Science fiction has existed as a genre for well over a century. In that time its familiar tropes have become established, and been transmitted in signals that are capable, however tenuously, of reaching neighbouring stars. An interesting subgenre of the field has asked whether SF itself is a uniquely human construct, and how our fictions might interact with both our views of real aliens and their perceptions of us. In such narratives, a recurring theme is the idea that, based on our broadcast media, the assumptions any alien race might make about appropriate contactees and our readiness for contact could become terribly distorted.

Troubled Stars

Published in 1953, author George O Smith’s novel Troubled Star imagined a scenario in which a group of alien technicians are mapping out a new transport route across the Milky Way. Having found a route, they now need to turn our Sun into a three-day variable star (i.e. one which pulsates) so that it will appear as a blinking beacon to spacecraft moving at interstellar speeds. Investigating Earth, and realising that they will need to move the planet to a different star, the technicians make contact with the individual who appears best known and best qualified to explain to the populous, based on their readings of the mental radiations of humanity. Their choice is actor Dusty Britton, freshly triumphant from a live global broadcast publicity stunt in his screen role as Commander of the (non-existent) Space Patrol. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the authorities - and audiences more generally - are unimpressed when the science fiction actor announces that he has been contacted and Earth is under threat.

Interestingly, humans in this scenario are described as originating on the planet Marandis, with Earth as a long-lost and forgotten offshoot colony. As a result, the Marandanians are human - with human impulses. After a confrontation with a Marandanian over his voluptuous female co-star, Dusty finds himself travelling to Marandis to argue Earth’s case, and is forced to adopt his screen role to assert his credibility.

As we’ll see with other examples, Troubled Star is amusingly self-reflective, referencing a range of science fiction authors (including the work of Smith himself!), audiences, films and radio shows, as well as science populariser Willy Ley (known for his science columns in Galaxy SF magazine) and professional astronomy observatory Mount Palomar.

A similar premise, in which a television personality is mistaken for his character's role as a space hero can be found in a 1995 made-for-television film. The Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer Space (dir. Tash [1]) focusses on a mediocre television melodrama actor Ty Farrell, who is teleported to the distant planet Pangea to help with the efforts of freedom fighters to throw a Ming-the-Merciless-style alien tyrant off their world.

On detecting broadcasts of the 1953 Captain Zoom television show, the Pangeans mistake its star for their long-prophecized promised one. Stuck on Pangea, and finding himself thrown into local politics, Farrell (who routinely uses prompt cards when acting and is lousy at improvisation) is forced to try to live up to his role despite his initial objections, and the resigned frustration of the rebel leader Tyra:

Farrell: “Look, I wish I was everything these people think I am, but I am not a hero. I just play one on television.”
Tyra: “That shouldn’t stop you from trying!”

As in the case of Troubled Star, Farrell finds himself able to lean on his speeches and acting experience to present a convincing facade, finding in the course of doing so that he may actually be the prophesied saviour after all. An interesting aspect of this is that the planet Pangea is described as being 400 light years distant, and there are suggestions that the teleportation might have taken him forward in time as well as across space - such that it is plausible (if unlikely) that the folklore of Captain Zoom had its roots in his own original television performance to begin with.

The idea of actors thrust into their roles unexpectedly was clearly in the air in the mid to late 1990s.

Diplomatic Act is a 1998 novel cowritten by William H Keith, Jr and Peter Jurasik - the actor best known for playing Centauri ambassador Londo Molari in television series Babylon 5 (TV, 1993-1998). In the novel, a middle-aged Hollywood actor called Richard Faraday is abducted by aliens.

From their research site on the Moon, constructed to monitor and protect emergent humanity, the watching Kluj have concluded that Faraday’s television character, Ambassador Harmon, represents an intervention into Earth’s culture by the legendary and long-lost Elder Race. Harmon’s influence is now needed to prevent a war between competing philosophies from disrupting the Galactic social and political organisation Unity. It comes as rather a surprise - both to Faraday’s Kluj hosts and to the disguised Klujan delegated to imitate him during his absence - to learn that the broadcasts from Earth represent fiction rather than reality. Indeed, the whole idea of entertainment fiction is a concept they struggle to understand (a surprisingly common assumption in science fiction). The initially-reluctant Faraday finds himself playing his role in real life.

