Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

The science fiction genre often features imaginative concepts, advanced technology, space exploration, or extraterrestrial life. Science fiction uses these imaginative attributes as an “allegory to comment on contemporary social and political issues, including anxieties about political oppression and societal control and themes of social inequality, racism, and injustice” (Mintz, Steven. “Where Tomorrow Meets Today.” Inside Higher Ed, 5 June 2024). An allegory is a story that has a hidden moral or political message.

When it comes to novels that feature encounters between human and extraterrestrial species, the author often uses the difference between these two life forms as an allegory for various registers of social “otherness” in the real world. Depending on the historical period and prevailing social ideas of the time the novel was written, these messages about “otherness” can either perpetuate or redress harmful ideas about human social groups. In the early modern period, when Europe began colonizing the Americas, European writers used extraterrestrial encounters in novels to affirm racist beliefs that justified their colonial project. Later, authors like H. G. Wells used extraterrestrial invasion as an allegory for the violence of the British colonial enterprise, while authors such as Octavia Butler use extraterrestrial encounters to signify how human societies use constructions of otherness to hierarchize and dominate people.