Alien invasion: Encyclopedia II - Alien invasion - Variations

Alien invasion - 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, 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 familar 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 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 adaption being made by John Carpenter in 1982 as The Thing. Recently, the cancelled CBS TV show Threshold detailed such a scenario. The film The Faculty features a high school where the teachers are taken over by parasitic aliens, with the only only hope being that of a group of students.

Alien occupation can occur in many invasion stories. In short, the alien invaders win and occupy Earth or human civilization, 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 and John Christopher's book series, The Tripods.

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 America, 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 repluse 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, and Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space. A more modern take on this variation would M. Night Shyamalan's 2002 film Signs.

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. The Computer game Doom follows this idea. The novel Childhood's End may be viewed as a form of demonic alien invasion, because of the aliens' devilish appearances in the book.

A new type of alien invasion theme is an Extragalactic Alien Invasion where the invaders are from another galaxy. A notable example is the Yuuzhan Vong of the Star Wars: New Jedi Order books, where they are extragalactic invaders who invade the Star Wars Galaxy.

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 2 episodes of the popular scifi show "Stargate SG-1" an Alien race known as the Aschen befriend humans and share there advanced technology and medicine freely in exchange for stargate addresses. But is soon becomes clear that the Aschen who actually look remarkably like humans plan to a eradicate the human race slowly by making both women and men infertile so the human race dies out over generations.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Variations", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki