Alien Invasions in Science Fiction
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- Опубликовано: 9 фев 2025
- In celebration of #Helldivers2's Illuminate Invasion, Spacedock delves into Alien Invasions in Sci-Fi.
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Spacedock does not hold ownership of the copyrighted materiel (Footage, Stills etc) taken from the various works of fiction covered in this series, and uses them within the boundaries of Fair Use for the purpose of Analysis, Discussion and Review.
If alien invasions have taught me anything, it's to run away from fog horns. From War of the Worlds, to Mass Effect, to others, fog horns seems to always indicate alien war machines.
Elite Dangerous thargoids come to mind too.
Is that a Warlord Titan?
[ *Reapers fog horns start roaring in the wind* ]
@@AsG_Alligator Good thing we humans have our own fog horns (the discovery scanner)
Reject Foghorn, return to *UUUUUUULLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!*
Also War of the Worlds is explicitly "What if we, the British who sail around colonizing less advanced places faced a more advanced civilization?"
I think that mirroring is what makes a lot of Alien Invasion stories captivating. Even if you're not British, seeing a technologically/logistically/militarily/industrially superior force trounce a weaker one can make you think 'but what if that happens to me/us?'
I can see how the colonial theme wasn't something that Orson Welles focused on in his radio adaptation
@@PltOffPPrune It might have made Americans unconfortable
I wonder how a former British colony would make their own alien invasion films. Would they be like, "oh no, not another one", or "finally, someone to break up the hegemony"?
@@ArifRWinandar Depends on the country and the form of the invasion. The Brits did a lot of good and also didn't usually just tramp in with vast armies. Assuming the aliens must be evil rather than just protecting their galactopolitical interests while 'uplifting' the local population (for better or worse, or more likely a middle ground), something like V would probably fit the bill best.
Then there's District 9 that flips the script on the alien invasion by having them stranded by accident and generally at the mercy of humans.
Older still is Alien Nation. Except those were star trek-ish near-humans
To this day, I agonize that District 9 never got its well deserved sequel. 😔
It was such a fantastic movie! It deserved far more recognition than it got.
@@MrDibara
There's been talk of a possible "District 10" sequel to it in recent times, with even the possible involvement of Neil Blomkampf again.
But as with Hollywood most times you just have to take these things with a grain of salt.
@@Cbricklyne Rumors of a District 10 in production have been going on for 10 years straight by now! Has there been anything _new_ about these recent rumors? If not, I don't think we should get our hopes up. (I wish I was wrong, but 10+ years of waiting is too much)
It's better off without a sequel. Modern Hollywood will not only fail to deliver, but they'll make a malicious piece of garbage and try to gaslight you into liking it.
The "why" issue is one of the biggest weaknesses of the alien invasion genre. Resource demands are not plausible, simply because any civilization that has the tech to cross interstellar distances can find all the resources anyone would ever need in space. You have to envision a non-material reason--a religious crusade, paranoia about humanity's future potential, alien power fantasies, human slaves as fashionable prestige items, etc. Human history actually offers many examples of wars and invasions fought essentially over delusional issues of desire and prestige.
This is why I mentioned living in the Oceans in the Battle: Los Angeles part. Being in the goldilocks zone and having a biome is what makes Earth unique and worth trying to take. But thats probably too sci-fi for some media looking instead for an analogy to real world issues.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Harry Turtledove's Invasion series has on of the most plausible ones I've ever seen: "Imperial Decree"
You have a species that's already conquered two other worlds and also needs space for their population. The Emperor said go get that one too and the tried to make it so.
@@hoojiwana that's what i liked about Cowboys vs. Aliens. shure you can also mine Gold on Asteroids or other planets, but's it's still rare and if you are more a Pirate Type ofc. you steal the alreaedy mined Gold and People understand it more like ... neodymium. Or Unobtanium despite the cheesy name is a better "reason" since you don't need to be that deep into space science to know that Water is not THAT rare in Space with the Bonus you don't have to lift it it up if you scoop up some Comets or Europa
It could still be a resource: life forms. Maybe they specifically need living things for a purpose. Maybe that thing they wanted to do in the Matrix movies (but got scrapped, because of concerns that the audience 'wouldn't understand it'): Computing power. Perhaps their technology is powered by minds, organic calculators.
@@Novenae_CCG Building on that, it's entirely possible that if the biology/geology between us and the aliens are different enough, we have biological goods they can't produce easily on their own. Think biological-sourced substances like nacre or limestone (though why they'd want THESE specifically? No idea).
I liked how in Halo, the Covenant invasion of Earth initially wasn't an invasion at all. The Prophet of Regret was looking for an artifact with a small force and was surprised to find humans on the planet, let alone the human homeworld. The Prophet of Truth however, knew it was the human homeworld and sent a proper invasion fleet.
Regret: "Oh fuck, oh shit, spin the drives back up, we are getting the hell out of here, we should have been gone"
Truth: "exactly as planned...except for the sangheili fighting back, that's a little annoying"
Halo is also fun because it's an alien invasion that gets interrupted by an alien invasion, and a sizable faction of the original invading aliens end up allying with the humans to deal with the new (very old) aliens.
I love how the Illuminate in Helldivers feel like a modern take on the old alien invasion movies.
Absolutely! My first fights against them at city maps felt like the X-COM action game I've been waiting for since 1997!
@@atillafiliz6591 I got so many XCOM 2 vibes (the one I've played the most) from those early dives on Calypso!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Mixed with the feel of fighting zombies with the Voteless
Nothing like the feeling of throwing everything you’ve got at an alien walker, only to see it emerge from the smoke and debris reflecting your terror stricken form in its shiny metal exoskeleton.
It removes all tension.
That's also like every giant monster movie ever
That Pointless Hub reference caught me completely off guard but it makes total sense that Hoojiwana is a fan
I was wondering if anyone else caught that.
