We Will Destroy Your Planet (26 page)

V
and
Independence Day
share an ethos that dramatic imagery is preferable to practicality or sense. Both invasions begin with gigantic saucers hovering over the cities of the Earth, making for jaw-dropping visuals that certainly impress both the characters and the audience, but which would be rather foolish for an actual invader, who would surely rather keep their plans and presence a secret until they actually attack.

Alien invasions have not always been depicted as necessarily hostile or evil, however, and there is a whole sub-genre of the benevolent invasion, exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke's
Childhood's End
, in which the aliens are seeking to better humanity. Both versions of the film
The Day the Earth Stood Still
threaten this, as the aliens there are concerned about humanity and human effects on the galaxy at large.

Oddly, SF has more recently taken a turn back towards the more paranoid style of alien invasions, but this time with religiously radicalized terrorists with suicide bombs in mind as the threat to be converted into hostile aliens for the purposes of entertainment.

The alien invasion genre has also adapted over time to new forms of media. From books it moved to films. When radio and TV came along, aliens invaded the new formats very quickly. Nowadays the alien invasion genre is hugely popular in video games, second only to military shooters and racing games, at least in the West.

This is perhaps not surprising, as the game that really sparked the video game medium itself was an alien invasion game - the legendary
Space Invaders
.

The other unusual form of alien invasion story that is seen to subvert the usual genre is the fake invasion. This is a story in which an apparent alien invasion is actually intended to unite humanity against a (non-existent) common enemy. The most famous example is probably the giant squid at the end of Alan Moore's graphic novel
Watchmen
, though this element is left out of the movie version.

Moore has been criticized for supposedly taking the idea from the
Architects of Fear
episode of
The Outer Limits
, but in fact this type of faux invasion has a longer history than that. Theodore Sturgeon originated the idea in the short story
Unite and Conquer
in 1948, while Kurt Vonnegut used it as the basis for his full-length novel
The Sirens of Titan
in 1959.

There have actually been several suggestions in real life that this strategy should be tried. In 1983, US President Ronald Reagan suggested in a broadcast that the US and the then Soviet Union would unite against an alien invasion. In 2011, Paul Krugman suggested that building defences against potential alien invasion could spur financial growth in the world's economies. The alien invasion
story
may not just be fiction for long, even if the aliens themselves are.

The best fictional invasions will be valuable research and inspiration for both invaders and defenders, so here is a quick rundown of those that are worth experiencing.

Some memorable or important alien invasion novels, which should be read by anyone with an interest in either attacking or defending the Earth:

WAR OF THE WORLDS
(H. G. Wells): The definitive alien invasion novel from which all others take their lead. Originally published in 1898, the nameless narrator's tale of travelling through an English countryside besieged by Martians still holds up today. The novel is short, but introduces so many of both the familiar elements and ones well thought-out according to the science of the time: the arrival of a technologically and militarily superior adversary, battles in which the cream of Earth's military are outclassed, the bravery and tragedy of the collateral damage, aliens using humans for food, terraforming by means of Martian plant life (the Red Weed) altering the atmosphere… it's all here.

THE PUPPET MASTERS
(Robert Heinlein): A quite exciting little adventure, in which a secret agent discovers that some of the enemy spies and saboteurs he has been hunting are from rather further away than Russia. In fact they are parasitic aliens that control people. This is the granddaddy of all alien parasite stories, of course, and the likes of the writers who created the Goa'uld in
Stargate
owe it quite a debt.

THE BODY SNATCHERS
(Jack Finney): Almost as definitive as Wells's expose of colonialist military invasion, but covering a stealthier attempt to conquer the Earth. As with Wells's book, the story is told by a first person narrator, but this story is more unsettling, perhaps. If you're only familiar with the film versions – official and unofficial – you'll find that the original book has a clearer picture of the ultimate threat to life on Earth, as the invaders cannot reproduce, but only have a five-year lifespan, meaning the Earth would be sterile after that.

