We Will Destroy Your Planet Page 18

  The humans will have no such head start where communicating with or understanding your species is concerned. (Unless you are also human, from a different era or alternate world. In which case you should continue to employ the same training as you give to any soldier or operative who may become a prisoner.) This means that you can think through your strategy and conduct a measured response, while the human captors are trying to figure out what your personnel actually are.

  Do not take too long, however, because it will occur to the humans at some point to vivisect their captive(s), especially if they do not realize that the captives are sentient, or do not recognize their importance to terrestrial science and sociology.

  You can simply destroy the holding facility to kill the captives before they can reveal vital facts, or you could mount a rescue mission. Threatening action if they are not released is always a possibility, as is offering a reward or trade. Be aware, though, that making successful communications contact to demand or request the return of any captives will, if this is how you have to announce your existence to humanity, create suspicion, as it will show that you have been monitoring humanity for a long time. Humans will wonder about your motivation in doing so.

  As for the captives themselves, of course the first duty of a prisoner is to escape. If you have teleportation technology, all of your forces should be fitted with an internal homing beacon or teleport trigger, which can be used to remove them safely from captivity at any time.

  Otherwise, any forces at risk of capture should, as mentioned previously, be trained in escape and evasion techniques and be given a list of rendezvous locations to make for in the event that they can effect an escape by more conventional means.

  MAKING YOUR OWN WAY HOME

  If no rescue can be mounted, it may be possible for stranded members of your forces – especially those who have survived a crash-landing before your main operation begins – to try making their own way offworld.

  If you came through a temporal or dimensional portal, you will need only to travel across the Earth to its location, without being discovered or recaptured. If you came by starship, you will be in a more difficult situation and will have a more difficult travel process ahead of you.

  This will entail either constructing a suitable launch facility, which may be well nigh impossible for an individual who isn’t a millionaire or making use of one of humanity’s launch sites. There are several dozen spaceports on Earth, but most are used only for launching satellites into orbit. Your best choices for making a trip in a suitable vehicle are Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Russia. Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in Hainan Province, China, will be a possible option soon, but is not yet operational.

  Needless to say, the few launch sites capable of sending life forms safely into space are well guarded, and there are many restrictions on who gets to take a trip. In general, only qualified military personnel or scientists have been able, after extensive background checks, to be given a seat on even an orbital flight. This is unlikely to be feasible for most extraterrestrials, unless you are able to shapeshift (in which case you can simply choose an astronaut or cosmonaut about to go into space, and imitate them to take their place) or control minds in order to make the relevant authorities give you safe passage.

  If you have been stranded and want to try constructing your own suitable launch facility, you will need to be able to either directly control – through psi power, technology, or chemistry – a lot of humans who can arrange the purchase of land, the construction, security, and so on, or to sell some of your scientific knowledge and technology for a very carefully arranged deal.

  You do not need to sell FTL drives, time travel, or doomsday weapons, by the way. Things as simple as new clothing fibres or materials, or heat-resistant or conductive materials will suffice. Such everyday items will both be easier for terrestrial manufacturers to make and market with the minimum of fuss, and be more subtle influences which will not attract attention for being too obviously advanced.

  In either event, if you do succeed in making it into orbit by means of a rocket launched from a human spaceport, your problems will really start; humanity has no vessels capable of near-c relativistic travel, let alone FTL or hyperspatial drives. You had best be either very long-lived, because it will take millions of years for you to get anywhere or have suitable suspended animation facilities on board your vehicle.

  All you need do then is activate a homing beacon and sleep until one of your ships finds you.

  WAR IS MUCH MORE FUN WHEN YOU’RE WINNING

  No matter how superior you think you are – or how superior you actually are – there is no such thing as a truly guaranteed victory. It is always possible for you to fail. Remember the story of Musashi and the farmer, and accept that you will lose someday.

  The reason why you fail to conquer the Earth could be through bad planning – though hopefully not, now – or sheer bad luck. Perhaps a rival invader or observer of the planet will step in. Perhaps you missed a microbe in your tests, which harmed your forces. Perhaps an unexpected solar flare disabled your ships or equipment. Most likely, if you didn’t go with the asteroid bombardment route, you were simply overwhelmingly outnumbered. After all, you can only have as many troops as you can bring or make, while the planetary population has absolutely everyone.

  If you have failed in your attempt to conquer the Earth, you will be faced with several options as to what to do next.

  EVACUATION

  As with all good military planning, it is important to have an exit strategy – or, ideally, more than one, depending on the different circumstances and contexts that might actually require you to withdraw from the Earth. You may wish to evacuate even if you did win the war and conquer the Earth, if you have then gone on to complete all your originally planned operations on the planet and achieved all your objectives. You could have to cease operations on Earth because you’ve received word of there being more urgent problems at home, or because you are being distracted by a war elsewhere.