Definitely one of the better video essayists.
Hoojiwana as Mr. Pointless Hub was not something I expected to see at all.
And him getting blown away by Godzilla's tail was funny.
Of all the alien invasion stories about collecting resources, I fail to see any exploit one of the most unique things about earth: Wood. A natural composite that is self-replicating, strong, and cleans the air to grow. Space has water, MANY times more minerals than earth, and again, no one to fight for them. Gradual ecologic collapse as they harvest all of the young and seeds would be an awesome way to slowly ramp up an invasion.
Still don't need to invade the entire planet for that, they could just take some seedlings and grow it themselves. If Mark Watney was able grow potatoes on Mars with a box of crap, I'm pretty sure aliens can do better.
An interesting idea but I can't think of a reason for aliens to need trees or wood since their own planet may have an analogous material/organism.
Except for Wall-E...
I find it hard to believe that aliens would make it to the space age if they didn’t already have plant-equivalents that purified air (a necessity to having an ecosystem) and some source of cheap strong easily available building material (a necessity for having infrastructure). Also, as the other commenter pointed out, they just need a few seeds, they don’t need to pave over the whole Earth. I think the only reason aliens would invade us is because of humanity, and even then more for ideological reasons or for sport than any resource we offer.
I like where you're going, but we need to go further... by a few tens of millions of years.
See, wood they could get by covertly stealing seeds and a few hundred tons of soil for all the microbes and stuff.
But there's something that is very limited. Oil.
Now, hear me out. Oil develops only from biological matter being buried under pressure and exposed to heat over a long period of time. Maybe you can replicate the process technologically, but that's a lot of power put in for so little gotten out.
And we very much are in direct conflict. We want it too, the aliens would want all we have, and you can argue that weapons that glass the surface of a world might burn off some of what the aliens want.
Thus the aliens need to invade via vehicles and ground troops to subjugate and secure the world, all for oil.
Now, I'll admit, this falls through if there's a hundred microbial worlds for every one with intelligent life, because a planet that's been nothing but algae for three billion years would have plenty of oil.
But it still works better than water.
I once toyed with a setting where aliens were interested in Earth for its unique features - biodiversity (primarily plants and animals), culture and data about individuals. Genetic data and cultural information can be sent back home via FTL radio rather than the far more expensive physical travel (which renders bulk cargo impractical).
The aliens didn't come to Earth with an overwhelming army to destroy the population, but set up heavily-defended trading posts where they would trade what was to them extremely out-of-date technology to humans in exchange for what they wanted, and in the process completely upended Earth's balance of power. (The fact that there were multiple competing alien factions supporting different client states and squabbling over dominance of the rain forests made things quite messy even if they weren't regularly nuking cities.)
Harry Turtledove has a series where aliens invade in the middle of WWII. The aliens scouted earth 500 years ago becuase of how slow space travel is. They did not think we could advance so fast. So while they were advanced, they weren't that more advanced and were ill prepared for the human war machine that was at full production. So it was a big CF for both sides.
Ah yes the 'Invasion' series. They literally shat themselves when humans started using Nukes. And ginger. Don't get me started.🤣🤣🤣
TOSEV 3
What is the name of this series? I've seen a comment talking about this same series in Isaac Arthur's videos and I still haven't discovered the name. Please
Now I'm interested in reading it XD This is a great consideration for a lot of harder sci-fis. Even if your tech development is ahead/can outpace your opponent, your ships will take decades at least to cross the void, if not centuries, and those 250-year-old ships have to contend with the newest local innovations when they arrive, operating on outdated reports. The Three-Body Problem series plays around this a lot too, with the alien invaders specifically developing assets to interfere with human scientific and technological development and retain their technological edge.
I'm just imagining a fleet sent to invade a planet whose last-known dominant species were still hunter-gatherers, and then receiving SETI radio transmissions from said planet halfway through your trip and realizing you might be boned because they went from the stone age to having radios in like 1000 years and you won't be there for at least another 500... and they are still like 60 light-years away or something, the message is 60 years old, they had radios powerful enough to be legible up to 60 light years away, 60 years ago and you won't be there for another 500 years. You also come to the conclusion that they would probably be able to see your deceleration burn. Better yet, maybe you've already started your deceleration burn, and they'll see it in less than 60 years, and it's too late to hide it, the light is out there traveling the distance. Your war council is now furiosly debating whether they should sacrifice one of the ships to use the fuel they should have used to decelerate to go faster and just kinetically impact the target planet to try and wipe out local resistance before they can overtake your ships, or trying to determine from the SETI transmissions whether the locals seem likely to kill each other off with nuclear war and stuff, etc. etc.
Ah heck, now I kind of want to write a drama about alien possible invaders or just settlers going to conquer and/or settle an uninhabited or unadvanced planet, seeing signs of life, signs of civilization, and eventually getting radio messages from that planet, and having the suspense of having to figure out what to do. And in like the middle of the book, you get the radio message, complete with like a Golden Records map of their solar system, indicating they have astronomy tech, and *OH MY [insert religious figure of choice] THEY COULD HAVE SEEN OUR DECELERATION BURN BY NOW THEY KNOW WE'RE COMING THEY'LL BE READY FOR US WHEN WE GET THERE IN 500 YEARS AND WE DON'T HAVE THE RAW MATERIALS OR INFRASTRUCTURE TO INNOVATE REALLY HARD WHILE WE'RE STUCK IN THE VOID HELP WHAT SHOULD WE DO WILL THEY KILL US*
I still think C&C3 had the best version of "the Aliens are invading to take our resources" style plot. because its not them coming to steal something common in the universe. It's essentially them farming a resource. They seed Tiberium on inhabited planets because Tiberium consumes organic matter to replicate itself. until it consumes everything, and then the scrin shows up to harvest it.
