We Will Destroy Your Planet (25 page)

Invasion from above also made its debut here, in the form of engravings, with suitable scaremongering captions and headlines, of fleets of French hot-air balloons floating over the English Channel. The very channel, in fact, whose narrowness made a simple winner-takes-all invasion a focus for centuries.

Almost as soon as the genre had begun, however, the more fanciful invasion-from-the-air and giant-mothership sorts of propaganda were put out of business by Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, which everyone could see pretty much negated the chances of there being any such invasion. (The post-revolutionary French government having executed most of its naval officers on the grounds that anybody and everybody could do the job of an experienced and trained commander equally, didn't do them any favours either.)

At the same time, there was literature that we'd call science fiction, dealing with what the world would be like in the future.
Les Posthumes
, for example, in 1802,
Le Dernier Homme
in 1805, Voss's
Ini: ein Roman aus dem ein und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert
in 1810; and of course Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
in 1818, one of the first true science fiction novels.

As a side note, 1836 brought the first alternate history/parallel world story covering invasion and conquest: Louis Geoffroy's
Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812—1832): Histoire de la Monarchie universelle.
This tells of Bonaparte being victorious in Russia, conquering Britain, Asia and the Americas, until the whole world accepts him as their Universal Monarch.

Such tales were not particularly popular or memorable, and the potential genre sank without much of a trace, while Gothic literature swept across the pages of English-language printers and bookshelves, and held sway for decades. Eighty years later, however, things changed.

In 1870, Prussia (part of Germany) took on France, who in the Napoleonic era had itself occupied the various German kingdoms in a hostile fashion. The Prussians armed themselves with far more modern technology than the French forces had. The Prussians had equipped themselves with a more modern army, lower-visibility uniforms, rifled barrels in all their weapons, breech-loading artillery that was much faster to reload, armoured ships and carriages, troop trains, and telegraphs for communication. The Prussians made swift victories with their superior training and technology, and Britain, in particular, took note that the face of warfare had just changed. Papers, magazines and books all raced to say their piece about the new warfare, but the one that grabbed popular public attention was a fictional story, a pamphlet called
The Battle of Dorking
.

Written for political reasons by George Chesney, the story tells in flashback of a successful invasion of England at Dorking by an unnamed (but obviously German) foreign power. The viewpoint character is constantly pursued by technologically superior invaders, while his own side are badly equipped and untrained by comparison. Chesney, though an experienced military officer himself, had actually borrowed much of his writing style and plot structure from two historical novels about the Napoleonic wars,
The Conscript
(1864) and its sequel,
Waterloo
(1865), by Erckmann-Chatrian, and it's a format and tone that would work very well – and very recognizably – for H. G. Wells some 28 years later.

The Battle of Dorking
was a huge hit, and was immediately followed not just by a genre of invasion-by-technologicaland-military-superiority but various unofficial sequels and ripostes, copyright be damned.

Also in 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton published another now legendary invasion story,
The Coming Race
, which dealt with the first sort-of alien invasion. In this story, the alien invaders, the Deros, are not from outer space, but from a subterranean realm under the Earth's own surface. Strangely, though largely forgotten as an early science fiction novel, the story sparked a rather odd conspiracy theory that flourished between the 1890s and the 1960s, in which many people believed that the Deros, or at least some sort of underground race, actually existed, and that the Earth was hollow.

Most of these tales were, however, simply about other nations invading, and the atrocities they could be expected to commit. In 1898, H. G. Wells changed all that forever and invented a whole new genre.

Wells took the tone of
The Battle of Dorking
, the Gothic futurism of some of those other European novels, and a subversive attitude towards colonialism (brave at the time, when the British Empire was the largest empire the Earth has ever seen), and blended them with science, to produce the now legendary
War of the Worlds
.

In Wells's book, aliens from the planet Mars invade the Earth, treating the natives like cattle and trying to rebuild the planet in the image of their own – decades before words like terraforming had been coined. Wells had in mind to refer to the way the colonial powers of the 19th century had treated India and Africa, but what he ended up doing was pretty much inventing one of the 20th and (so far) 21st centuries' most popular forms of entertainment. Interestingly, Wells didn't realise this himself at the time. He didn't consider himself a science fiction writer, not least because the phrase ‘science fiction' itself wasn't coined for another 20 years or so. In fact, Wells later wrote several other more straightforward invasion stories, which veered towards the futurist, warning of military technology and applications to come.

Actually, the first true alien invasion story as we know the term is not the more famous
War of the Worlds
, but
The Germ Growers
, by Robert Potter, which was published in Australia in 1892. Potter has his aliens masquerade as human and set up a biowarfare programme, intending to develop a virus which will wipe out humanity, leaving the planet free to be taken over by their species. Which, to be fair, is the plot of a fair number of
Doctor Who
episodes, especially those written by Terry Nation.

The next stage of the alien invasion genre came from the US. This is perhaps unsurprising, as the popularity of Wells's novel had led a number of American newspaper publishers to commission their own sequels to
War of the Worlds
, which brought the invasion to America, and took the fight back to Mars. In the first years of the 20th century, rip-offs abounded, though these became less popular during the years of the First World War.

In the 1920s and '30s, however, science fiction, inspired by so much post-war technological development, boomed. With it, so did the alien invasion. The futurism of science exploration blended with the vicarious thrills of the pulp era to produce franchises such as Tarzan (who also fought creatures from a hollow Earth), Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers. Killer Kane and Ming the Merciless embarked on their campaigns to crush the forces of Earth. In print, strange aliens from far corners of the galaxy set their sights on Earth in the works of E. E. ‘Doc' Smith and others.

