Alien invasion

From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)

The alien invasion is a common theme in science fiction stories and film, in which a technologically-superior extraterrestrial society invades Earth with the intent to replace human life, or to enslave it under a colonial system, or in some cases, to use humans as food.

The invasion scenario has been used as an allegory for a protest against military hegemony and the societal ills of the time. Wells' The War of the Worlds is often viewed as an indictment of European colonialism and its "gunboat diplomacy" —setting a common theme for future alien invasion stories, that force audiences in modern societies (U.S., UK) to empathise with the conquered rather than the conqueror.

Prospects of invasion tended to vary with the state of current affairs, and current perceptions of threat. Alien invasion was a common metaphor in science fiction during the Cold War, illustrating the fears of foreign (i.e. Communist) occupation and nuclear devastation of the American people. Examples of these stories include "The Liberation of Earth" by William Tenn and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

It is to be noted that in fiction the aliens tend to observe (sometimes using experiments) or invade (Plan 9 from Outer Space, and the Daleks and others in the long-running series Doctor Who) rather than help the population of Earth acquire the capacity to participate in interplanetary affairs with a few exceptions, such as the original encounter involving Vulcans in Star Trek.

1 Variations
2 Notable examples
3 See also
4 External link

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Variations

The most well-known alien invasion scenarios involve the aliens landing on Earth, destroying or abducting people, fighting and defeating Earth's military forces, and then destroying Earth's major cities. Usually the bulk of the story follows the battles between the invaders and Earth's armies, as in The War of the Worlds. However, not all alien invasion stories follow this plot. In some accounts, the alien invaders will covertly subvert human society using disguises, shapechanging, or human allies. In other depictions, the aliens score an overwhelming victory over humanity and the bulk of the story occurs after the aliens have taken over. Sometimes, the aliens do not come from space, but from another dimension. And in some fiction, the invaders may not actually be aliens, but demonic creatures.

Alien infiltration has been a familiar variation on the alien invasion theme. In the infiltration scenario, the invaders will typically take human form and can move freely throughout human society, even to the point of taking control of command positions. This type of invasion usually emphasizes paranoid fears and was very common during the Cold War, with the Communist agents suspected everywhere, but has also become common in during any time of social change and unrest. The classic examples of this would be Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters and the John W. Campbell, Jr. short story, Who Goes There?, which was made into the 1951 Howard Hawks film The Thing from Another World, with a more faithful adaption being made by John Carpenter in 1982 as The Thing.

Alien occupation can occur in many invasion stories. In short, the alien invaders win and occupy Earth or human civilization, at least until a human resistance overthrows the aliens and/or their puppet governments. Many occupation stories are influenced by the real human invasions by totalitarian governments, such as Nazi Germany, in which the alien invaders support existing human government infrastructures that welcome their new alien overlords or purge opposition governments and rebuild them in their own image and the enforcement of their rule through the use of collaborators and secret police. Examples of life under alien occupation can be seen in the TV series V and John Christopher's book series, The Tripods.

Alien raids are short-term alien invasions. The aliens are incapable of supporting a large-scale invasion due to small numbers and instead use the shock of their arrival to inspire terror. Other stories following this line of reasoning would have the alien invaders conducting reconnaissance and probing raids on the Earth's population and especially their military forces. Also, the invaders will try to choose isolated spots, such as the desert or farmlands of rural America, as a staging area or landing zone. This type of plotline provides a better possibility of small groups, like local police and military, or even ordinary civilians, the ability to repulse the invaders and return to normal life after the event. Because of budget constraints, this variation was fairly common in the 1950s science fiction B-movies, such as It Came from Outer Space, Teenagers From Outer Space, and Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space. A more modern take on this variation would M. Night Shyamalan's 2002 film Signs.

The theme of beneficial alien invasion has also been explored in fiction. With this type of story, the invaders, in a kind of little green man's burden, colonize the planet in an effort to spread their culture and "civilize" the indigenous "barbaric" inhabitants. This theme shares many traits with hostile occupation fiction, but the invaders tend to view the occupied peoples as students or equals rather than subjects and slaves. In other fiction, the aliens intervene in human affairs to prevent them from destroying themselves, such as Klaatu and Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still warning the leaders of Earth to abandon their warlike ways and join other space-faring civilizations else that they will destroy themselves or be destroyed by their interstellar union. Other examples of a beneficial alien invasion are Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, the anime and novel series Crest of the Stars and David Brin's Uplift series of books.

Another conception of the alien invasion theme is a demonic alien invasion, in which the invaders are Biblical or religious-inspired demonic beings, who infiltrate the Earth, attack mankind, take over human society (disguised as humans themselves) and make war upon the saints, fulfilling the events described in the Book of Revelation or another religious prophecy, occasionally invented for the story itself. The Doom computer game series and the hentai anime series Legend of the Overfiend both follow this concept. The novel Childhood's End may be viewed as a form of demonic alien invasion, because of the Overlords' devilish appearances.

Occasionally, two or more themes can be used as a combination. For example, the aliens may first infiltrate society secretly, then, after gaining human trust, they will suddenly begin destroying Earth's cities, with the humans taken by complete surprise. Another example of this is in two episodes of the popular sci-fi show Stargate SG-1 an alien race known as the Aschen befriend humans and share their advanced technology and medicine freely in exchange for stargate addresses. But it soon becomes clear that the Aschen, who actually look remarkably like humans, plan to eradicate the human race slowly by making both women and men infertile so the human race dies out over generations.