Thsn Kane pulled a Uno-Reverse Card on their asses by tricking them with that Liquid Tiberium explosion. 🤣👌 GOD, I love that bastard!
Them Scrin arrived expecting a harmless planet with just a few surviving mutant lifeforms, only to get Ion Cannon'ed to the face, than scrambling to build Threshold Towers in order to escape *the shockingly advanced and powerful civilizations.* Granted, the Scrin tech was superior, but they were still miners going up against two military powerhouses. _(really wish we could've seen the full might of their military in future games, instead of __-Tiberium Twilight-__ _*_the abomination_*_ )_
I appreciate that the Scrin are generally confused, have bad intel and an out-of-touch high command that keeps giving bad orders (like wasting forces attacking population centers instead of putting everything into holding the Red Zones) because they don't understand the situation. It's different from the typically-uniform nature of most alien invaders.
I also like that, while there is ultimately a magic "destroy this and the invasion ends" button, humanity didn't really need it. The Scrin forces were collapsing anyways without reinforcements, making C&C3 one of the few examples of near-modern humans defeating an alien invasion in peer-to-peer combat.
Another fun twist is that the scrin invasion isn't an invasion at all. It is a harvesting fleet with enough military forces to protect it from whatever remaisn in the planet surface after the liquid tiberium detonation.
@@andrefaillace81 You mean after the Tiberium has fully overtaken the planet.
The Liquid Tiberium explosion was Kane's trap to get this mining fleet to arrive prematurely and then scramble to build Threshold Towers in a panic to escape, *all so he could acquire one of them for himself.* 😈
@@MrDibara Kane is the Messiah after all!
When I was a youngster, I watched 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978) and it will stay with me forever as the scariest invasion ever. It's unstoppable, everyone needs to sleep. And, that sound they make, such an alien noise from the mouth of a human looking thing. horrifying.
Also, right after finishing the movie, my uncle who im watching with turns to me and says "you know, that's a true story, that's us" He made a sweeping motion with his arm. "we stole all this"
Your uncle sounds awesome 🤣
Mass Effect 3 had probably the best invasion of Earth in media rn. Earth fell in an hour or less when the Reapers hit. Halo had the UNSC holding out on Earth for months and 40k has so many planets holding out till the last for months or even years. Mass Effect made you realize that this threat is real. Leaving Earth and seeing the falling pieces of the Fourth Fleet onto Earth hammers that in.
One thing I have against Alien Invasions (or rather all extrasolar invasions) , is the oft dismissal that planets (in sci-fi) have better access to defence systems than typical expressed, especially in harder sci-fi's. A planet can use a planets oceans for coolant for planetary weapons, it has access to drones to disassemble, or re direct meteors, or even outright engage them.
A planetary battery can fire shots so regularly that it could force an invasion fleet to stand off so far off to be ineffective, or cook themselves with evasion. A network of "towers" could intercept direct attacks etc
The simplistic notion of attacks on planets typically ignores an equivalent defensive system that important plants would have.
Weber does go into this really well in the sequel to Mutineers Moon. Earth is able to hold off a massive fleet for months because things like shield generators and weapon emplacements on a planet are far, FAR bigger than anything that can be mounted on a mobile structure.
A real world analog is coastal defence artillery up until WW2. A battery of day 3 guns ashore could fight off a ship with 6 or 8 guns. Because the shore based guns don't have to compensate for ships roll and pitchso are more accurate. They can be mounted higher to increase range and can have more layers of armour and concrete protection than a ship can handle.
It's a good thing then that not everyone makes this mistake... you have a very good point that a lot of things do, and it gets frustrating at times. It often makes for a much scarier situation when you have all these measures in place and then the invaders still manage to invade, despite the defenders having taken every measure that it was realistic to take.
Halo I think holds up fairly well because of the huge military presence, orbital MAC stations, and fleet buildup around worlds like Reach and Earth - at least, it holds up well enough that you never feel like the UNSC is holding anything back. Anything important enough to be fortified is fortified with defenses across the planet and into space, with deep-space monitoring stations that can and should have picked up the incoming Covenant (I believe canonically, some guy dismissed readings of the of nearby Covenant ships as a malfunction or anomaly before the invasion of Reach, and didn't tell their boss out of fear for their own job security I think. If that one guy had mentioned this, Reach may well have been better prepared, though the overall outcome would not have changed). Coincidentally, nukes are one of the only ways (apart from massed MAC volleys) for the UNSC to regularly threaten Covenant ships, so I guess the fact nukes are used and are common in the setting for levelling the playing field helps to sell this a lot.
The Dark Forest (book 2 of the 3-Body Problem trilogy) has humanity hyper-developing all technology the Sophons couldn't interfere with the development of, and they put together a fleet where every ship can flatten mountain ranges in single volleys, hit tiny targets at space combat distances, and change the geography of a planet. Nobody can fault them for not trying hard enough within their time, nobody can fault them for not putting up as many defenses as possible, but they did get very, very cocky because their weapons could destroy mountain ranges and stuff, and the Trisolaran fleet had spent I think literal centuries crossing the void between Alpha Centauri and Sol, so they were sure they had overprepared. Which makes the ensuing events all the more impactful - if you know, you know, and if not, it's a good book (though Dark Forest as an explanation for the Fermi paradox is definitely not without flaws, for some of the same reasons why it might be postulated to begin with, so please don't go having existential dread from this book).
Coincidentally, both of these are (loosely) harder sci-fis with an alien invasion, and they do work great.
To be fair, planetary defense is only functional as long as it is not targetable - planetary defense assets are a great deal harder to rebuild than a fleet if the invasion is a long-term thing and if the other guys can just trade a ship for a big gun, then it's just a matter of mathematics - if they can throw more ships at your defense than you have defenses, they win.
