The idea of the existence of life forms more intelligent than our own clearly troubles us. If it’s not our own AI coming to take us down, it’s aliens. There was a time when space aliens tended to be morally as well as technologically superior to humanity. The gigantic and wise alien visitor from the star Sirius in Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) looks down with serene disapproval on an earth wracked by war and injustice. In many cases, nineteenth-century space aliens inhabit a purely spiritual realm, as in Marie Corelli’s hugely-successful-but-now-forgotten A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), in which human suffering is revealed as a function of our earthboundness, and the interstellar spaces through which the novel’s protagonist travels are suffused with spiritual wonder (C. S. Lewis reused the idea for his ‘Space’ trilogy of science fiction novels, 1938–45).
However, most science fiction now focuses on aliens as great invaders, come to end our world, and although the likelihood of such apocalypse is miniscule, this fantasy plays a large role in science fiction and popular culture.
Why the change? It seems likely that the shift between the 1750s and the 1890s was caused by the massive expansion of Western imperialism. The early eighteenth century was hardly a time of innocence in terms of the European exploitation of the rest of the world, but by the end of the nineteenth century imperialism was being pursued on a scale and with an inhumanity unprecedented in human history. It was also becoming as unignorable at ‘home’ as it was in those countries that were on the receiving end of imperial aggression, and fed into rising concerns over what would happen as these competing empires increasingly came into conflict with each other.
George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), a short novel about an imagined future German invasion of Britain, sparked a trend for ‘invasion stories’. It is badly written, hectoring and crass, but it touched a chord of anxiety in the British public: Blackwood’s Magazine, where the story was first published, reprinted the issue six times to meet demand, and produced as a separate volume it sold 110,000 copies in two months. Scores of similar tales appeared over the following decades, imagining future invasions by Europeans, Chinese, Americans and other peoples.
It was a particular stroke of genius by H. G. Wells to replace human adversaries with alien ones in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, not least because it so effectively changes the threat level from a local to a global one. He was imagining what it might be like to find oneself on the receiving end of this mode of apocalyptic alien expansionism. It is Wells who deserves the credit for establishing the portrayal of aliens from outer space as malign, predatory monsters bent on dominating or destroying the globe.
In The War of the Worlds, terrifying bear-sized, octopus-like tentacular Martian invaders crash to earth in gigantic metallic cylinders, emerging from their landing craft to pilot towering mechanical tripods that devastate south-east England. After several months of wreaking death and destruction, they succumb to mundane germs against which they have no natural defence. But you already know the story. The War of the Worlds is Wells’s most famous novel, and has had a greater influence on the development of twentieth-century science fiction than any other (except Frankenstein, perhaps).
Wells’s aliens are material rather than spiritual beings, more highly evolved and much more technologically adept, but uninterested in human moral orientations. They refract the idea of British imperial expansion back upon the British, bringing destruction, exploitation and death to London. As the novel goes on, we learn that ‘more highly evolved’ means that they have dispensed with a stomach and digestive system altogether and instead feed like vampires, taking the blood directly from other animals. They come to Earth to eat us.
Had the invaders not died of disease, it would have been a global disaster, with the subjugation of our species and the end of civilisation as we know it. But we might speculate that it would not have led to the destruction of all life on earth, as they needed to keep us around to feed on.
Nonetheless, many modern science fiction writers have explored a more extreme version of Wells’s alien invasion. A great many stories and films have been written and made in which alien invaders even more malignly destructive than Wells’s Martians attempt to destroy human life – perhaps most famously in Roland Emmerich’s loose adaptation of Wells’s novel, Independence Day, the highest-grossing film of 1996. Wells’s invaders are motivated by the desiccation of their home world and a desire to find a new place to live, but the ruthless alien invaders in Emmerich’s movie are more like locusts, their whole civilisation predicated on the model of travelling from one planet to the next, stripping each in turn of their natural resources before moving on.
The Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin explores a central mystery in his novel The Three-Body Problem:* what does a popular immersive virtual-reality game have to do with the suicide of prominent Earth scientists? The answer is that a superior alien species known as the Trisolarans, living in a solar system many light years away, are planning an invasion that will wipe out humanity. It will take 400 years for the Trisolaran fleet to reach us, but they have already made their presence felt. Using a technology based on ‘sophons’, particles that transmit back everything they observe, they have been monitoring humanity and can communicate with us if they wish. This technology is so sophisticated that nothing can be hidden from the Trisolarans: they have access to all computer databases and human communication. The only thing to
