I thought the alien invasion of Independence Day was pretty believable. They come in their huge ships, blast some of our treasured landmarks into smithereens, and expect us to capitulate. No dithering around with “take me to your leader,” no negotiating, just whammo!
But there was lots of ridiculous stuff later that caused my disbelief to deflate like a party balloon with a hole in it.
My personal theory is that the aliens we saw in the movie were NOT the actual, you know, aliens. They were shock troopers, or perhaps specimen-gatherers.
They were genetically engineered to be vulnerable to water- the aliens weren’t dumb, they could easily see that three-quarters of our world’s surface is composed of good ol’ H2O. They engineered their pets to be dissolved by water so that we couldn’t easily capture specimens, and so that their pets wouldn’t survive on their own.
We never actually saw humans being eaten, did we? Most humans were gassed and taken… somewhere. It wasn’t an invasion, or a food-gathering situation… no, it was more slave-taking than anything. The monsters we saw in the movie were just the gathering mechanism- a gathering mechanism with a built-in lifespan so it wouldn’t spin out of control.
Or perhaps I’ve put too much thought into this. Remind me to tell you my theory on The Power Rangers sometime.
Put me down for another vote for Footfall.
Lightnin’, tell us your theory on the Power Rangers, will you?
I agree that the situation in Signs is not a simple invasion. I don’t think we’re meant to believe that the book Morgan buys has anything like an accurate account of what the aliens’ motives or aims are; the point of telling things from the Hess family’s POV is to keep the audience in the dark as to the aliens’ nature, so that the tension is heightened.
That said, I always saw the events of *Signs * as a massive rite of passage. The aliens chose Earth to attack (it wasn’t an invasion, as one character observed, but was rather a raid) because our world was so inhospitable to them; participating in the raid was thus an act of bravery. The humans abducted weren’t primarily for food or slaves; they were trophies. The purpose of the crop circles was to claim an area as a given group’s target.
I thought the plot of The Arrival was more realistic than Independence Day, and it was a more intelligent movie overall. I think it came out around the same time as ID4, but got no where near the same amount of attention.
Also, the plot of ID4 hinged on the alien computers being Mac-compatible, and their spacecraft being flyable by humans. I think both are unrealistic.
I don’t know from flyability, but have you ever heard of a “protocol” and “bootstrapping”?
I’ll add another vote for Harry Turtledove’s [WorldWar (and its follow-up, Colonization) series. Very well done series about war between WII humans and aliens who are about at our current technology level. Turtledove explains the apparent paradox of aliens who can cross interstellar space but have mostly circa 2000 technology by having them extremely conservative in technology and social engineering. It looks facile, but it’s an underlying element of the alien makeup which he explains and sticks to very well. I think, if the aliens had been any more advanced, or if they were original enough in their thinking to employ Bosda’s scenario, there would be no war between humans and aliens – they’d have walked right over us. He struck the right balance for a good story.
Any story about invasion has to deal with the ludicrously long supply lines and the huge powers and energies expended (and, if you’re not letting anything like wormholes into the mix, enormous temporal disparities due to long transit times and time dilation). Interstellar conquest, in the absence of almost maghical technology that shrinks space and time, is an unbelievably costly endeavor, and you’d be better off doing practically anything else – terraforming, building artificial environments – simple exploration and settlement of uninhabited locations – than trying to conquer. Unless, of course, you had other motives (Need to get rid of excess population, religious or philosophical imperatives, instinctual drives not satisfied in other ways). Even that only gives the reason for doing it – it’s still expensive in any terms you choose to name. That’s why I think the Niven solution in the short story is such a hoot – it sidesteps the use of resources and the need for actual conquest.
Another interesting series is the Man-Kzin wars series started by Niven’s stories and carried on by a number of other writers. They’re up to the 11th volume, and it’s good hard sf. I still can’t help but think that the Kzin should’ve wiped the floor with the Human Race. They’ve been trying to make it credible that humanity was able to fight back effectively, but it’s a long haul from the enforced pacifism Niven originally had arth being to a war-making culture that could take on creatures bigger and nastier than (if as honor-bound as) the Klingons.
Probably carbon based, yes, but the odds are at most 50-50 that they’d use the same amino acids. All Earthly life uses the left-handed versions of the amino acids, but you could just as easily have life based on the right-handed ones. Plus, of course, there’s the possibility that alien amino acids wouldn’t even be isomers of ours, so it’d be less than half.
Dewey Finn, didn’t you know that Macs are compatible with everything? It’s one of the reasons we Mac-people like them so much :).
That’s what I meant when I said “lots of ridiculous stuff later.” The initial invasion, with the destruction of iconic landmarks, seemed quite believable to me.
I always thought Niven did a great job of explaining why humanity survived. The Kzinti did roll right over Wunderland (Alpha Centauri), but weren’t able to conquer Earth because humans did a good job converting industrial tools (launching lasers & fusion drives) to weapons the Kzinti didn’t have defenses against. Even so, the Kzinti would have won eventually if the Outsiders hadn’t sold a hyperdrive to the humans. There’s also some information in some of the M-K books that the humans were the most technologically advanced enemy the Kzinti had fought.