Especially when you get caught with your pants down and your planetary defenses are not finished - and the part that's unfinished is the guns and the mass of rock above them to prevent them from getting slagged.
@ That's a great point... though I will say that planetary defenses can fall into some strange categories depending on the tech, lore, and intention of the author/creator of the setting. Sometimes writers want the setting to have room for prolonged planetary sieges and stuff, and build their universes to accomodate that. Sometimes writers go, "well that's not what I want" and the setting just doesn't have them, and the lore and logic of the world reflect that.
All of that said, though... oftentimes, the costs of investing in relatively static planetary defenses line up exactly with what your post says, and these costs are known in-universe. Fortifications will only be put down where they are most needed, where the need outweighs the risk. I'm thinking Halo in this case with the UNSC's orbital MAC installations. These are targetable and squishy to the Covenant, but also hit hard enough to be some of the only weapons that are reliable against their ships. The UNSC knows how valuable these are, but also how vulnerable they are - and I think that's usually reflected in the lore and games well enough. I mean, heck, you spend a level defending Cairo Station after watching one of her sister stations explode. You won't find these put just anywhere, because to even cover a planet you'd need a lot of them and a lot of ships to keep them secure, but there are some planets like Earth and Reach that just must be held no matter the cost.
Ok,I never expected a alternatehistory/pointless hub reference but Im glad to know some people watch him
The reason Alien Invasions are so popular in science fiction is that it's common in reality. It's the fear of the unknown wrapped up in Colonialism.
And that parallel was intentional from the very beginning; Wells wrote War of the Worlds in part as an anti-colonialist story told through a sci-fi lens.
Yup. And the infiltration stuff is largely a play on the red scare and other instances of mass paranoia.
@@corrinestenman5683 And there's a reason why the alien invasions shifted as time went on, from the powers of the day getting the same Royal Navy Special treatment they'd given to others, to being infiltrated and subverted just like the Commies to, to being about resources and extraction.
You can combine the fear of the unknown and first contact with such (often violent) with a lot of different tropes and issues facing a society to get something unique, which makes the alien invasion (or fantasy equivalents like the demonic invasion of Golarion in the Pathfinder games via the Worldwound) tell a huge host of stories from the same basic framework.
@@corrinestenman5683 Nailed it. The book is explicit, the Martians warred in the same spirit as European colonialists.
Did you mean to say "its a common FEAR in reality", or do you know something the rest of humanity doesn't?
Glad to see Battle LA mentioned. Fun movie!
And from what I recall, if you look at newspaper headlines in the background, there are mentions of "strange lights" around titan and other water sources in the system, suggesting that the invasion of earth is just part of a strip mining operation that wants ALL the water in the system.
I think one aspect that makes alien invasions interesting, is that the alternative is horrifying. I don't think humans like to contemplate the idea that an alien species shows up and just glasses the planet entirely. In the alternate scenario humanity actually has a space in the world afterwards (especially if they win, something which I always find utterly rediculous), but even if they lose they still have a space as a lower caste or something along those lines, which leads to interesting stories.
Humanity eradicated and never to be seen again storylines are probably less appealing to us.
Ever read "The Killing Star"?
@@darksidegryphon5393 I have not.
@@op4000exe Basically Earth and human colonies in the solar system get obliterated by relativistic missiles and then the aliens arrive.
I think the X-Com invasion is my favorite kind. Slow and quiet at first, ramping up in intensity over months and years. All shrouded in mystery.
I think one of the big drivers in why they're so fascinating is they allow us to tell stories that'd otherwise be difficult to practically talk about. They lend themselves to the classic 'good guy' versus 'bad guy' in a way that suspends disbelief for a sci-fi story. It makes the underlying conflict intuitive and easy to understand without a ton of backstory prep - you have the humans, who we're going to sympathize with, and the weird inhuman things that we're going to find creepy. Everything else is just building off of that and even when the excuse for the invasion doesn't make a lot of sense under any real scrutiny - like 'they needed water' - the basics of the conflict aren't so out there. And it's a story that's difficult to tell with humans because there's a lot of emotion wrapped up in our own modern day conflicts. It's really hard to come up with an idea for a modern Earth conflict that isn't going to be stepping on toes and upsetting people, by either simplifying some conflict to the point of being insulting to one or both of the belligerents, or dehumanizing a group of people, etc. You just don't have that issue with aliens. You *can* humanize them, of course, and add more nuance to the conflict, but aliens by themselves are just an incredibly ready made story. They're like vanilla ice cream; if you want to bring a snack to a party, just bring that and it'll probably go over okay, and if you want it to be special just bring some toppings.
Missed opportunity to discuss command and conquer’s tiberian series.
I think that is how you should invade another planet. You do not send your army and start a war, too much waste of resources, you send a planet wide terraforming agent and wait. Once the time is done, only then you send your force.
The opening of ME3 always hits the feels. They get you roped in with the kid.
For those who don't know, speaking of games inspired by XCOM, the most common background music in recent Spacedock videos is from Firaxis's _XCOM: Enemy Unknown_ and _XCOM 2._
I've always thought The Fifth Wave was the most realistic alien invasion movie I've seen.
Please give the book a try. The atmosphere of the books are so great, but I wish that movie never existed. edit: after some recap the book is not as good as I remember, but still way better than the movie.
Red over at OSP speculated on this with her "Space Horror" video. The fear of "we were bastards to other cultures... what if someone came and did the same stuff to us" is a big part of it. Also, given your background, I wonder what you would say about some invasions being "aliens giving us the British Navy special.'
Honestly kind of surprised how little the Freespace series or Freelancer get mentioned on your shows, considering they're perfect examples for topics like this.