“If he could pull this off, it could be the acting coup of all time. Quite apart from saving Earth, playing the Galactics’ equivalent of angels or God or whatever would be a tremendous accomplishment.”

Perhaps inevitably the truth about alien interference on Earth proves more complex than expected, but this does not diminish Richard’s achievement as he blends the biblical judgement of Solomon with memorized Shakespearean speeches in the effort to avert war.

While the stories above focus on individual actors, a more oblique but also entertaining take can be found in the Arthur C Clarke short story Security Check (1956, first published in The Evening News). Here it is not the actors that come under alien scrutiny, but rather the props department: a production’s equipment and weaponry is so convincingly similar to genuine alien devices that the aliens in question turn up in order to investigate any cultural contamination.

Of course, the best known example of this subgenre also forms part of the cluster of narratives from the late 1990s.

GalaxyQuest (1999, dir. Parisot) was a blockbuster feature film starring Tim Allen, Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver. The story focuses on the cast of the eponymous and long-since cancelled television show GalaxyQuest, an affectionate parody of 1960s Star Trek. Living out their middle years attending fan conventions and opening supermarkets, the cast are shocked to find themselves abducted by the alien Thermians, who have modelled their culture, society and, crucially, brand new starship NSEA Protector, on the “historical records” they have detected in Earth broadcasts.

Forced to command and pilot the ship against an alien aggressor, Sarris, the lead actor Jason Nesmith (known as Captain Peter Quincy Taggart) and his supporting cast/crew are initially wary and overwhelmed, but slowly develop into their roles. The strength of the plot lies in the way that the crew gradually recover the confidence, optimism, teamwork, excitement and openness to discovery that defined their characters in the long-defunct television show. At the same time, the fans of the original GalaxyQuest find their fascination with its details and efforts to visualise and understand its technology validated spectacularly. By the end of the film, the Thermians are ready to stand alone with their starship Protector, the actors return to Earth, and the television series is revived with a new energy.

Cover Version

The actors-mistaken-for-space-heroes subgenre is undeniably entertaining, but it doesn’t represent the only cases of self-reflexivity in science fiction. The trope of individuals in costume, space or radiation suits being mistaken for aliens by their fellow humans can be found in many SF examples, such as Man in the Moon (film, 1960, dir. Dearden) and Space Tug (novel, 1953, by Murray Leinster). It was sufficiently well established by the mid-1960s to be played with in Thunderbirds (children’s TV, 1965-1966). The episode “The Martian Invasion” opens with an apparent alien incursion... which is rapidly revealed to be a new blockbuster science fiction film shoot.

A more sophisticated strand of such stories deliberately employs the cynicism arising from this clichéd scenario, with human-run science fictional organisations using the concept of science fiction itself for cover. In the television series UFO (TV, 1970), for example, the secret anti-alien organisation SHADO is based under the Harlington-Straker film studios, allowing any accidentally-seen activity or equipment to be explained away as merely another movie production. 

A similar situation can be found in the universe of Stargate SG-1 (TV, 1997-2007). An amnesiac alien stranded on Earth has only hazy and distorted memories of the Stargate Command’s activities. Believing them to arise from his own imagination, he pitches the concept to a television studio, resulting in the creation of a science fiction series “Wormhole X-treme”. While the SG-1 team are horrified by the information leak, the air force have realised that the existence of the SF television series gives them plausible deniability - any genuine leak from this point forward can be dismissed as fan fiction or simple leaks from the Wormhole X-treme studio.
The episode “Wormhole X-treme” (2001) was the 100th episode of the television series and deliberately designed as an affectionate and comical exploration of the series’ own premise. It was nonetheless an interesting example of the familiar premise - and one revisited for the series 200th episode as well (episode “200”, 2006 [2].).

