The True Meaning of Smekday

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.

The earliest written literature about an extraterrestrial encounter is Syrian author Lucian of Samosota’s True History, written in 2 CE. However, after Europeans began exploring the Americas, the author used extraterrestrial encounters in literature as social commentary justifying colonization and the empirical racism of the early modern period, which hierarchized human groups as superior and inferior. In John Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave (1611), he imagines Lucifer and a Jesuit priest setting up a “race of the starre Lucifer” on the Moon, which he explicitly parallels to what “[Lucifer] offered to do out of the Indies” (Donne, John. “Ignatius His Conclaue.” Early English Books Online, 1611, pp. 19, 129). European travel writers who documented their encounters with Indigenous people often claimed that Lucifer organized and instated Indigenous religions.

Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638) imagines extraterrestrial Lunerians that use “uncouth” musical languages whose descriptions share many similarities with how travel writers described the language of Indigenous Americans. Subsequent writers like Cyrano de Bergerac were inspired by Godwin: de Bergerac’s The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657) imagines his protagonist meeting Lunerians and Godwin’s protagonist on the moon, where Godwin’s protagonist has dwelt so long that he has “degraded to the status of a pet monkey” (Godwin, Francis. The Man in the Moone, edited by William Poole. Broadview Press, 2009, p. 51). This reflects the common European anxiety that the climate and food of the Americas would degrade the humoral integrity and “superiority” of the European colonial body.

The author commonly considered to be the father of modern science fiction, H. G. Wells, used his writing to address and critique what he saw as injustice in his society. Wells explicitly states in his preamble to The War of the Worlds (1897) that the novel uses an extraterrestrial invasion as a parallel to depict the genocide of the Aboriginal Tasmanian people by the British Empire during the Black War in the early 19th century. In The War of the Worlds, the Martians—a parallel to the British Empire—use their heightened technology to wipe out humans en masse, and human technology is helpless to fight back. In The War of the Worlds, the Martians die because they are harmed by Earth’s bacteria; the Gorg’s reaction to cats and subsequent retreat is likely an homage to this.

Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn (1987) uses extraterrestrial encounters to critique how human social groups use shallow perceptions of difference as markers of innate superiority or inferiority to hierarchize people and power. The works of earlier writers like Donne, Godwin, and de Bergerac engage in the types of projects Butler critiques, using religious or linguistic differences to extraterrestrial species to hierarchize living entities in ways that mirror and attempt to justify contemporary colonial events.

Wells and Butler represent only two of many ways authors use modern extraterrestrial encounters as an allegory in science fiction literature. The True Meaning of Smekday works within the legacies of both Wells and Butler, with Boov and Gorg introducing The Impact of Colonization from a Child’s Perspective. The friendship and understanding forged between Tip and J.Lo, despite Tip’s initial negative reaction, speaks to the theme of The Nature of Cross-Cultural Understanding.