For all that we love to mock the marvellous preposterousness of The Quatermass Experiment, the British sci-fi TV series of the 1950s, it exerted a powerful grip on early TV viewers. Does anything today have the impact of its buried spacecraft and deformed hominids? Alien Nation, a new ICA exhibition curated by John Gill, Gilane Tawadros and Jens Hoffmann, explores the cultural myth-making behind aliens. It touches on the past, with posters of old sci-fi classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still, but the heart of it is the work of 12 contemporary artists who all use futuristic imagery to address current reality.

The curators’ big idea is that anxiety over instability in the Middle East, terrorist attacks in the West and the recent influx of migrants to Britain have been transformed by the media into new versions of the sci-fi nightmares of old. We are being invaded by new (illegal) aliens, bombed by dark (Muslim) forces, and contaminated by new (religious) viruses.

Yinka Shonibare presents one of the most pointed and interesting rejoinders to this kind of outlook by literalising the perception of migrants as “aliens”: Dysfunctional Family is an alien wife-and-two-kids, their skin formed from batik, a fabric that was originally imported from Indonesia yet is now seen as typically African.

Henna Nadeem presents collages of an old England transformed into an alien landscape, pictures from Country Life being used as the ground for abstract patterns that make over the familiar in uncertain ways. The artist Marepe presents the litter of this new landscape: computerised meteors that oddly resemble Christmas decorations.

The ensemble of contemporary art and 1950s memorabilia makes this an intriguing show, but it doesn’t quite back up the curators’ argument that Britain is in the grip of a new dread-fear of the alien. Apart from Shonibare’s sculpture, which is somewhat abstract in its references, only Hamad Butt’s film The Triffid joins together fantastic and real fears: its source is the deadly plant on the cover of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel Day of the Triffids, which it moves on to link it to the fear of Aids. Surely, fear of disease is not the same thing as fear of racial contamination? Where, beyond some unsavoury rhetoric in the papers, are these new tales of alien invasion? Interestingly, finding such links was no problem for the critic David Sylvester in the 1950s: as David Alan Mellor says in his excellent essay on British sci-fi in the show’s catalogue, Sylvester compared the imagery in Quatermass to contemporary sculpture by Germaine Richier and painting by Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland.

Popular sci-fi images date back barely a century, and never really had much influence on modern art. The concept of monsters, however, dates back millennia, at the very least to Ovid’s tales of mythological transformation, Metamorphoses. Here, the fusion and transformation that the gods and men undergo often encapsulate a morality tale.

Later, though, in early modern Europe, monsters became ways of conceptualising the limits of possibility and thought. Images of humans with deformed ears, for instance, carry ideas we can all understand about different kinds of sensitivities. Consequently, perhaps, they are common in many cultures. The medieval mind did not consider being malformed in this manner to be necessarily evil: monsters merely pointed to the limits of Man’s understanding of Nature, indeed, they were often considered avatars of the Almighty, who, in this line of thought, was the ultimate monster, a creator beyond the tiny imaginings of his creations.

The arrival of the Renaissance in some way marked a return to an earlier, pagan fear of monsters as omens of evil. Monsters were demoted from the status of sacred to that of exceptional other, and hence, centuries later, became intriguing to the Romantics. Yet as Tate Britain’s recent show, Gothic Nightmares, demonstrated, those monsters were as much psychic as supernatural.

The aliens of science fiction are not categorically different from the monsters of old; they are simply deformations in a technological world. Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill, from 1913-14, is not a bugbear, a nightmare glimpsed in a flash, but a considered foreboding of the mechanisation of man.

The messages contained in such art is, perhaps, as valuable or as repugnant as the artists who create them. Quatermass, for instance, often seemed to have an unhealthy preoccupation with blackness, a barely veiled commentary on racial change in Britain. In one scene in Quatermass II, the Professor stands outside a pub and watches the sky fill with dark asteroids. “They’re coming in their thousands,” he says, “this is it.”

That may appear a reactionary attitude, yet as Mellor argues in his essay, one of the central figures in Quatermass and the Pit is the Jewish scientist Matthew Ronay, whose triumph is to resist the fascist racism of the Martians. Quatermass did reflect pessimism about the end-of-Britain-as-we-know-it, yet that was also tempered by good sense. One might see Alien Nation as the symptom of a different kind of pessimism about the rise of an intolerant Britain. And one could also argue that such pessimism is not warranted.

Alien Nation, the ICA, London SW1, (www.ica.org.uk 020-7930 3647) Friday to Jan 14.