer on her leg and without diagnosis of her hearing loss. We also learn, from Helena’s stories of her past, about the unsavory situations in which a woman in America is placed throughout her lifetime. She speaks of circumstances still commonly occurring to this day, such as sexual harassment at her workplace and being left by her husband to raise her son alone. She talks of the ingratitude of that son, who “left [her as] soon as he could get a job” (822), and of the difficulties of life “growing up during the Depression” (823).
Perhaps even more telling than her anecdotes, however, is the reaction that she gets to these stories from the male reporters; that of disdain, impatience, scorn, and repulsion. “She’s a horror” (823), one of the reporters says of Helena, and “She’s senile, on top of everything else” (819). As an elderly woman, Helena recognizes that nobody honestly cares about her; she comments that “none of [the reporters] were interested” (827) in her, and that they only listened to her stories in order to placate her, in the hopes of gaining something from it.
And listen they do. The world seems to stop for Helena’s benefit: “newspapers stopped reporting crime and wars—crime and wars had, in fact, nearly disappeared” (821). Goldstein attempts to prove the pointlessness of war and strife among nations by demonstrating that when working together for a common good, the countries of world no longer have the time or energy to spend warring with one another. Crime comes to a standstill in the face of greater and more pressing needs; in this case, that of pleasing the old woman into making the choice they want.
In the end, Helena is influenced by a question that the young female reporter, Gorce, had posed about her feelings on being forced into making the ultimate judgment on the fate of the world, on “the way [the aliens] want to make our decisions for us” (826). She decides not to decide; she has learned from the mistakes of others, and she knows firsthand what it feels like to have someone else make the most important decisions of her life for her. She says, “All my life, people have decided for me . . . but that’s all over with now” (828), and she refuses to provide an answer.
Sadly, despite everything he could have learned from this woman, the male reporter, Stevens, seems to have gleaned nothing from the experience, and he walks away from the entire situation treating his female coworker in exactly the same manner that Helena had been treated all her life, deciding not to go out with Gorce because she was “too bony, and her chin and forehead were too long” (828-829), while completely disregarding her intelligence and personality.
All of this deeper meaning makes Goldstein’s story into so much more than a formulaic sci-fi tale of alien invasion—it makes us actually contemplate our own lives and lifestyles, in our own, current era, and perhaps it even has the power to influence a little change for the better.
Work Cited
Goldstein, Lisa. “Midnight News.” The Norton Book of Science Fiction. Ed. Ursula K.
Leguin. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993. 819-829.
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