An additional angle is provided by the concept of Alien invasion in the past, with a period of the recent or distant past serving as the secene of an alien invasion of one of the aforementioned types. The most ambitious project of this kind seems to be Harry Turtledove's alternative history Worldwar & Colonization Series , where lizard-like aliens land on Earth in 1942, bent on conquest, forcing the opposing sides of the Second World War to unite against them. In Sideslip by Ted White and Dave Van Arnam, a private detective from our New York finds himself in an alternate reality where Earth is under occupation by interstellar humanoids nicknamed "Angels", who had landed in 1938, taking advantage of the confusion following Orson Wells' War of the Worlds radio program, and had ruled Earth as a colony ever since. In Starspawn by Kenneth Von Gunden, Earth is infiltrated by small parsasitic aliens capable of attaching themselves to a human and controlling him or her - similar to the scenario of Heinlein's aforementioned The Puppet Masters - except that the invasion takes place in Medieval England, against the background of knights besieging a castle. In similar settings at Poul Anderson's High Crusade, an alien ship lands at a Medieval English village, but the overconfident would-be conquerors find the hard way that they are not immune to swords and arrows; the humans take over the ship and proceed to carve out an emprire among the stars, but lose contact with Earth which goes on with its familiar history.

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Notable examples

The classic treatment was The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Other treatments have posited biological invasions (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), or cultural invasion (The Uplift Wars by David Brin).

The 1988 cult film They Live uses its own alien infiltration backstory as a satire on what some perceived as Ronald Reagan's America and the 1980s as an era of conspicuous consumption, in which the hidden aliens and human members of the elite oppress poverty-stricken humans and a shrinking middle class.

John Kessel makes use of the metaphor of alien invasion in his short story Invaders, by contrasting "the Krel's" (a fictional alien race) invasion of Earth with Francisco Pizarro's conquest of Peru, as if to illustrate the horror of the real event.

Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
V - Drama about reptile aliens disguised as humans.
Doctor Who
John Wyndham made an effort to depict alien invasions in ways not thought of before him. In The Kraken Wakes, (published in a rather different version as Out of the Deeps) creatures from a high-density planet land in Earth's oceans and colonise the sea bottoms. Since the only environment useful to them is one where humans can't live, there is no real reason for conflict - but they do destroy a deep-sea exploration vessel, the humans react drastically with exploding an h-Bomb on the sea bottom, and from then on it is war to the death with the two sides finding various destructive ways to get at each other. Until the end of the books, the deep-sea invaders are not seen and humans have no idea what they look like.
In The Midwich Cuckoos Wyndham describes an alien ship landing at an English village, putting all its inhabitants to sleep and impreganting all the women. The children born of that visit have strong telepathic abilties and on growing up act like dangerous invaders, though in law they are nothing but a group of English kids. Here, too, the identity of the aliens who planted them remains unknown until the end of the book.
The Day the Earth Stood Still - alien invasion movie (1951), in which the alien being (played by Michael Rennie) and his robot/android demonstrate their superior technology and fire-power by neutralizing all of mankind's electronic machines (i.e. cars, trucks, planes, trains, etc.). The theme of the movie is pacifism/anti-war/one-world government: The alien shows a superior technology and the governements of the world over-react and kill the alien as a perceived threat when his intention was to help the human race.
Half-Life 2 illustrates the effects of a prolonged occupation of Earth by an alien empire known as "The Combine", an alien civilization in its post-Singularity age. After humans accidentally open a portal to another dimension, Earth is invaded by alien soldiers and wildlife. Earth's military forces are defeated in the Seven Hour War, allowing the Combine to take over the planet. Humanity is eugenically culled via reproduction suppression and the brutality of the Combine's human allies. The Combine's motives are unclear, but humans are seen being honed into another weapon fit for the Combine's arsenal.
Alien Siege sees aliens demanding the lives of millions of people in return for vast amounts of knowledge and technology.
Halo: Combat Evolved and The Fall of Reach depict an Empire comprised of a union of Alien species known as The Covenant who invade Earth's expanding empire and deplete it to a mere dozen worlds. They claim that "The Gods have demanded your destruction, and we are their instrument!"
Independence Day, instead of the typical large fleet of UFOs, aliens used large destroyers to cover an entire city and sychronize with each other worldwide by using artificial satellites so they could strike at the same time. Also very importantly, they used one giant heat ray to disintegrate the building it was hovering over, producing a large wall of fire that destroyed anything it touched in a circular pattern.
The X-COM series depicts a series of massive alien invasion attempts on Earth, first by the hostile Sectoids, then later by bizarre creatures from another reality. The tone of each of the games is dark and tense with occasional moments of levity to break up the relentless fear. Enemy Unknown is the first in the series. Aliens known as Sectoids launch covert strikes against Earth-based targets from their base in the Cydonia region of Mars. X-COM is formed to research and defeat the alien threat, finally achieving its objective by reverse-engineering alien technology and destroying the Martian base. In the sequel Terror From the Deep, an ancient Sectoid ship which has crash-landed beneath the ocean begins to awaken, reviving legions of Sectoids adapted to live underwater. The last true sequel is Apocalypse, which takes place many years after the Sectoid threat has been neutralised. In Apocalypse, the aliens are from another dimension rather than another planet.
Mars Attacks! can be considered a parody of this genre.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a fleet of Vogon "constructor" ships, resembling giant flying yellow bricks (symbolizing bulldozers) demolish the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass. They do it in mere minutes by circling the Earth with all of their ships and firing at once; humanity is annihilated with no resistance.
Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict, the Taelon race came to Earth and solved many of the worst problems of mankind, but were later revealed to have a hidden agenda of turning human beings into weapons to be used in their own war themes.