Extraterrestrial: Science Fictions in "A Brief History of Time" and "The Incredible Shrinking Man"

Micromégas: Altered Body–Environment Scaling in Literary Fiction

“…Staying in the same environment – the suburban American home – the ineluctable shrinking process of Scott Carey, the main protagonist, allows for many dramatic effects and powerful metaphors. These include, through an astutely constructed narrative (and remarkable special effects for the movie), careful explorations of bodily and perceptual alterations, feelings of estrangement toward a progressively growing spatial environment (the same objects acquire different meanings as the shrinking insidiously proceeds; distances and actions suddenly become insuperable from one page to the other), commentaries on the consumer culture, importance of social status, as well as gender roles of the 1950s, changes in attitude and character of the protagonist (from childish outbursts at the beginning, passing through paranoid and depressive states as he becomes an outcast, to full survival mode in the final sequence, it has frequently been noted that Carey’s character grows mentally and humanely as his physical dwindling proceeds), the need for constantly adapting in an increasingly unpredictable, dangerous, and unfamiliar world, alterations of the experienced passage of time, and of course metaphysical questions about the infinite and the unknown, as well as the inevitability of self-annihilation ( Rosenheim, 1995 ; Sobchack, 1997 ; Hendershot, 1998 ; Berton, 2006 ; Cunnally, 2013 ).…”