To be fair, most of these villains were, like the invaders of the earlier European invasion literature, thinly disguised racist stereotypes, usually of the Asiatic variety. This isn't surprising, as invasion stories have always been about fear of the incomer who isn't part of the local group.

War of the Worlds
again changed that, this time in the form of a radio drama produced by Orson Welles. This 1938 Halloween broadcast is the alien invasion story to which all others still aspire, having caused a number of listeners to believe that three-legged Martian war machines really were trashing New Jersey.

Rather than disappearing during the Second World War, as invasion literature had done during the First World War, the alien invasion story simply took more overt sides, with alien invaders in the pulps and comics siding with the Axis forces in stories, which merely served to give the heroes all the more reason to fight against the villains.

Thanks to both Wells and the pulps and comics, the alien invasion had become a staple of written SF by the 1930s. The sub-genre would become more accessible to a wider audience, however, on screen.

It didn't take long for Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers to become Saturday morning serial films, bringing their alien invaders to cinemas everywhere, but what sparked the next shift in the genre was the Cold War and the rise of the UFO report. The year 1947 was a good one for UFOs, with the first reported sighting of so-called (by a reporter, not by the witness) flying saucers, and the original Roswell incident. Over the next few years, flying saucers from space were big news, hitting front pages in the US on a regular basis, and making massed flypasts over Washington DC in 1952. Couple that with the Cold War paranoia about Communism, and the fear of the devastation caused by the all-new nuclear technology, and what do you get?

You got a golden age of alien invasion movies, in which Communists of some form or another (either politically, just being from the Red planet or being generally faceless) came to the USA and caused havoc.
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Invaders from Mars,
the George Pal movie version of
War of the Worlds
,
The Thing from Another World
, and many more such movies graced the screens.

The genre also mutated somewhat, with the related alien infiltration genre coming to prominence in both literature and film. The likes of Jack Finney's 1954 novel
The Bodysnatchers
, filmed several times and better known as
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
, and Robert Heinlein's
The Puppet Masters
(1951) ushered in the popular theme of alien conquest by infiltration rather than overt warfare. Because these books and movies came to prominence at the time of the Cold War, during the height of the McCarthy Hearings and the paranoia that anyone could secretly be a Communist spy for the Soviets, this whole side of the genre has become viewed as an allegory for that fear.

It's certainly true in some cases –
The Puppet Masters
repeatedly compares the invading parasites directly to Russia and Communism – but this is an interpretation attributed more by critics and audiences than by the creators. For example, the 1956 film version of
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
is often held to be the definitive Reds-under-the-beds paranoia allegory, but writer Jack Finney, producer Walter Mirisch, director Don Siegel, and star Kevin McCarthy all maintained that no such thing was intended.

In the UK, alien invaders were almost as popular, but less open to interpretation as being based on fear of Communism as they were clearly highlighting the wounds of the recent war and the loss of Empire. Where America feared the soulless commune from outer space, Britain was wary of the dangers of German-inspired rocket technology in the Quatermass serials, and of the resurgence of Nazism in the form of the Daleks.

The other big difference between alien invasions on American and British screens is that American media tended to put alien invasion stories on the cinema screen – or at least at the drive-in theatre – while British invaders were far more likely to threaten the heroes of TV shows than films. Partly this may be because American SF series tended to be more about the pioneer spirit, going out and exploring, while their movies were more about bringing thrills to an audience. It also probably relates to the fact that British cinema simply never was as big on SF movies, while TV, needing more hours of programming to fill, could be more imaginative.

Oddly, while the ‘other' or alien that Hollywood feared in the 1950s was supposedly in the form of Communism, the Eastern Bloc made its own SF movies, which were far less driven by fear. This means they tended not to be invasion stories in the typical sense, but were usually about human explorers going to other planets (Venus was a common destination) and there meeting utopian alien civilizations who either already were communist themselves or were happy to learn about it.

This probably has less to do with the values of the political system itself, or even the state-mandated propaganda side of things, and more to do with the effects of having gone through a lot of very bloody recent history, up to and including the Nazi invasion of the Second World War.

In fact, it's worth noting that the country that really took the alien invasion genre to heart and made it a major part of the entertainment media was the one big player in the Second World War that was never threatened with invasion, let alone actually invaded.

Britain had been under threat of invasion for the first three years or so of the war, and its alien invasion stories tended to either reflect the recent fascist threat, or be more subtle types of invasion of the land of the living that had evolved from ghost stories and demonology. Japan had been occupied by the US, and its fictional alien invaders tended to be technologically superior powers who stayed remote and used monsters of mass destruction that reflected both the nuclear bomb and the constant threat of earthquakes and tsunami.

Throughout all these different periods and fashions of storytelling, H. G. Wells's
War of the Worlds
has still remained the touchstone for the alien invasion story. It has been reinvented for every generation. A Hollywood movie with Oscar-winning visual effects in the 1950s, which relocated the story to contemporary America (as had Orson Welles's radio version), was followed by a jingoistic sequel TV series in the late 1980s. A Steven Spielberg remake a few years ago tried to make it more a tale of obstacles keeping a shattered family apart. Whether it is Jeff Wayne's unofficial, haunting musical version, or a big screen adaptation,
War of the Worlds
still casts its long shadow.
Mars Attacks
, which started as a trading card series in the 1950s, before becoming a comic book series and movie in the 90s, and still going strong in card and comic format today, is a black-humoured pastiche. The Martians may come in flying saucers rather than cylinders, but they have their heat-rays all present and correct. The blockbuster
Independence Day
even managed to update the virus idea, by using a computer virus uploaded from a laptop to knock out the systems in the alien mothership, leading to the defeat of their invasion.