I think Sci-Fi works off the fact humans don't want to be alone in the universe, but, also want to believe we are the powerhouse of the universe.
So, instead of Terrans humans from Earth should call themselves Mitochondrians?
A lot of Sci-Fi concepts are rooted in the ideas of white supremacy and colonialism, yes. This isn't a new revelation.
We want to believe that we are that one village in Gaul that the Romans somehow never quite managed to conquer.
"Two Possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying".
Arthur C. Clarke, as quoted by XCOM:Enemy Unknown
Also liked the way the Garmilas tried to Invade the Earth in Space Battleship Yamato.
When the Initial invasion force failed to break their orbital defences (due to earth being just a small side war in the big picture for them) they changed to far range bombardment which humanity couldn't do anything against effectivly turning earth into an mars like planet.
Personally I would love more of the kind of subversion of this sub-genre seen with the James Cameron Avatar films, where Humanity are the alien invaders/occupiers.
Certainly potential there to talk about between Avatar and Starship Troopers. Perhaps in future!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
A lot of people see the humans in those movies as good guys acting reasonably. You can show a human the horrors of colonialism, but you can't make him realize it's bad.
@@DecidedlyNinja Those people seem weird, until you notice that every reason they give is just internalised colonialist attitudes. "They need the resources", "Oh, they could wipe out the natives but they choose not to", "The natives weren't negotiating", "The natives were a stagnant society, they weren't *using* that stuff".
@@DecidedlyNinja That's because a lot of people actually don't know anything about Avatar lore.
@@Taronyu_SVK I have never deeply studied the lore but I knew the RDA was bad news almost from the start. If life has taught me anything, never trust a large corporation with no guardrails hellbent on exploiting a resource.
I feel a good question to ask the RDA fanboys is "Would you give up your land, Or vote yes on moving your town so that a company could come in and build a strip mine for coal?"
5:10 you said that the Illuminate’s first strike is different from Independence Day but now there’s a clear buildup happening right now in Helldivers 2 with something predicted to come through the Meridian Wormhole on the games first anniversary on the 8th.
Yes its very interesting that they did a surprise thing and now there's a buildup! Best of both worlds in some ways.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Battle los angels will always be one of my favorites, so underrated ❤
Video feels like it’s basically a Helldivers expansion promotion and I’m all for it
One of my favorite 'alien invasion' stories is Turrtledove's Worldwar series.
-The invasion fleet arrives only to find humanity more advanced than they expected due to us being more innovative than them.
-Their technology is better than ours, but not so much better as to be incomprehensible or invincible.
-GInger is pretty much alien heroin.
-The story is very character-focused instead of just being the grand march of history.
-And did I mention this all happens during World War II? So you have historical figures mixed in with completely fictional characters.
It's a great read, and again, one of my favorite alien invasion stories.
Nobody probably would see this comment, but my guess about the draw of this trope is about getting a fighting chance. If they invade and slowly take ground piece by piece, it feels like there's a point in fighting. Instead of immediately giving up.
That's a good point.
@Titanic_Tuna thx
The thing you're missing is probably that everyone loves a good underdog story, and an alien invasion lets human militaries be the underdog despite being at their most powerful. In the original book war of the worlds we root for the thunderchild ramming and taking down a single tripod allowing civilian ships to escape, as well as the artillery managing to knock out a single tripod with a headshot. While in the most recent movie we get our big money shot as a bunch of soldiers take down a tripod with gustavs and javelins.
I always like the twist in the manga Cannon God Exaxxion. Starts as a very V-coded invasion where they ingratiate themselves into human society over a decade, then once the invasion starts and the giant robot fights begin, half the alien forces mutiny, kill the loyalists, blow up the warp gate to the homeworld, and reveal that the human robot is an ancient, powerful, and rare superweapon (that crashed on Earth thousands of years ago) and then focus everything on capturing or convincing the protagonist to join them to form a new empire.
Couple to this the aliens loyal to Earth, anti-alien partisan fighters, surviving aliens loyal to the empire, world governments who varyingly rebel against, capitulate to, and openly assist the invaders, and the protagonists grandfather, a mad scientist who found and repaired the mecha, each with their own agenda, makes a very tangled web.
I like how in Warhammer 40k, when a Necron tomb world wakes up, it’s a kind of invasion
Don't forget about those sneaky "secret xenos within" invasions. 'They Live' is a classic fifth column flick and would be an epic opening act for a 'V' reboot. They don't just show up, they been sneaking in here for a minute...for asylum of course...until the third act lol.
The War of the Worlds: Alien Invasions in the era when people thought you got from planet to planet by being shot out of a giant cannon.
As the book came out 5 years before Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published the rocket equation, that's not surprising.
And in fairness, War of the Worlds is from the perspective of very early 20th century British who explicitly have not been able to reverse-engineer what the Martians left behind by the time the record is written. The "shot out of a giant cannon" thing is simply what they think happened based on what they have observed.
I mean honestly with how many people see space travel as a 1 to 1 with naval travel. Being shot out of a cannon from planet to planet is probably more accurate with how space travel is really like.
@@igncom1
Except it's not.
It's not even remotely anywhere close to what actual interplanetary navigation and orbital trajectory calculations entail.
Even today, if we need to send a probe to say, Saturn or even our next door neighbor Venus, it's not just a simple case of finding Venus or Saturn in the sky and aiming your rocket and firing.......unless you really want to waste fuel and for the journey to take twice or thrice longer or more.
Because we use gravity assist to accelerate/decelrate and re-direct stuff that we sent out into other planet's there's a lot of calculations and thinking outside the box (like aiming your probe to the other side of the sky to get a gravity assist boost from Mars to get your probe to Venus faster and also using their respective revolutions and orbits around the sun to shorten the trip.
I can pin down exactly what it is that makes alien invasions such a persistently interesting concept for fiction. We know we have to be ready for it.