  More likely, though, if you want to leave, it will be because you have been defeated and sent slinking home with your tails (if you have tails) between your legs (if you have legs). Hopefully this latter case has been avoided if you’ve been following the advice of this guide correctly.

  So, if you can simply leave, do. Make sure that you have not left humanity with any directions to your home, and go find a better target that’s less trouble to conquer. You can always re-arm, regroup, reinforce, and come back for a second attempt, but you can be sure that the terrestrial resistance will be waiting for you by the time you return and will have made sure that there are now planetary defences in place.

  Depending on how vindictive your nature is, you can carry out a (literal!) scorched Earth policy by either triggering a nuclear exchange as you go or conducting that by-now very belated asteroid bombardment.

  Some means of exit from the planet will be easier than others. If you have come through some kind of fixed portal, be it from another time zone in Earth’s past or future, a wormhole link to your home planet, or to a parallel dimension, you obviously have the easiest exit strategy, as you can simply withdraw through the portal on the ground.

  Leaving the Earth in a fleet of ships may be a more difficult proposition, especially if your evacuation is due to a defeat by terrestrial military forces. You will need to have suitable assembly and embarkation sites from which your forces can embark on craft designed to carry them out of the gravity well, possibly while still under fire. You may prefer to try negotiating a truce in order to safely embark your forces and leave.

  Before you do leave, you should destroy all your technology and equipment that will be left behind, so that humanity cannot use it to follow you for revenge later.

  If you can’t leave, for whatever reason, or if you just prefer to accept a diplomatic solution – or even if you’ve been impressed by the humans as worthy opponents – you can sue for peace and negot
iate an armistice. This will probably involve you having to make some form of reparations, in the form of reconstruction work and advanced technology.

  This is especially possible if the original war for the Earth was sparked by some form of accident or miscommunication, such as human troops shooting your messenger when he emerged from his ship, or you interpreting science fiction TV transmissions as threats that the humans were planning to come and invade you.

  It may even be possible that you or some of your forces decide they prefer the terrestrial ways of doing things and decide to stop trying to ruin it, to switch sides, or to outright go native.

  Stranger things have happened.

  A HISTORY OF ALIEN INVASIONS

  According to literature, movies, and TV, the Earth has been under threat of invasion by alien beings for a very long time.

  The earliest alien invasion stories are probably religious folk tales from cultures around the world – stories of angels, gods, or other beings coming down from the skies and making lives for themselves on Earth. These usually involve mating with humans, so that idea, of breeding with beings from the skies, has been around for a long time as well.

  There are Native American legends of women who came from the stars in flying baskets, but these are largely oral tales, rather than written literature, and, of course, they weren’t intended to be tales of invasion. Nor were they intended in any way as science fiction.

  The first (surviving) proper literary fiction example of alien overlords ruling over (literally) parts of the Earth comes in 1727, with Jonathan Swift’s famous Gulliver’s Travels. At one point, Gulliver visits the floating island of Laputa, which is a whole city-state hovering in the air in defiance of gravity, aboard which humanoids who are not human choose to control the weather by blocking sun or rain from reaching the ground below, thus controlling the agriculture of the Earth.

  In 1752, Voltaire published Micromégas, in which two vast alien intelligences – one from Saturn and one from the star Sirius – visit the earth.

  The alien invasion genre isn’t really originally a subset of science fiction, however, which was originally developed more with the intent of providing tales of exploration, philosophy and wonder.

  It actually evolved from the straightforward genre of invasion literature, which still exists in a far more limited form today, with movies like Red Dawn, and, in mutated form, in the zombie apocalypse genre. In general, invasion literature poses as a warning about the dangers of the reader’s homeland being overrun by faceless inhuman armies of one kind or another. Invasion literature almost began in the 1790s, after the Montgolfier brothers made their hot air balloon flight (and humans weren’t the first passengers of their flying machine, oh no. The first creatures known to have taken successfully to the air over the skies of Earth were nonhumans. On 19 September 1783, the Aérostat Réveillon was launched by the Montgolfier brothers, with three passengers: one sheep, one duck, and one rooster. The first manned flight took place a month or so later.)

  The French Revolution took place only six years later, and, during the era that followed, of Robespierre’s ‘Reign of Terror’ and the rise of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, there was a brief flurry of stories and even poems in both France and the recently-independent United States of America about using balloons to carry the revolutionary fervour to England.

  British writers replied with plays intended to warn about Gallic invasions, such as The Invasion of England in 1803, and The Armed Briton in 1806. Those were pretty much straightforward propaganda tracts, until the arrival of a proper ‘future war’ kind of story, in the form of An Invasion Sketch, a three-page story which covered a week in Napoleon’s supervillain-like conquest of London, in which he rebuilt and renamed the largest British cities. Both sides in the Napoleonic propaganda war then began to make use of the same engravings of fantastical motherships that would soon be used for a French invasion – rafts 2,100 feet on a side, powered by four windmills (one on each corner), with a solid, stone-built castle keep in the middle. To the readers of the early 1800s, this was basically what the sight of giant motherships hovering over cities in V or Independence Day were to modern TV and movie audiences.