CHILDHOOD'S END
(Arthur C. Clarke): This is an example of the benevolent rule of a successful invader, in which the story is told by a person who serves the Overlords, demonic-looking beings who actually invaded the Earth in order to prevent humanity from turning to the Dark Side and conquering the universe. This they achieve by enlightening humanity, at least to start with… As with all of Clarke's work, it is thought out with scientific precision, and contains some interesting reversals and characterization of the effects of an invasion on both human society and the invaders.

FOOTFALL
(Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle): This reinvents the alien invasion for the 1980s, with a doorstop-sized epic in which pachydermic aliens use sensible strategies like research and asteroid bombardment in an attempt to conquer the Earth. Not all of their attempts at research are successful, as proven when they think they can learn about humanity well enough from notorious 1970s blue movie,
Deep Throat
.

As well as having epic action, and terrifyingly believable asteroid strikes,
Footfall
does a good job of depicting the invaders as having an alien mindset, and inability to understand humanity – who to them, are the incomprehensible aliens.

WORLDWAR
(Harry Turtledove): This is a series of military SF pseudo-historicals in which reptilian aliens invade the Earth at the same time as the Second World War breaks out. The series delves into the relative political and moral developments that would have occurred in such a situation, as well as being action-packed.

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS
(John Wyndham) is worth mentioning, as it does cover the events that occur when an alien species – the Triffids, a race of mobile carnivorous plants – begins to spread and multiply on Earth. This species is not extraterrestrial in nature, however (the narrator explicitly states this), but almost certainly an artificial creation from a Soviet lab.

Aliens have been invading our TV sets for years – and these stories have been broadcast into the universe at large, so who knows who may be watching these memorable examples?

QUATERMASS II
(October–November 1955): This six-part BBC serial dealt with the discovery of an invasion of parasites that had already been in progress for some years. Like
The Puppet Masters
it deals with parasitic aliens – with a collective consciousness – who control human minds into building environmental facilities for them. They plan to terraform the Earth later, until the scientists working on a new rocket uncover their plan. This series, like many British alien invasion stories, echoes the Nazi threat from the Second World War, with work camps, black-uniformed guards, and bomb-like objects falling from the skies on peaceful English towns (these objects actually bring the alien parasites).

The story was remade by Hammer films in 1957, but this changes the ending, so that, rather than terraforming the Earth, the aliens have been growing giant blob-like life forms which burst free into the countryside. The serial also inspired (to put it politely) many invasions in the later series
Doctor Who
, in some cases literally shot-for-shot.

Note that there is also an invasion of sorts in the following Quatermass serial,
Quatermass and the Pit
, though this invasion is actually a delayed effect from the original landing five million years earlier, and the ‘invaders' are just the segment of the human population who have the genetic memories of the long-dead aliens (who are, yes, Martians again).

THE MONSTERS ARE DUE ON MAPLE STREET
(
The Twilight Zone
, March 1960): This episode of the legendary anthology series depicts not an outright military alien invasion, but some intelligent preparatory strategy on the part of the aliens, and good observation of human group reactions and psychology. In the episode, the aliens simply let their ship be glimpsed briefly, cut the power to a residential area, and let the residents react as they feel appropriate – which means suspicion, tribalism, and eventually violence. As an example of the divide-and-conquer strategy, it is worth giving thought to.

TO SERVE MAN
(
The Twilight Zone
, 1962): Based on a short story by Damon Knight from 1950, this is a good example of the apparently benevolent alien arrival, which conceals a secret objective to turn humanity into food resources. Much of its original power depends on the twist over the double meaning of the word ‘serve' in the alien documentation, and this twist became sufficiently widespread in pop culture that it would no longer be a surprise today, but it still shows a well thought-out plan of deceptive conquest.

THE ARCHITECTS OF FEAR
(
The Outer Limits
, 1963): This technically isn't an alien invasion, but an example of the fake one created by scientists hoping to scare humanity into making peace during the Cold War.

THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH
(
Doctor Who
, 1964): This is only the second serial to feature the Daleks, and the first of their many attempts to invade the Earth in the past, present, or future. In this story, the Daleks attempt to replace the magnetic core of the Earth with a power unit, which is not a very practical idea. The idea of Daleks invading the Earth, and the sights of them having famous London landmarks all to themselves – the first time very nonhuman aliens had been shown so convincingly in real locations on screen – was so popular with viewers, however, that not only did they try to invade in several other stories, but this story was remade as a cinema film, which tells the same story, with more fun, in about a third of the time.

Though the story begins well into the Daleks' occupation of the planet after a successful invasion, dialogue establishes that they did use sensible strategies for their attack, however crazy their ultimate objective is. We hear that they began with a meteor bombardment to destroy defensive infrastructures, followed by biological warfare to reduce the native population to manageable levels for enslavement.

See also the stories,
The Daleks' Masterplan
(1966),
Evil of the Daleks
(1967),
Day of the Daleks
(1972),
Resurrection of the Daleks
(1984),
Remembrance of the Daleks
(1988),
The Parting of the Ways
(2005),
Doomsday
(2006),
Evolution of the Daleks
(2007), and
The Stolen Earth
(2008). In these later stories, the Daleks have been seen to (among other things) set up a client state to use slaves to strip the Earth of resources, bomb the Earth with nuclear weapons and asteroids, develop mind control, adapt themselves to flying over obstacles, and conduct a mass military invasion on-screen.

THE INVASION
(
Doctor Who
, 1968): The second most popular and familiar hostile aliens in
Doctor Who
are the Cybermen, a race of cyborgs in need of fresh converts. In their own minds, the Cybermen think of themselves as benevolent, removing fear and hatred from humans when they convert them into mostly-robots. (If this sounds awfully like the Borg in
Star Trek
, you'd be right.) In their first story,
The Tenth Planet
, the Cybermen pilot their home planet (which has a power unit – why didn't the Daleks just steal that one?) to Earth in order to drain it of energy, and invade the Earth with a mere 250 spaceships containing half a dozen Cybermen each – far too small a force to achieve the success depicted. In this later story, however, they display far superior strategic thinking, by allying themselves with a multinational corporation which can use their technology to render humanity unconscious, and thus allow the Cybermen to invade unopposed from their position in the lunar L2 position.

In a later story,
Army of Ghosts
(2006), five million Cybermen use a dimensional portal to transition through from a parallel world, displaying the value of using such a home position from which to launch an invasion. This episode also demonstrates the risks of random outside factors causing the invasion to fail, and how an invader may need to ally with their intended victims when a rival and superior invader tries to join in the fun.

THE INVADERS
(1967–68): The last real gasp of the Redsunder-the-beds style of 1950s SF, this series was about an architect who discovered that humanoid aliens were secretly infiltrating the Earth in order to take it over. It's really more a remix of
The Fugitive
than anything else, but the photography, mood, and some of the quirks of the aliens and their distinctive flying saucers are especially memorable still.

The series was an obvious influence on the story arcs running through the later
The X-Files
, and a miniseries remake was made in 1995.

U.F.O
. (1970): This 26-episode British series takes a surprisingly gritty approach and plotline, prefiguring some elements of
The X-Files
as much as
The Invaders
does. In this series, Earth is under constant threat and visits from aliens who abduct humans to harvest their organs, in order to allow their pilots to survive. The aliens are limited in number, with only two to a ship, and so must operate by stealth. Believably, the aliens must wear environment suits at all times, and even have their suits filled with breathable oxygenated liquid to cushion against G-forces and variant pressures in the atmosphere and at sea. (It is also implied at least once that the ‘aliens' seen are in fact converted enslaved humans, and that the genuine aliens may be parasitic or even non-corporeal.) Humanity's defences are a secret organization called SHADO, which is based in a movie studio.