With Reach I still wish we got to see the UNSC fleet get annihilated. Sure we saw a couple of our Frigates get destroyed and the arrival of the Covenant Battle Fleet, but we never saw the fleet on fleet engagement that would see the UNSC crushed!
This is the topic I was the most interested in you covering
Great vid as ever. There are interesting connections between B5's Shadows and alien invasion themes, but I'm slightly disappointed you missed an opportunity to include Vir Cotto waving at Morden's lifeless head.
Humans are by far the dominant species on Earth. Part of the appeal of alien invasion stories is turning that around. Now humans are the underdog, and everyone loves a good underdog story.
A favourite alien invasion moment is from Stolen Earth in Doctor Who, Earth is in a dark sunless space-rift place, and the signal comes out of the dark:
“Exterminate!”
Really like the aliens in the Edge of Tomorrow. Fast, aggressive and with the total cheating "infinite redo's" ability.
The Underdog story is also strong with these, and everyone likes that.
I'm not actually sure how evergreen a story topic they are outside the West. I genuinely think that we find it so morbidly fascinating is that deep down, we're terrified of the thought of another civilization doing to us what we've done to everyone we've deemed "lesser" on our own planet. That's certainly what drives H.G. Wells' take on it.
I do think that part of the reason why alien invasion stories are so captivating is due to our own history with very similar scenarios, IE the conquest of the Americas. Neil deGrasse Tyson says it better, but our own history of coming into contact with cultures much less technologically advanced than our own is very bloody. We know (or at least we think we do) how aliens turning up would go down
Niel DeGrasse Tyson isn't qualified to talk jack shit about the conquest of the americas, guy's a pop-sci talking head with a degree in astronomy.
@@ymishaus2266 He's right though.
@@ymishaus2266 Who do you think is qualified to talk about it then?
This argument always confuses me so much. Especially considering that on a grand scheme of things we've began to climb out of barbarism only very recently.
Expecting aliens to behave like the 16th century conquistadors or the EIC is a bit like expecting modern wars be fought by medieval rules and standards. Especially when you consider that both are a result of a very specific combination of European culture and religion, and just wouldn't happen (or at least wouldn't be as bad) otherwise.
@ Yeah I can agree with that, there's no way to tell if an alien species with completely different evolutionary behaviorisms would behave the same way we have. My theory is that we're projecting our only frame of reference (us) upon the unknowable, and what we see in ourselves terrifies us.
*Alien invasions pulls together multiple sub-genre interests.*
Often Military Sci-fi for one thing, but also the philosophical question of what to do in the event other life is discovered, the unusual clash of distant civilizations reliving early colonization in the Age of Sail, and it generally gives the audience an entire underdog faction to root for. It can touch upon so many different aspects in conclusion, the weight of sheer impossibility in resistance which can connect the audience, the glimpse of hope, and the celebration of ingenuity and skills over bullying brute power.
I love how spacedock mentions wodering about what the Illuminate are up to and just a few hours a go we heard they are trying to yeet the Meridia singularity towards Super Earth
Ah, a pointlesshub enjoyer
One theory I like about Battle Los Angeles, is that the aliens we see are the survivors of a defeated army. They are after water on Earth, for no other reason than they don't have the infrastructure to harvest it in space on their own, and is probably one of the best realistic explanations.
In reality I’d give us 12 hours. Wave one of relativistic kill missiles takes out half the planet. Wait twelve hours for the planet to rotate and take out the second half.
8:08 Colonialism. District 9, the Prime Directive, the Invasion of Naboo, etc. etc.
I think the Alien invasion trope plays off of the "fear of the unknown". The mystery being uncovered of who they are, what they are, what they want, and how they are going to get it.
Mass Effect 3 has it in spades.
The invasion of Earth - which is so overwhelming that your character has to flee the planet to go find help, because Earth forces alone are simply no match.
The battle for Palaven - with the most powerful navy in the known galaxy getting paddled while the Turian home world burns in the background.
The invasion of Thessia - the acknowledged most advanced civilization in the galaxy just crumbling before the Reapers.
Hell, they even went after the Krogan home world - though even they didn't want to mess with the yahg.
I really love the emergency communication to all Alliance forces that you get to read. It's just a bit of text, but it really establishes the stakes.
EMERGENCY FLASH TRAFFIC - URGENT
From: ALLIANCE FLEET OPERATIONS
**FLASH FLASH FLASH X1A.34**
ALL ALLIANCE MILITARY PERSONNEL:
THIS IS A GALAXY-WIDE ALERT FOR ALL HUMAN TERRITORIES. FLEET ADMIRAL HACKETT HAS DECLARED THREAT CONDITION SABER ONE. ENEMY PRESENCE CONFIRMED IN SOL SYSTEM. EARTH UNDER REAPER ATTACK.
ALL ALLIANCE MILITARY PERSONNEL ARE DIRECTED TO EVACUATE SOL SYSTEM AT FIRST AVAILABLE OPPORTUNITY. DO NOT ATTEMPT EARTH APPROACH. HEAVY ENEMY RESISTANCE REPORTED. REPEAT. DO NOT ATTEMPT EARTH APPROACH. FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW ON CODED CHANNEL CRIMSON TACIT.
EARTH-BASED ALLIANCE PERSONNEL UNABLE TO EVACUATE ARE DIRECTED TO COMMENCE ANY AND ALL NECESSARY COUNTERMEASURES.
ALL REMAINING ALLIANCE PERSONNEL OUTSIDE SOL THEATER ARE DIRECTED TO MUSTER AT PRE-APPOINTED STAGING AREAS AND COMMENCE OFFENSIVE COMBAT OPERATIONS AT FIRST AVAILABLE OPPORTUNITY.
