Second Game by Charles V. de Vet, the short story version. I think that’s the author. I canlt find which book of mine it is in to confirm.
About aliens that meet humans and decide they have to conquer us. And do. but they lose the titular subject.
This is a television episode, not any written kind of thing. There’s the episode “The Invaders” of Twilight Zone. Through most of the episode you think it’s about a human on Earth fighting off an alien invasion. At the end you find out that it’s about an alien fighting off humans from Earth who have just arrived on their planet (although it’s not clear if the humans are invading or exploring). So through nearly all the episode you’re getting the story from the alien point of view.
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” with Keanu Reeves.
The premise was that we were being eliminated because we were ruining one of a limited amount of planets that are super friendly towards life.
I had another story in mind: the plot of “The Monster” is virtually identical (in the first part of the story only…) to
[edit: found two stories with the same name: NOT GROGNARDIA: Pulp Fantasy Library: Can These Bones Live?]
But this one: Can These Bones Live? by Ted Reynolds (Summary) - Writing Atlas female not male, and
she isn’t a psycho
, but does have to convince the aliens to rezz everyone else.
The new James A. Corey series The Mercy of Gods isn’t exactly the OP’s ask, as it starts with an alien race called the Carryx invading an Earth colony and conscripting a group of research scientists for their own purposes. The humans find themselves in competition with other kidnapped alien researchers while the Carryx basically wait to see which species produces the best results.
In the meantime, the human protagonists try to communicate with the Carryx and glean their motivations, but it turns out to be a difficult task because their culture is too inhuman to empathize with. It does have a few chapters from an individual Carryx’s perspective, but they’re mainly about its place in the Carryx hierarchy and struggles to succeed within a system of constant competition and subjugation as driving forces of progress.
People like “They’re Made Out of Meat” (from OMNI).
Made into a video here:
Okay, this is blowing my mind. I could have sworn that, many years ago, I read a story with this plot in one of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies put out by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. But that anthology ceased publication in 2008, two years before this story was written. And the one I remember was clearly based on The Thing, but much more loosely, without all the names of characters from the film. Does anyone remember a story like this? I have no idea how to Google for it.
We had a poster named @SentientMeat, named after that story, I think. Smart poster, no idea what happened to them.
If we’re loosening things up a bit, I wanted to make quick mention of Asimov’s THE GODS THEMSELVES, which starts off by showing mankind’s reaction to a miracle substance that aliens keep making available to us: if we follow the instructions they sent, and leave out some stuff we have no real use for — well, they keep obligingly switcherooing the stuff we discard for some stuff that has incredibly useful properties, is all. Who are these aliens? Why are they helping us solve so many problems? Is it mere benevolence? Or are they likewise swapping out stuff they find worthless, in exchange for stuff they find valuable? Do they need us as much as we need them?
It’s then that the novel flips into a long multi-chapter section showing us things from point of view of the aliens, and it eventually becomes clear that the folks calling the shots on their homeworld don’t really give a crap about us: they’re not out to help us; they’re not really interested in the stuff you’d maybe think they’ve been trading for, either; they’re just hoping that we keep accepting the miracle substance until everyone on Earth dies from its cumulative effects — at which point said aliens can, like, plunder by default.
@RitterSport two above … I remember him. He was an entertaining poster. Maybe a little too outré for the board’s current bland culture, but in his day …
I definitely had a positive view of him overall, maybe a bit prickly.
Wasn’t there a Joe Haldeman story, Camouflage, maybe? I think that was from an alien’s POV, but I don’t think it was that sympathetic.
Shipping radioactive waste to places that don’t know what radioactivity is has a certain utilitarian attractiveness to it.
This brings to mind the story from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:
…the words “I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle” drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl’hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war. Eventually of course, it was realised that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands more years the mighty starships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth-where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Sounds similar to “Punch” by Pohl. The aliens help earthlings by giving us technology. At the end, they watch a hunter hunting ducks, and ask why he doesn’t shoot them while they’re sitting on the pond, and he tells them, “We don’t shoot sitting ducks, it’s not sportsmanlike.” Turns out, the alien agree with that - the technology they gave us was to give us a fighting chance.
That was the last good Asimov novel, in my opinion. All those later novels to unify the Robots and radioactive Earth and Foundation were over-written, wordy dreck.
In THE MAN WHO USED THE UNIVERSE, the first section of the novel involves an amoral profiteer getting ahead in business until he eventually gets chosen from among all others by aliens who’ll gladly help him become — by far — the richest and most prominent guy around: giving him access to breakthroughs that (a) humanity doesn’t yet have a line on, but which (b) are old hat for the aliens. In exchange, they figure that the CEO will help them get the upper hand over the species he’s willing to sell out; or, as they put it, “the man has been bought.”
The rest of the novel then follows an alien who suspects that, no, in the end. that guy’s not going to help us; he’s out to pull a fast one on us. And so we then watch things from that alien’s perspective — during interactions with yet other aliens, as well as various humans — because, hey, when you’re all-in on making sure the alien plan for traitor-aided conquest of mankind is still on track, why not dedicate your life to studying the only guy who now has a fighting chance?
There’s the Pixar short, “Lifted,” about a flying saucer pilot in training.
The short story The Bully and the Crazy Boy by Marc Stiegler is told from the viewpoint of the commander of an alien invasion fleet who is interrogating a captured human admiral, while about to engage in what he thinks will be a decisive victory over the human fleet. He’s quite confused by humans, who while he regards with contempt behave irrationally; such as surrendering a space colony, waiting until the occupation forces are aboard and only then detonating a nuclear device on board, killing everyone on both sides.
Under the influence of interrogation drugs the admiral tells him that they realize that the invaders have better technology, and are apparently both more rational and even more intelligent than humans. But then he tells him the story of the title, about a bully who came after a “crazy boy” who fought beck every time until he couldn’t fight back anymore. Until one day it was the bully who ran away. And yes, humans are less rational; so unlike the invaders, they will keep on fighting long past when giving up would be rational, even to their own destruction.
And the upcoming “decisive battle”? Why, that’s just to get the entire invasion fleet in one spot, because the “rational” aliens didn’t think to consider that humans might do something crazy like ram a dozen or so ships head-on at relativistic speeds in the middle of the battle, creating enough radiation to kill everyone on both sides.
And when the alien commander orders evasive action, that’s when the admiral bites down on the tooth on berserk drug, rips his way loose, lethally wounds the commander with his bare hands and manic strength and under multiple gravities heads for the reactor room…
This is the one I came in to post. One of my favorites too.