This is an excerpt from an essay I wrote on a
Doctor Who forum in a series discussing the Cybermen, that directly compares a 1967 Doctor Who story
The Tomb of the Cybermen with
Prometheus and archaelogical science fiction in general.
I thought I'd post this fragment here just for the fun of it.
...
Tomb of the Cybermen is probably the most influential classic series Cyberman story. Here's a plot you may recognise:
"An archaeological expedition from Earth arrives on a barren, desolate planet. They discover and enter a seemingly abandoned alien base. As they explore they encounter mysteries, strange machines, and people start to die. Some of the expedition have their own sinister agenda involving finding and waking up the owners, who are discovered in hibernation. On being revived, the aliens prove incredibly dangerous and can't be negotiated with, and seek to travel back to earth to conquer, enslave or destroy humanity."
This is, of course, the plot to the 2012 film
Prometheus directed by Sir Ridley Scott and written by John Spaiths and Damon Lindleoff. However, anyone who has seen or read
Tomb of the Cybermen may find hauntingly familiar. Let's do a quick comparison of the two:
1. An archaeological expedition from Earth arrives on a barren, desolate planet. They discover an alien structure ...
2. They explore, finding mysteries, strange symbols and writing, and iconography of the vanished inhabitants.3. They find remnants of the inhabitants ... just empty shells. Without heads.4. Strange and dangerous creatures inhabit the remains. People start to die ...5. The financier of the expedition has an agenda, an ulterior motive for financing the expedition.6. They discover the vanished aliens still alive in hibernation. The financiers revive them against good advice. They are tall, imposing, powerful.7. The hubris of the humans, thinking they can control or make demands. The aliens prove to be incredibly dangerous and powerful; they can't be negotiated with, and seek to travel back to Earth to conquer, enslave or destroy humanity.8. The hubris of the aliens, they are attacked and killed by their own creations. (The Prometheus one is a little gruesome, so I've gone for a shot that obscures the monster a bit).Of course, the pacing and positioning and emphasis of the story beats differ, but like a horse and a zebra you can see there's a common ancestor. Even down to the coda ...
I'm not suggesting the creative team of
Prometheus were ripping off Davis and Pedler (though Scott, who was working at the BBC at the time
The Daleks was in production, may well have seen
Tomb of the Cybermen only a few years later), rather the similarities come from because both works exist in the niche genre of archaeological science fiction.
Prometheus itself is a prequel to
ALIEN, with which it shares some of the same space-archaeology DNA: originally the alien-eggs were stored in a pyramid as part of an alien ritual, with writing and pictograms on the wall, and this concept was bought back for the
ALIENS vs Predator film.
Prometheus, with the benefit of a film budget, post-millennium special effects, and a director considered by many to be among the best of his time, is measurably better than
Tomb of the Cybermen (though it also has its flaws).
ALIEN and
Prometheus were both strongly influenced by H.P Lovecraft's writing, especially the novella
At the Mountain of Madness (1931). H.P. Lovecraft, in turn, was influenced by the Mummy genre, Egyptology being very much in the zeitgeist (the tomb of Tutankhamen was discovered in 1922) and that is also what
Tomb is derived from. The Mummy stories are the common ancestor to all these works, with Egypt being the "alien" civilisation with a rich and complex history and strong icongraphy, and the Mummy the sleeping horror, the powerful, mythic figure disturbed by the scientists.
Archaeology and Science Fiction fundamentally have a great deal in common: though one is focused on understanding the past, and the other is on trying to understand the present by imagining a future. Both are works of deduction. Here's what we know; here's the clues: now extrapolate forward or backward. Whether the plot is a Victorian adventurer exploring a pyramid, or Professor Parry et al. exploring the tomb of the Cybermen, or Elizabeth Shaw exploring an alien installation, the framing is the same: intrusion into a dangerous place of mystery, and trying to reconstruct who, what and why of the context, as well as trying to gain something (usually riches, knowledge or power).
Archaeological science fiction encompasses works like
Rendezvous with Rama,
Rogue Moon,
Revelation Space and
Diamond Dogs,
Roadside Picnic,
Winds of Time,
Across a Billion Years,
Man in the Maze,
Engines of God and
At the Mountains of Madness ...
I'll spare you the rest of the essay
The pictures were the fun thing really.