IN ABSENCE OF FURTHER INSTRUCTION, INDEPENDENT ACTION IS AUTHORIZED.
btw, I highly recommend anyone interested to read the original war of the worldsrld's by HG wells, it's old enough for the troops common at the time to be considered new and the twist of the aliens being weak to bacterias, is brought about fairly beleivably well (especially if you also consider how much people at the time knew about that subject), it also does have an epilogue that hints at a possible sequel, that to my knowledge never happenned.
Pacific Rim is also an alien invasion movie. The Kaiju are weapons.
Personally a think the scrin invasion is really cool humans siding with the aliens is rarely done and kanes mysterious nature really adds to the story
Sci-fi's bread and butter is the alien invasion and how they are done depends on the writer's creativity and knowledge.
Fs in the chat for Thunderchild
Most Scifi nerf nukes in order for aliens to win.
halo dosnt
*Independence Day has entered the chat*
@@nwmancuso In the books. The aliens were actually panicking after the first one. Because one more and their shields would break.
We have nukes, made them before we had reliable jet engines. Imagine what weapons and defences aliens would have with their warp drives and whatever let's them survive impacts at super Lumina speeds
Human weaponry tend to get nerfed generally, we are just too good at destruction. In War of the Worlds (the book), HMS Thunderchild, a then obsolescent torpedo ram ironclad, manages to destroy two Tripods, one with cannon fire and the other by ramming it, before being destroyed by the third one. Subsequent adaptions cut the Thunderchild and had to give the Martians deflector shields to preserve their threat, because not long after the novel was written we developed such fun things like tanks, bombers, dreadnought battleships and railway artillery.
War of the Worlds '88 stumbled so that The X-Files could run, hope Spacedock expands on the Infiltration Invasion that's covered a bit lightly here.
I recently read The War Of The Worlds. I was blown away by how we’ve basically been telling the same story over and over again for over a century, just with different dressings
There was a missed opportunity in SG-1 for me, which had the Trust, an Earth based terrorist organization, infiltrated by the surviving members of the Goa’uld. I thought that it would have been an interesting arc to have this group, led by Ba’al, expose the SGC to the public and claim that they were the victims of a xenocidal campaign by the United States government. The show would have become a more Earth focused political drama for the duration of the arc and could have been an interesting exploration of how the existence of aliens would be received by the general population and how the diversity of Earth cultures and governments could be turned against themselves.
Skyline from 2010 was good and I'm sure half of the hate it got was just because the Aliens were so overwhelmingly powerful. Don't want to spoil to much, but they didn't had an achilles' heel like in 90% of the other movies and laughed about every effort the humans put together.
I think the concept was great but really, the director couldn't decide on what kind of movie it was and it suffers because of it - is it about civilians trying to survive or about spectacular battle scenes as the military tries to fight back? It went for both and doesn't come together as a whole, and has some extremely forced situations where the civilians end up in the middle of the military engagements. The dialogue and acting wasn't particularly strong either, but I think it could've worked if the story had been more focused.
Animorphs had a lot of this, but primarily it was a vehicle for spy stuff, intrigue, and war crimes done against aliens. Yet, at the end, there is a full scale invasion, but the war drum had been beating for 30 books previous to the full scale fighting
also it was shown that even if it was a full-scale invasion from the start, humans still manage to win via sheer numbers. Earth's population being quite literally orders of magnitude larger than any of the alien factions
No mention of the Yuuzhan Vong from Star Wars :(
Anyway I think one of the reasons people are drawn to this sort of fiction is that it's kind of based on real life. It's an easy way for otherwise opposing factions to set aside their minor differences and unite against a much more dangerous and common foe. France and England used to be at each other's throats for most of their history, but they both united against Germany in both world wars, and I think these kinds of alien invasions run parallel to that idea.
Gotta do a vid on 80's type of tech in SC-FI like how alien isolation did it or signals. I just like em big computers.
(Analog type stuff)
I'm Worldbuilding one as I watch this haha
Check out "The Night of the Triffids!"
I really liked how they gave the Quintessons classic alien invasion vibes in Transformers One despite the entire movie being about aliens on an alien planet from our perspective.
8:21 Genetic memory of getting sacked by Roman and/or Mongols
Independence Day is as if a small fleet from the Star Wars Empire invaded Earth in the 90s. And the coolest part of every good invasion movie is the beginning. When aliens unexpectedly appear and mess up people's entire perception of normality and disbelief. Independence Day marked my childhood when I watched it
Season of Arrivals in Destiny 2 did a great job of building up the arrival of the Black Fleet. Missions to decode strange messages, Pyramid Ships darkening otherwise familiar skylines, and eventually entire systems disappearing (being vaulted :( ).
My favourite invasion threat is the one in The Three Body Problem. We start so incredibly, truly incomprehensinly outgunned and outsmarted. Most invasion tropes cover only the outgunned-part.
That's one hell of a dumb alien invasion story for all manner of scientific-based reasons.
But I can see why fans of the book think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
In addition to having our sanctuary lost. The War of the Worlds was written as an absolutely scathing indictment of European colonialism. The Martians were the new colonizers, the British the helpless native tribes being slaughtered.
While I will never argue it is realistic (nor even contemplate a discussion about the writer's political views and message), I like John Ringo's Posleen War for how much it focuses on the conventional side of fighting an alien invasion, along with concocting a _slightly_ reasonable excuse for why these interstellar locusts are so easy to kill with artillery.
I like the "fun" Earth invaded stories where the invaders are more advanced than we are...but not SO advanced that they wipe out our defenses instantly. Larry Niven's "Footfall" is a great example of this, as well as John Ringo's books involving the Posleen as the invading aliens.
apparently the martians in the war of the worlds book are quite weak and instead rely on shock and ave and querilla tactics to win battles because every artillery piece about a certain caliber just shreds their tripods.