Don't Believe What you See

While aliens might misinterpret science fiction as science fact (as in GalaxyQuest or Diplomatic Act), and humans might use science fiction to disguise science fact (as in UFO), another set of scenarios features the aliens themselves using science fiction as a tool to accomplish their goals. 

The Last Starfighter (film, 1984, dir. Castle) imagined a science fictional video game being used to recruit expert pilots needed to fight on the side of virtue in a genuine space battle. The gameplayers are forced to face the reality of a conflict that they have merely been acting out for entertainment.

Also confronting humans with the reality of a presumed SF scenario is the half-hour radio drama The Parade, written by George Lefferts for the science fiction anthology series Dimension-X (broadcast 1950) and remade for the successor series X-Minus-One (1955). In this story, a mysterious character recruits an advertising executive to put on a pro-Martian parade [3]. Assuming this is intended to promote a new Hollywood film, the advertiser does so, only to gradually realise that the actors he has recruited in order to act out a Martian invasion have been replaced by the real thing. In both cases, the cognitive dissonance, the move from familiar entertainment to sudden and very real peril, forms the core of the character journeys.

The idea of actors (or writers) confused with their characters, and fiction for reality, isn’t a new one. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle complained vociferously about being confused with his most famous creation Sherlock Holmes, and the same premise underlies the role of the crime writer main characters in Castle (TV series, 2009-2016) and Murder She Wrote (TV series, 1984-1996). The mistaken confusion of actor for role is the central premise of the film The Three Amigos (1986, dir. Landis), and screen detectives and medics are notoriously likely to be treated as sharing the competence of their on-screen alter-egos.

The same is true in science fiction, to the frequent frustration of the actors. Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy, for example, famously titled his 1975 autobiography I am not Spock although, as he was at pains to point out, his opinions as expressed in the book itself were favourable towards the character [5]. His updated second autobiography of 1995 gave way to inevitability and was titled I am Spock. In it, the biography was framed by frequent conversations before Nimoy and his most famous character role.

Expecting Someone Different

If this tendency in humans to confuse role with reality is so common, why should we care if it occurs in science fictional contexts? Is there any reason why science fiction writers - or scientists - should pause and reflect on the phenomenon?

One area in which there could be real consequences for the relationship between science and science fiction, and for society more generally, is in the field of representation and inspiration. SF has long been accepted as a largely positive inspirational source when it comes to the general public’s perceptions of science and scientists. It has demonstrably been an influence on the career choices of reasonable fraction of scientists, and is often cited as being a positive influence on public views of science more generally.

This starts early, with small children engaged by stories of space and space travel. Troubled Star looks at the importance of role models directly in response to a complaint from protagonist Dusty Britton to his agent, Martin Gramer:

"Did you ever think how imbecilic it sounds to be Dusty Britton of The Space Patrol, with no space to patrol, wearing a blaster that doesn't blast? And wearing a pack of medals stamped out in the model shop? What does it all add up to?"

Martin Gramer tossed the stump of his cigar at the disposal chute and faced Dusty with a hard expression. "It adds up to a lot, Dusty. It adds up to a damned good living for you. It adds up to—maybe something you're too dumb to understand, but I'll spiel it off anyway—being an ideal. Damn it, man, there's millions of kids in this world that eat, think and dream about the Space Patrol and Dusty Britton. You're an idol as well as an ideal, Dusty. Kids follow a big name man. It's a darned sight better that they follow an ideal rooted in virtue, strength, honesty and chivalry than to have them trying to emulate characters like Shotgun Hal Machin or Joseph Oregon."

The same desire to create aspirational characters to look up to appeared in much of children’s SF, particularly in the mid twentieth century - comic hero Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future, for example, was created by a clergyman with the express intention of providing a virtuous role model fit for the new science- and technology-driven world of 1950.

More generally though, even adults are notoriously likely to believe in on-screen perceptions. As another character says to the actor-playing-science-officer Alexander Dane in GalaxyQuest, “You know, with all that makeup and stuff, I actually thought you were smart for a second!”