Of course, Ringworld revealed that the M-K wars were all part of a puppeteer plot…
That’s the explanation that came up a few volumes back, but it’s the one I find it hard to buy. It takes a lot to change industrial hardware to military weaponry, and even more to change a pacifistic society to one of warriors. They had some time, but not, I think, enough.
I love that series! I agree that after later series made th Kzin smarter and faster to learn, it got incresingly unlikely that the humans were winning the war, but remember, in the first war the Kzin attack wasn’t really a war fleet: it was a tiny number of (for the Kzin) poorly-armed ships who just wanted first dibs on a planet they assumed was completely harmless. Having never messed about with reaction drives (leaping straight to gravity planar, courtesy of the poor Jotuk) they completely underestimated the humans. Remember, said humans has also been preparing religiously for at least 50 years (as told in The Colonel’s Tiger. Personally, I think ARM is ruthless enough for anything; I would wager they had a few hundred humans ready to turn into Protectors if the Kzin failed to be sliced up by their massive signalling lasers/mass drivers.
I kinda agree with you as the series went on, but remember, the humans were losing. Even with enormous human ingenuity, even with their willigness to do anything to beat the Kzin, even with the Kzin’s tenedency to attack before they are ready ever. single. time (the concept of planning simply doesn’t occur to the Kzin- that’s for weak monkeys! If you have a ship, you send it off to attack the foe, and only stay still yourself for as long as you don’t have a ship to carry you)- even with all that, the humans were still taking a pasting. Wunderland was gone, the resistance was a joke, and the second and fourth raids on earth pitted a tiny number of Kzin ships against the accumulated resources of a whole star system with all the advantages that a well-maintained system of solar defences could give them- and the Kzin still beat up the humans before dying! If the humans hadn’t been given hyperdrive, they would have beem wiped out in the fourth attack, that much is clear. Once they had hyperdrive, of course, they had no chance whatsoever of losing, yet still managed to be hurt by attacking Kzin-held systems. The enforced peace (and confiscation of Kzin slave systems, weaponry etc) meant it was easy for the humans to win the next few encounters.
I agree that the whole “one solitary human beats up a shipful of Kzin by ingenuity and sheer darned pluck” was way overdone, though. Still, you have to remember that, species vs. species, the humans had a huge number of attributes the Kzin couldn’t touch. Hell,
We had the puppeteers on our side, and there is no species short of a Protector I would rather have with me.
There’s The Arrival, where the earth is getting just a little too toasty, and it’s discovered that aliens are here and are terraforming. They have a zapper that makes them humanoid and machines that loft giant greenhouse gas balls into the atmosphere. Pretty good sneaky alien stuff.
Just like in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam. Heck even France had la Risistance 
ID 4 would have been a great if we never saw more of the aliens than their massive ships, the alien fighters were a hundred times faster and more meneuverable than F18s and fired beam weapons instead of green crap and the humans lost. Making it an end of the world movie like On The Beach or The Day After would have made it a far more compelling movie, however it probably wouldn’t have been much of a crowd pleaser.
In a book called Protectorate by Mick Farren (thats the local release name, I think it had other titles else where) the aliens are involved in their own war and are only interested in Earth as base of operations. They show up, destroy those parts of human civilisation that are an annoyance to thier plans & then leave us to our business with the occasional warning to stay in line.
The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham is a good attempt, though the ending is a little weak.
Ah, that would have been sublime. Instead, he accepted a compliment about “Oath of Fealty” graciously, told a related story about his own brother, and in general treated an aging fanboy with respect.
Thanks for asking, teela
Yeah, but it kinda makes me wonder why they brought along all the SAMs, armor-piercing tank ammo, and fighter-interceptors when they were going to attack a backwater planet they thought would be in the middle of the dark ages. (Just like the other planets they’d found and conquered…thousands of years before.)
The Twilight Zone - To Serve Man
Eric Nylund’s Signal to Noise ranks among my favorite science fiction books. Unfortuately, due to the nature of the thread, the mere mention of the book is a spoiler - it’s about first contact with an alien race that ultimately goes very, very wrong, set in a post-cyberpunk Earth. The overall plot unfolds like a magnificent multi-layered puzzle.
[spoiler]The aliens contacted are destroyers, and coerce the protagonist into making increasingly tempting technology trades, but each new advance comes with a wicked catch, left undiscovered until it’s too late. The carefully planned end result is the discovery of the location of another civilization to plunder and destroy, continuing the cycle, while eliminating all witnesses by creatively destroying the Earth in the process.
(I haven’t read the book over in several years, so I may be mistaken on some details. Apologies in advance.)[/spoiler]
A word of warning, though - if you do read and enjoy it, don’t read the sequel. It’s quite a disappointment, not because it ruins anything about this book, but just because it’s pretty bad.