Alien invasion

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This article is about invasion by extra-terrestrial beings as a theme; for other uses of the term, see Alien invasion (disambiguation).

The alien invasion is a common theme in science fiction stories and film, in which an extraterrestrial society invades Earth with the intent to replace human life, 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 some politically motivated future alien invasion stories.

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

In the invasion trope fictional aliens contacting Earth tend to either 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. There have been a few exceptions, such as the alien-initiated first contact that begins the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the Vulcan-initiated first contact that concludes the 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact (although after a failed invasion by the Borg in the rest of the film). In both cases, aliens decide to visit Earth only after noticing that its inhabitants have reached some threshold level of technology: nuclear weapons combined with space travel in the first case, and faster-than-light travel using warp drive technology in the second.

As well as being a sub-genre of science fiction, these kind of books can be considered a sub-genre of Invasion literature, which also includes fictional depictions of humans invaded by other humans (for example, a fictional invasion of England by a hostile France strongly influenced Wells' depiction of a Martian invasion).

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[edit] 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, creating conflict in humanity and let humans destroy themselves, 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, the gradual evolution of humans to `hybrid' aliens in TV's Invasion, Threshold, the Animorphs series, Invader Zim, Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters and the John W. Campbell, Jr. short story "Who Goes There?", which was made into 1951 Howard Hawks film The Thing from Another World, with a more faithful adaptation 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 the Earth or human civilization (sometimes they even try to terraform the earth to make it suit them better [a more accurate term for this would be "xenoform"]), 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, John Christopher's book series, The Tripods, the comic book miniseries Slash Maraud and the Half-Life series of computer games.

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 zones in the United States, 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, The Blob, and Plan 9 From Outer Space. It also appears in the film Signs as they do not want the world's powers to retaliate using nuclear weapons.

The theme of beneficial alien invasion has also been explored in fiction on the rare occasion. With this type of story, the invaders, in a kind of little grey/green man's burden, colonize the planet in an effort to spread their culture and "civilize" the indigenous "barbaric" inhabitants or secretly watch and aid earthlings saving them from themselves. The former 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. The latter theme of secret watcher is a paternalistic/maternalistic theme. In this 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 Gene Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes movie and his 1968 Star Trek episode Assignment: Earth, 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. Warhammer 40,000 and The Doom computer game series follows 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 plan to eradicate the human race slowly by making both women and men infertile so the human race dies out over generations. Another type of invasion is seen in various Godzilla films, most notably Destroy All Monsters, and also in the Monster Wars saga of Godzilla: The Series and the 2004 film, Godzilla: Final Wars. In these films, alien races take control of earth's monsters and use them to attack and destroy Earth's major cities, but are usually ironically defeated by the monsters themselves.

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 scene 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 sign hasty cease-fires and fight their own (largely) separate wars against the invaders. 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 parasitic 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 out the hard way that they are not immune to swords and arrows; the humans take over the ship and proceed to carve out an empire among the stars, but lose contact with Earth which goes on with its familiar history. The 1996 movie Star Trek: First Contact deals extensively with this theme, although the frame of reference is in the future; the Borg come to Earth in 2063, approximately two to three hundred years prior to the relevant events in the Star Trek universe.