This can be a positive influence at times, but also problematic in a number of ways. The massive overrepresentation of mad scientists amongst the scientific community in science fiction has been described as having a potentially negative impact on trust in science, while representations of scientists as incompetent, deceitful or self-interested can have real-world consequences if the same motivations and characteristics are assigned (however unconsciously) to real scientists by the public.

There is an active and extensive research literature on how science fiction interacts with science perceptions. While many members of society can clearly distinguish between fiction and reality, this is not always the case [4]. Several internet conspiracy theories can be traced to science fictional concepts and origins, but have now become so divorced from their sources that any attempt by scientists to argue from the starting point of real facts is dismissed as deception.

In addition to general reflections on scientific competence, the representation of scientist in the media can have impacts in other ways. A commonly-invoked phrase in efforts to maximise the full potential of future scientists from under-represented communities is “if you can’t see it, you can’t be it.” While this is not strictly true in all cases (otherwise pioneers could never exist), it has certainly been demonstrated that an improved diversity in role models leads to wider diversity in student recruitment and amongst early stage researchers. Thus the gifts of talented potential scientists from underrepresented backgrounds are less likely to go to waste.

As a result, the confusion of actors with their roles can be damaging if biases in casting lead to reinforcing negative or misleading stereotypes about scientists themselves.

A perhaps more speculative impact, but one that’s still worth considering in the context of astrobiology and habitability studies, is the impact of science fiction on any potential first contact with aliens. Ever since H. G. Wells published War of the Worlds in 1898, alien invasions have been a staple of science fiction. The reasons for alien aggression, or the idea that they may come in peace was seldom explored (with The Day The Earth Stood Still, film, 1951, being a notable counter-example). In many cases science fiction was used as allegory - aliens standing in for soviets during the Cold War, for example. But already by the era of pulp-SF, narratives drawn from science fiction itself were suggesting that this could lead to paranoia and xenophobia - with disastrous consequences for any actual space-faring aliens who might wish to contact humanity.

An interesting example here can be found in the very short story Publicity Campaign by Arthur C Clarke (first appearing in the Evening News in June 1953). It describes the titular campaign of pre-release advertising for a huge alien invasion blockbuster movie… and the way that a humanity driven to a frenzy of xenophobia react to the subsequent first attempt by a friendly alien civilisation to make first contact. As we’re told,

“While the number of people fainting at each performance was still news, the skies of Earth filled suddenly with long, lean shadows sliding swiftly through the clouds…”.

Understandably, all does not end well. The publication venue of this article, in a mainstream newspaper rather than a science fiction genre periodical, is pleasingly aligned with its warning of unintended consequences for society as a whole.

Clarke returned to the premise (at least in passing) a year later in one of hisWhite Hartbarroom tales,Armament Race(short story, 1954). While the story tells of the woes of a Hollywood special effects designer, one of the characters makes an interesting comment in passing:

“I wonder why we always are menaced by Mars? I suppose that man Wells started it. One day we may have a big interplanetary libel action on our hands - unless we can prove that the Martians have been equally rude about us.”

Litigious Martians are, of course, vanishingly unlikely (as the character would have known well) but the idea that - in the event we are not alone - the other party may be less than impressed by our representations of them, and we might be the worse for our own self-indulgent paranoia is one of the more interesting unintended consequences of science fiction.

Part of the reason films such as GalaxyQuest have been embraced by the science fiction community is because of their affectionate recognition of the complex interdependency between science fiction, the actors who portray it, the audience who consumes it and the love of detail and facination with scientific possibility that drives it forward. Science fiction is an intensely self-reflexive genre. The conventions of science fiction, and its impact on its participants and fans, are widely acknowledged within science fiction texts themselves. Even amongst those who do not consider themselves fans, the themes and visual shorthands of SF are widely recognised.

This can act as a shop window for science and a channel for science communication - or a warning against it. It’s important to recognise that science fiction can have a key role in shaping popular conceptions of science in general and space science in particular - a responsibility of which science fiction itself is well aware.