Best Alien Invasion Stories?

Cafe Society
1

Movies, TV programs, books…any media

I watched the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still the other day didn’t think much of it…especially its overly preachy message.

Unlike many I liked both Independence Day and Signs although in a lot of respects they were both undeniably silly. Independence Day did a decent job of showing a ‘big picture’ depiction of an alien invasion while Signs did the opposite, one families experience of the event with all the rumours, confusion and lack of information that would mean.

I enjoyed the War of the Worlds remake as well but I’m not really a fan of films where the aliens are shown as utterly invincible.

An alien invasion movie I’d really like to see is one where the aliens aren’t invincible, or almost invincible, but rather somewhat more advanced than us but we are still capable of fighting them partially because just because they’re more advanced than us it doesn’t mean they know everything we know (I read an excellent short story with this premise, the aliens invade and are taking over with brute force but they have no experience of stealth technology and other more subtle human technologies, which when humanity realises this they use it to take out the alien mothership, they quite literally don’t see us coming)

I’d like to see a movie where humanity has to fight off an alien race of somewhat more advanced non-terran technology, perhaps invading in huge numbers but still beatable.

I want to see the aliens attempting to fight their way through human armies armed with tanks that can hit a football sized object a mile away, alien ships in low-earth orbit getting blown apart by nuclear-tipped ASAT armed F15’s, Russian fighters hitting their anti-gravity aircraft with missiles fired from thirty miles away and closing to dance rings around them in a dogfight, their armies getting torn apart by human heavy artillery and .50 calibre machine guns (no Geneva convention for the xenomorphs!), A10’s annihilating landing craft with their cannons etc etc

Of course the aliens would need to have fearsome weaponry as well, but it would be interesting if it had obviously followed a different technological evolution than ours.

In another story I recall reading but can’t remember the author of the aliens had powerful lasers and other line-of-sight weapons but had a mental blind spot when it came to direct fire weapons like mortars and artillery.

I would have the defenders being slowly pushed back as the aliens gradually gain the upper hand, until finally the humans end up launching submarine based ballistic missiles (the aliens have no idea the subs are even there) against their own cities in order to prevent the aliens holding them if we can’t have them.

Shocked the aliens open negotiations and come to terms, it turns out that they had no desire to destroy our infrastructure or wipe out the human race (as they would be capable of in holding the ultimate high ground of space), their invasion was an act of desperation as their own planet had become uninhabitable (yeah, they’re fallible just like us and screwed up their environment) and they had no real means to replace much of the vehicles and personnel lost in the invasion, at least quickly enough to prevent defeat. In other words aliens with real motivations and not just one-dimensional evil invaders from outer space.

War porn? Definitely, but I’ll tell you this, it would make one hell of a good movie… :wink:

2

Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series has exactly what you’re looking for. Not great literature by any stretch, but it’s still good fun.

3

Love that series because it is ‘realistic’. Who says one side would walk all over the other? Who says there wouldn’t be things unexpected on both sides? Who says it wouldn’t make better sense to compromise when you can inhabit areas the natives barely can? That’s been our history of conquest.

I love the way Turtledove brings real people into his alternate histories, but I must admit that nothing ‘progressive’ has happened since the 1960s in the West, so there is nothing interesting to project World War any further.

4

That sounds awfully like John Ringo , if not well congratulations he’s exactly what you are looking for.

5

One of my favorites is Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Somewhat out of date due to the political changes since 1985 ( no Soviet Union anymore, no white South Africa government, etc ), but still very good. The aliens, the fithp, have in general better technology and the advantage of controlling space. But they have only one ship with parasite craft, don’t understand humans that well, and their technological base has gaps. It’s mostly a legacy created from records left behind by a long extinct species. They smash human conventional forces early on, and there’s a give and take for a while. The US and USSR combine to nuke their beachhead in Kansas; they respond by killing most of the population of India with an asteroid as a demonstration.

In the climax, America’s Archangel project has managed to build an Orion Drive battleship ( powered by nuclear bombs ) named Michael ( because he cast the Devil out of Heaven ). They strap smaller craft to it; armed Space Shuttles, dismounted battleship guns with cockpits and rockets attached. They arm it with all the weapons they can think of, including bomb pumped lasers - which the Fithp don’t have, one of those tech gaps. Then they launch and proceed to pound the Fithp into submission and surrender after a long fight and lots of casualties. Including a Space Shuttle managing to ram the mothership near its drive; the heat shield kept the enemy’s lasers from destroying it before they hit.

6

I heartily second John Ringo for exactly the type of stuff you are describing.

In the first of his Posleen War books, the hero kludges together an inprovised anti-matter satchel charge to take out the alien invader’s command ship. He doesn’t have time to make a timer, so he has to hold it against the hull of the ship and detonate it by hand!

In later books, the hordes of bad-guy aliens are held off from Washington DC by snipers in the Washington Monument picking off their command caste.

If that isn’t the type of story you are looking for, then I will eat my hat.

7

You might enjoy the premise in a book by Clifford D. Simak from a long while back titled “They Walked Like Men.”

The aliens don’t try to take over the earth by brute force attacks, they go about stealthily (and legally)…

buying it! House by house, building by building.

8

Any aliens advanced enough to cross interstellar space could simply redirect a few asteroids our way to annihilate us if they just wanted to kill all humans, and there would nothing we could do to stop them. The truth is in an encounter between humans and spacefaring aliens we really wouldn’t have any chance. That doesn’t make for very interesting fiction though, so usually the aliens have some reason not to simply drive us to extinction.

9

The aliens might be limited by the fact that they want to have a habitable Earth for themselves, not a radioactive desert. I also liked in Footfall that the aliens weren’t that good at war- in particular, they suffered nervous breakdowns under stress more easily than humans do.

10

“The Screwfly Solution” was a short story someone linked to on this board a few years ago, and I love it. I’m not sure how much I’m revealing about the ending by posting it in this thread though…

http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/sheldon/sheldon1.html

11

I got one: “The Empire attacks Earth!”

What if Earth today was attacked by the Empire? Assume they want
conquest and don’t use the Death Star. Go by the movies, not EU.

I think Earth would stand a pretty good chance against them.

Empire has better technology… however it may not be as effective
against solid projectile weapons (like a shell). The Falcon had no
trouble getting through the Star Destroyer’s shields in ESB. All it
takes is a kamikaze A-Wing, or in our case, an explosive-laden drone.

Supersonic jets would be too fast for TIE fighter blasters and turrents.
Our radar-guided missles would give us a huge advantage over long
distances.

SAMs firing at the TIE fighters. Much more accurate than the lasers.

Many of the Empire’s ground weapons don’t have indirect or long-range
fire capabilities. Tomahawks and batteries miles away would have easy
pickings.

Stormtroopers’ aim is bad, would get cut down by automatic weapons
before they could recalibrate their aim. Stormtroopers’ armor is weak,
if it can’t deflect Ewok rocks, bullets should have no problem.

Nuclear weapons. Empire doesn’t have the equivalent of that. If a
crashed A-wing can take out a super Star Destroyer, imagine what a
well-placed nuke could do.

12

You have some great ideas and a passion for expressing them. Why not write the story yourself? Your brief teaser got me interested.

13

The various War Against the Chtorr books because of the genuine effort to make the aliens something from another world not dressed-up versions of humanity.

14

Thanks, unfortunately plenty of ideas…can’t write for toffee! :slight_smile:

Although given some of the stuff I’ve read thats been printed…

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I’ll certainly check them out. I have read Footfall before and recall liking it.

15

The short story The Bully and the Crazy Boy by Marc Stiegler has the Solar System invaded by a nasty alien empire. They have better technology, and are even somewhat more intelligent than humans. Humans however have the advantage of being relatively insane; we will refuse to surrender even when it’s rational to do so, we keep fighting even when it’s hopeless. The aliens would never do something like surrender a space station, let on occupation troops then blow it up. Or arrange a battle that ends in the annihilation of both fleets.

Pandora’s Planet aka Pandora’s Legions by Christopher Anvil has Earth just barely losing to an alien invasion ( but the occupation goes. . .poorly ). Outside of not having spaceships our technology is about as good, or better; and it turns out that we are actually smarter than they are. The short story version that the novel became was better I think. Available at the Baen free Libraryalong with a fair number of other novels.

The first of Alan Dean Foster’s The Damned trilogy has an invasion of Earth. The bad guy aliens, the Amplitur don’t bombard from orbit or anything like that mainly because the goal is conquest and religious ( for lack of a better word ) conversion. It fails because humanity gets help and weapons from the Weave, the good guy alliance. And because it turns out that humans are the badasses of the galaxy. The only species that wars among itself; one of the few psychologically that can fight at all, and we are the best at it. Plus, if the telepathic Amplitur try to take over our minds they go mad.