Not really. They had all the firepower they needed to win every engagement but used it too late in a couple of cases due to not knowing anything about human militaries. Then they adapted. They certainly never resorted to guerrilla tactics.
The original ones were more than strong enough to beat humanity, it’s just that humanity has gotten way stronger since the book was written. Originally their speed and mobility made it impossible for the artillery to hit them, now we have tanks and missiles designed to target fast moving armored vehicles.
Invasion America was a fantastic approach to when the alien invaders are very technologically advanced but don't have the resources or manpower to conduct a shock and awe invasion. Love it.
7:59 Did...did you just channel Cody?
@6:11 The battle LA aliens did actually come to live in the oceans, there was a lot of backstory that wasn't mentioned in the movie.
Have you got a source handy for that? I've never seen any extra lore for the movie beyond speculation.
There is a show for free on YT (that got cancelled after 1 season, unfortunately), Threshold, that depicts an interesting "invasion(?)" by sending a multidimensional probe that carries some kind of DNA altering frequency, turning humans into hybrids. And the cast is really good. Brent Spiner, Peter Dinklage and others.
Ah I remember. Nice concept. But they somehow managed to ruin every episode at the end with something illogically stupid 😂 But I still liked the overall story
Oh also there was an episode of Outer Limits with this plot :)
'V' is another form of alien invasion where the aliens come to us as friends, and later on we find out how horrifically they intend to take all our water and have the human race for dinner. (No, there's no cookbook this time) 😳
It should be noted that the original 70's Cylons were aliens.
Two more points about alien invasions:
It's usually a David vs. Goliath story
It's a war movie where you don't have to worry about dehumanising the enemy.
Before science fiction was big, War of the Worlds was considered part of a different genre - "Invasion Fiction", which was usually stories about continental European nations invading Britain, and heroically fighting them off.
it should be noted that earth in the Half life universe was brought to it's knees by portal induced natural disasters long before the Combine show up.
V and V The Final Battle were the best alien invasion stories.
As someone wryly put it on twitter once, Alien invasion films are "what if colonialism, but it happened to us". The appeal is us, whether a nation or humanity as a whole, being the underdog rather than the destroyer
I love the invasion in annihilation because it’s a cosmic horror beyond human comprehension
To me, one of the more insidious alien invasions was the Scrin from the Command and Conquer series, sending tiberium to Earth and terraforming the planet for them. There's just something about living on a world that is actively being transformed into an alien environment that you won't be able to survive on
One neat little exception, that I might’ve enjoyed hearing you discourse on, is the short-lived franchise, “Defiance,” which dealt with the aftermath of an invasion…which had ended in a draw.
What I like about the genre is the combined extreme tension of humanity first being put on the brink of eradication, then subsequent mobilization of Earth's economy, followed by military science research at breakneck speed, coupled with removal of a lot of non-essential civilian occupations like barbers and bartenders.
With these items in mind, you could fit some additional media in the narrative, with examples being:
Neon Genesis Evangelion - multiple Kaiju-like beings that violate laws of physics are met by clandestine organization with highly advanced equipment;
Doom Eternal - energy grid failure brought about by corrupted engineering talent results in the Earth's invasion;
Gunbuster - fast escalation to a space war with hostile civilization required harvesting entire parts of the Solar system to deliver the military response to enemy's homeworld.
Alien invasions endure because of their familiar unfamiliarity
We know war. We do it all the time. Only Klingons love it more.
But we know all our adversaries on earth. We know who does what why.
Aliens bring the familiar world of war, but are completely unknown. They could be anything, for any reason.
They are unfamiliar, but they speak a very familiar language. That's interesting, that's new.
The key to greatness is not novelty. It's a good mixture of new and old, innovative and familiar. Alien invasions scratch that itch perfectly
I think it's worth noting that two of the most iconic alien invasion stories, War of the Worlds and Independence Day, both feature the aliens as overwhelming aggressors against a global hegemonic power that was basically untouchable at the time of the story being written. For WotW it was the British Empire in the late 1890s, for Independence Day it was America in the 1990s. In both cases it was presenting a population that felt invincible with an enemy that seemed as invincible to them as they wereto the rest of the world
There's this semi-related sci-fi idea in my head I want to write down, meeting aliens as allies the middle of a conflict.
There's this story floating around in me head of a generic alien invasion story, but then it turns when another alien race comes to Earth and fights the invaders. Instead of the "lets learn languages!" schtick, the relation between the humans and the new aliens will be more as "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," and the humans and the new aliens fight off the invaders together.
I hold that the best alien invasion story is Command & Conquer 3. The aliens' general plan is actually brilliant (let tiberium consume the world and kill all resistance, then harvest it), but because they were fed bad intel, they showed up too early. Their confused high command makes multiple mistakes, ordering blunt terror attacks on populations centers as reconnaissance/distraction while they build up portal gates to summon reinforcements, but this ultimately causes unsustainable casualties in their limited forces (which were not intended to subjugate a planet, let alone one whose entire population was mobilized for total war). The local alien commander is forced to shift everything into defending a few beachheads as they attempt to evacuate.
While GDI ultimately destroys a classic lynchpin device that cripples the invasion, that was only AFTER neutralizing most of the alien forces, and humanity probably would have won that round regardless. However, the fact that so much damage was done by a confused mining operation security team shows how dangerous a true Scrin armada could be, and their one completed portal tower, while inactive, leaves the eternal possibility of their return...
It's also a really fun dynamic for them to show up out of nowhere halfway through a conventional world war, with nobody on either side (except the tippy top of one side's leadership) understanding what is going on. GDI and Nod's inability to decide if they are going to team up against the aliens or beat each other first is also funny. As a Scrin assessment states: "[humanity] is warlike to the extreme."