[edit] Notable examples

The classic treatment was The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, which was made into movies in 1953 and 2005. Another early version is The Germ Growers (1892), by Robert Potter. 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
  • Footfall - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
  • V - Drama about reptile aliens disguised as humans.
  • Doctor Who features numerous examples of almost all the aforementioned types of alien invasion. It should be noted that the Doctor himself, as well as several of his companions, is an alien, despite his human appearance.
  • UFO Features attempt's to fight a low level alien invasion. This is one of the darker entries in that the Humans operate from very much an ‘end justifies the means’ mentality. the basic premise was that the alien invaders were abducting humans to use as involuntary organ transplant donors. A later episode, "The Cat with Ten Lives", suggests that the UFO pilots are not humanoid aliens at all, but are in fact human abductees under the control of the alien intelligences.
  • Animorphs - A best-selling young adult book series and short-lived TV program about a group of human teenagers who are forced into fighting in an interstellar war that has been brought to Earth, featuring invasion of Earth by the parasitic Yeerks.
  • 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 impregnating all the women. The children born of that visit have strong telepathic abilities, and upon growing up act like dangerous invaders, though in law they are nothing but a group of English children. Here, too, the identity of the aliens who planted them remains unknown until the end of the book.
  • In the film adaptation of Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids the Triffids are of extraterestrial origin, though this is at variance with the original novel.
  • 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 firepower 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 governments of the world over-react and kill the alien as a perceived threat when his intention was to help the human race.
  • The Twilight Zone has many episodes dealing with alien invasion, though a good deal of them do not have direct attacks but through fear and deception.
  • Half-Life 2 illustrates the effects of a prolonged occupation of Earth by an alien empire known as "The Combine",
  • Resistance: Fall of Man takes place in alternate reality (where World War II never happened), in which most of Asia and Europe has been destroyed by a mysterious race known as the Chimera.
  • Killzone is in the future, where a sub-species of human, called "Helghast", invade a human colony called "Vekta", sparking a war between both races.
  • Alien Siege sees aliens demanding the lives of millions of people in return for vast amounts of knowledge and technology.
  • The video game Halo: Combat Evolved depicts a religious alliance comprised of different alien species known as the Covenant, who invade Earth's expanding empire and destroy the majority of humanity's planets. Through the course of Halo 2 and Halo 3, it is explained that humans are only an obstacle of a greater plot, in which the Covenant are attempting to fire superweapons called Halos. After firing, the Covenant believes that they will go through something called the Great Journey, which in turn, will kill every living being in the Milky Way Galaxy.
  • In the video game Gears of War, aliens called Locusts attempt to wipe out humans which have colonized on the fictional planet Sera.
  • Independence Day - instead of the typical large fleet of UFOs, aliens used large destroyers to cover an entire city and synchronize with each other worldwide by using artificial satellites so they could strike at the same time. Also very importantly, they used one giant beam of light which strikes the ground producing a large wall of fire that destroyed anything it came in to contact with, moving in an outward circular pattern (like ripples moving out in a pond), which is shown in the film destroying New York City, Los Angeles and Washington DC and presumably destroying many more.
  • The X-COM series depicts a series of massive alien invasion attempts on Earth, first by the hostile Ethereals, 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 Ethereals launch covert strikes against Earth-based targets from their base in the Cydonia region of Mars, using many lesser alien races as soldiers until eventually joining the battle themselves. 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 alien colony ship which has been built beneath the ocean (probably during the Jurassic Period) begins to awaken, reviving legions of different aliens adapted to live underwater. The last true sequel is Apocalypse, which takes place many years after the alien threat has been neutralised. In Apocalypse, the aliens are from another dimension rather than another planet.
  • The X-Files features a long-developing plotline focussing on an alien invasion assisted by an international syndicate of high-ranking shadow government operatives.
  • Mars Attacks! can be considered a parody of this genre.
  • In Crysis, an alien "factory" buried and hidden in a mountain is accidentally awakened by a research team. The alien device generates an ice sphere which freezes everything in its vicinity while deploying alien machines to fight against both U.S. and North Korean militaries.
  • 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. This is ironic, as the story begins with the local planning department of Arthur Dent's city saying that the plans to demolish his house (to make way for a bypass) were on "display" for a few years, only to have the Vogons demolish the Earth (for a hyperspacial bypass), who say that the plans had been in the local planning office in Alpha Centauri for 50 Earth years.
  • In 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.
  • Destroy All Humans!, the popular video game for Playstation 2 and Xbox portrays an alien invasion scenario. However, rather than playing as a human, the player controls Cryptosporidium-137, a Furon alien, in an attempt to take over Earth and annihilate the human race. Destroy All Humans! 2, a newer sequence to "Destroy All Humans!", is about Cryptosporidium-138 in the swinging 60's.
  • Sgt. Frog, Five alien frogs are stranded on Earth (or Pokopen, as they refer to it), and have yet to regroup with one another. Keroro, the main character, is taken by the Hinata family, and ends up becoming a servant to them, as well as a friend of Fuyuki Hinata. Most of the frogs regroup, but far too often, they get sidetracked in various activities with the humans. Even when they finally get serious about their mission, it still gets botched somehow.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog, The Black Arms aliens, lead by Black Doom, invade the earth so Black Doom can get the seven chaos emeralds and warp their vessel, the Black Comet, to earth so it can release a paralyzing gas over the entire planet. Humans and other intelligent life, like Sonic and the other anthropomorphic animals, can then be consumed by his alien spawn without any resistance.
  • In Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, creepsome alien creatures known as shroobs attack the Mushroom Kingdom of the past. The Mario Brothers of the present use Time Holes to go to places in the past in order to fight against the shroobs, along with their young past-selves.
  • In Superman II, Superman (who is an alien himself) has to fight off three extremely powerful people from his home planet (Krypton), including General Zod, who intends to put the Earth under his rule via Kryptonian superpowers.
  • In Command and Conquer 3 features an invasion by an alien race (known as the Scrin, although their identity is not made clear during the game) that is triggered by a detonation of a substance called Liquid Tiberium (or Ichor LQ, as called by the Scrin), set off by Kane, leader of the Brotherhood of Nod. The aliens' true purpose was to wait at the edge of the Solar System until Earth had been completely overrun by Tiberium. Kane lured them to Earth earlier in order to seize their knowledge and technology for his own ends. The Scrin taskforce sent to Earth is portrayed as being unprepared for a total war against humanity since they expected the Earth to be filled with rich deposites of Tiberium for strip-mining and mankind on the brink of extinction. At the end of the game, the Scrin leader, the Overlord, orders a full invasion force after Foreman 371, commander of the Scrin taskforce on Earth, forfeits.
  • In El Eternauta, one of the most influential comics series of the 20th century, the real invaders remain hidden controlling everything from the distance.
  • In Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, mankind has made contact with an insectoid alien race known colloquially as "Buggers" The buggers have attempted to invade Earth twice, having been narrowly defeated the second time by a man named Mazer Rackham, and the threat of the third bugger invasion looms large over the Earth. They build a space training facility to train young kids, namely Ender, to defeat the buggers.
  • In the game Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, aliens serve a small role. They come to the Milk Farm and want to abduct the cows. Link helps the ranch owner's little sister to keep the aliens away.
  • Signs is the story of one small American family living through an alien invasion.
  • Michael Bay's live action film Transformers features an invasion of the Decepticons from Cybertron with the Autobots, also from Cybertron, coming to Earth to defend the human race.
  • John Christopher's Tripods series, a juvenile book series featuring a scenerio where Earth has been overtaken by a group of giant metallic creatures with three legs. They implant humans with metal caps to control their minds and keep them subservient.

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