Rights Talk in Science Fiction

Christine A. Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, has published Visits to a Small Planet: Rights Talk in Some Science Fiction Film and Television Series from the 1950s to the 1990s. It is forthcoming in the Stetson Law Review. Here is the abstract.

As early as the seventeenth century, authors, particularly satirists, used the travel essay as a means to examine and critique societies, including their own. If an artist’s government discouraged or banned political or social critique, he was necessarily forced to disguise his criticism as fiction - the more fanciful, the better. This practice has carried over to the genre of science fiction (SF).

While authors fictionalize many of the elements in SF to make their stories more exciting and bizarre, some elements have made a transition into popular culture because they resonate with the human popular imagination. As a result, many individuals believe that the elements actually exist. Among them are popular methods of alien transportation, such as the rocket (often pictured as the “rocket to Mars”), the flying saucer, and the alien being interested in making contact with a human, either for benign or (more often) nefarious purposes. The idea that an alien means to visit Earth in order to destroy the planet or to cause us harm is one that quickly becomes a theme in novels, films, and television beginning in the mid-twentieth century, fed by actual political and cultural events.

These ideas resonate with human imaginations or they are embraced by spiritual beliefs. Viewers’ familiarity with real life space travel, which increases plausibility as well as the maintenance of traditional SF memes, allow SF writers to use the genre’s conventions to continue to critique society.

SF authors continually use human beings as the yardstick by which to measure aliens. So, while such films and shows may seem to invite us, through the use of the alien lens, to critique human society, they actually invite us to re-examine human society from a different, albeit a human, perspective. As the genre critiques human society from two perspectives, SF is actually well suited to examine the issue of civil and human rights.

This Article examines the critique of human society’s development and use of such rights within a sampling of SF film and television programs from the 1950s to the 1990s. Part II analyzes the treatment of civil rights within the alien invasion and infiltration narratives of the time period. Part III discusses the transition from the foreign alien-invasion narrative to the domestic alien narrative and its effect on the treatment of civil rights. Part IV explores the civil rights issues represented in the friendly alien-visitor narrative of the 1960s television show My Favorite Martian. Part V examines the civil rights questions the late 1980s and early 1990s television series Alien Nation poses. Part VI analyzes the civil rights issues the 1990s television series 3rd Rock from the Sun raises.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.