Fear of a Melmac Planet

In his Hugo-winning 1998 personal history of science fiction The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Thomas M. Disch wrote “America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend to believe."

This observation rings troublingly true when it comes to immigrants and immigration. Science fiction has a long history of offering tales of lonely, lost aliens who build a new life for themselves on Earth and serve as thinly-veiled metaphors for foreign nationals who arrive at US borders.

Indeed, the lies some Americans tell about immigrants to their country can be seen writ large in their science fiction.

The sitcom Aliens in the Family featured an early
cameo by future star James Van Der Beek, who
ends up eaten by the family pet.
(Image via muppetwiki) 

There have been literally hundreds of published or performed stories about aliens lost on Earth, most of which serve as a parable about immigration in some way. Everything from The Cat From Outer Space, to the sitcom Aliens In The Family offers uncomfortable subtext about those uprooting themselves in search of a better life.

The trope has its origins in the late 1800s, with Thomas Blot’s The Man From Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion, an odd little work that offers anecdotes about the strange customs of a highly advanced civilization. But the alien travellers of early utopian novels were generally used as a didactic tool to tell the reader what the “ideal” human society might look like. Just as importantly, these alien visitors were not planning to stay on Earth, and thus were portrayed as nonthreatening, long-term, to the country’s citizens.

Although not technically an alien, Valentine Michael Smith, the protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1963 Hugo winner Stranger in a Strange Land, was raised in a culture with different norms than those of contemporaneous Americans. Although some of the gender representation in the novel is highly questionable, the depiction of immigration is far more progressive than one might expect. Smith arrives on Earth, is relatively quick to understand local customs, and then offers valuable insights gained from his bi-cultural experiences.

Published just two years later, Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell To Earth also presents a parable about the threat of immigration, but interestingly the warning is about the danger to the immigrant. The novel portrays alien Thomas Jerome Newton as losing his culture, losing his way, and being utterly assimilated into a culture that consumes him. Likewise, Zenna Henderson’s “The People” stories, which feature a group of extra-terrestrial refugees living in an Anabaptist commune in Pennsylvania puts the focus on the difficulties these refugees face in their interactions with their Anglo-Saxon neighbors.

Every sitcom alien has a favourite
weird food. My Favourite Martian
ate gold.
(Image via moriareviews.com)

In more mainstream media, however, there are more troubling works. My Favourite Martian, which ran from 1963-1966, features a stranded extraterrestrial living in Los Angeles. The visitor, named Tim, leans into tropes that would become familiar in such sitcoms; weird foreign food, strange customs, and lack of understanding of normative US cultural practices of the era. Moreover, the series often features the extraterrestrial character only proving his worth through magical powers; leaning into the idea that a newcomer must go above and beyond to justify their presence and prove their harmlessness, or risk erasure.

Since the late 1970s, these stories have taken on a darker tone that aligns with right-wing narratives about migrants.

Depicting a lone alien stuck in Boulder, Colorado, the television series Mork and Mindy was one of the highest-rated comedies of the late 1970s. Featuring the late Robin Williams as the titular alien Mork from the planet Ork, much of the humour was derived from a sense of cultural dislocation. Although the series is gentler in its implicit xenophobia, it still depicts Mork the migrant as having less work ethic than his US counterparts, an inability to work well with authority figures, and difficulty understanding everyday life. It’s worth noting that Mork’s obsession with eggs may have been inspired by increased levels of migration from Mexico and Japan — those being the two countries on Earth whose citizens eat the most eggs per capita.

Another example of this type of narrative is The Brother from Another Planet, John Sayles’ 1984 cult classic about a Black-presenting alien fleeing from his erstwhile enslavers. Although the titular Brother is more of a refugee metaphor than an economic migrant like many of the others discussed here, the alien is presented as bringing value to the American community in which he finds refuge. Portrayed with empathy by Joe Morton, the alien Brother does not speak the language of his adoptive home, but the movie uses fewer problematic tropes than many contemporary works.

In the 1980s, prompted in part by the success of Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, there was a wave of stories about lost aliens on Earth. Given that it was a decade in which right-wing politicians weaponized economic uncertainty, job competition, and cultural change to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment, it is no surprise that many of these narratives display some degree of xenophobia.

(Image via alftv.com)

The television series ALF (an abbreviation of “Alien Life Form”) ran on NBC for four seasons from 1986 to 1990, with an additional television movie airing in 1996. Featuring an alien named Gordon Shumway from a planet named Melmac whose spacecraft crashes in California, the series focuses on the cultural clashes between Shumway and the family he ends up living with. Shumway becomes a safe proxy for otherness, allowing the show to make coded racist jokes without confronting prejudice directly. The alien is often depicted as lacking privacy boundaries, having a weird odour, and not always sharing American values — comedy that echoed the anti-immigrant talking points of xenophobic politicians like Jesse Helms. Notably, the alien’s culinary preference for eating peoples’ pets has a direct analogue in recent right-wing smear campaigns against immigrants in the Midwest United States. Much of the series’ framing normalizes exclusion while softening its impact through sitcom conventions.

It is worth noting however, that ALF does engage with the anxiety that many undocumented migrants face around law enforcement. A running theme within the series is that of a shadowy and malevolent government agency tasked with rounding up aliens and confining them in undisclosed locations under harsh conditions without benefit of due process. This fictional agency may have predated the real-world ICE, but it still resonates today.

As a story about an illegal migrant to the United States, the currently-airing series Resident Alien’s premise is steeped in xenophobia. The alien in question, Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk) is sent to Earth to destroy all human life. Although the protagonist eventually rejects his original mission, this set-up still mirrors the reprehensible claims made by pundits that all or most immigrants hide harmful intentions. This is a propaganda-based narrative that clearly continues to resonate in too many countries. Fans of the show will defend the character of Vanderspeigle, noting that he ends up trying to assimilate to the broader American culture, but the fact that he is the only non-aggressive member of his species brings to mind the old racist trope of calling someone “one of the good ones.” Interestingly, Resident Alien creator Chris Sheridan is himself an immigrant, having been born in the Philippines before moving to the United States as a child.

Much has been made in critical analysis of science fiction of the relationship between the word Robot, derived as it is from the Czech word robota — literally forced labour. But the etymology of the word “Alien” is equally revelatory about the subtext inherent in our science fiction. The word came to English from Latin (by way of French), based on the possessive form of the word alius, literally meaning “other.” It seems fitting, then, that the majority of such stories connote the othering of migrants.

Science fiction does not just echo cultural attitudes toward migration, it helps to construct and normalize them, wrapping suspicion and exclusion in the comforting guise of entertainment. If, as Disch suggests, the genre is uniquely suited to telling the lies Americans prefer to believe, then serious questions should be asked about what the genre suggests about those who come to this planet in search of a better life. We might also question why stories about successful and mutually beneficial migration, celebrating diversity and inclusion, seem less likely to be published and performed.