  Invasion from above also made its debut here, in the form of engravings, with suitable scaremongering captions and headlines, of fleets of French hot-air balloons floating over the English Channel. The very channel, in fact, whose narrowness made a simple winner-takes-all invasion a focus for centuries.

  Almost as soon as the genre had begun, however, the more fanciful invasion-from-the-air and giant-mothership sorts of propaganda were put out of business by Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, which everyone could see pretty much negated the chances of there being any such invasion. (The post-revolutionary French government having executed most of its naval officers on the grounds that anybody and everybody could do the job of an experienced and trained commander equally, didn’t do them any favours either.)

  At the same time, there was literature that we’d call science fiction, dealing with what the world would be like in the future. Les Posthumes, for example, in 1802, Le Dernier Homme in 1805, Voss’s Ini: ein Roman aus dem ein und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert in 1810; and of course Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, one of the first true science fiction novels.

  As a side note, 1836 brought the first alternate history/parallel world story covering invasion and conquest: Louis Geoffroy’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812—1832): Histoire de la Monarchie universelle. This tells of Bonaparte being victorious in Russia, conquering Britain, Asia and the Americas, until the whole world accepts him as their Universal Monarch.

  Such tales were not particularly popular or memorable, and the potential genre sank without much of a trace, while Gothic literature swept across the pages of English-language printers and bookshelves, and held sway for decades. Eighty years later, however, things changed.

  In 1870, Prussia (part of Germany) took on France, who in the Napoleonic era had itself occupied the various German kingdoms in a hostile fashion. The Prussians armed themselves with far more modern technology than the French forces had. The Prussians had equipped themselves with a more modern army, lower-visibility uniforms, rifled barrels in all their weapons, breech-loading artillery that was much faster to reload, armoured ships and carriages, troop trains, and telegraphs for communication. The Prussians made swift victories with their superior training and technology, and Britain, in particular, took note that the face of warfare had just changed. Papers, magazines and books all raced to say their piece about the new warfare, but the one that grabbed popular public attention was a fictional story, a pamphlet called The Battle of Dorking.

  Written for political reasons by George Chesney, the story tells in flashback of a successful invasion of England at Dorking by an unnamed (but obviously German) foreign power. The viewpoint character is constantly pursued by technologically superior invaders, while his own side are badly equipped and untrained by comparison. Chesney, though an experienced military officer himself, had actually borrowed much of his writing style and plot structure from two historical novels about the Napoleonic wars, The Conscript (1864) and its sequel, Waterloo (1865), by Erckmann-Chatrian, and it’s a format and tone that would work very well – and very recognizably – for H. G. Wells some 28 years later.

  The Battle of Dorking was a huge hit, and was immediately followed not just by a genre of invasion-by-technologicaland-military-superiority but various unofficial sequels and ripostes, copyright be damned.

  Also in 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton published another now legendary invasion story, The Coming Race, which dealt with the first sort-of alien invasion. In this story, the alien invaders, the Deros, are not from outer space, but from a subterranean realm under the Earth’s own surface. Strangely, though largely forgotten as an early science fiction novel, the story sparked a rather odd conspiracy theory that flourished between the 1890s and the 1960s, in which many people believed that the Deros, or at least some sort
of underground race, actually existed, and that the Earth was hollow.

  Most of these tales were, however, simply about other nations invading, and the atrocities they could be expected to commit. In 1898, H. G. Wells changed all that forever and invented a whole new genre.

  Wells took the tone of The Battle of Dorking, the Gothic futurism of some of those other European novels, and a subversive attitude towards colonialism (brave at the time, when the British Empire was the largest empire the Earth has ever seen), and blended them with science, to produce the now legendary War of the Worlds.

  In Wells’s book, aliens from the planet Mars invade the Earth, treating the natives like cattle and trying to rebuild the planet in the image of their own – decades before words like terraforming had been coined. Wells had in mind to refer to the way the colonial powers of the 19th century had treated India and Africa, but what he ended up doing was pretty much inventing one of the 20th and (so far) 21st centuries’ most popular forms of entertainment. Interestingly, Wells didn’t realise this himself at the time. He didn’t consider himself a science fiction writer, not least because the phrase ‘science fiction’ itself wasn’t coined for another 20 years or so. In fact, Wells later wrote several other more straightforward invasion stories, which veered towards the futurist, warning of military technology and applications to come.

  Actually, the first true alien invasion story as we know the term is not the more famous War of the Worlds, but The Germ Growers, by Robert Potter, which was published in Australia in 1892. Potter has his aliens masquerade as human and set up a biowarfare programme, intending to develop a virus which will wipe out humanity, leaving the planet free to be taken over by their species. Which, to be fair, is the plot of a fair number of Doctor Who episodes, especially those written by Terry Nation.