INVASION

1) Futuristic fiction in the UK was given a tremendous boost by the success of George T. CHESNEY's clever piece of propaganda, The Battle of Dorking (1871), which put the case for army reform and rearmament by offering adramatic illustration of the ease with which the UK might fall to an invading German army. This became the foundation-stone of a subgenre of future- WAR stories whose history is described in I.F. CLARKE's excellent Voices Prophesying War 1763-1984 (1966). Significant exercises in similaralarmism published in the run-up to WWI included The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) by William LE QUEUX, The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine CHILDERS, The Invasion of 1910 (1906) by Le Queux and When WilliamCame (1913) by SAKI. P.G. WODEHOUSE's early novel, The Swoop! (1909), was a parody of the subgenre. The invaders were usually German, but stories of French invasion were frequently used as cautionary tales against the follyof building a Channel Tunnel, such as Max PEMBERTON's Pro Patria (1901). UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE was to a large extent an outgrowth and elaborationof this kind of fiction; and a crucial CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH was made by H.G. WELLS in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898), which imagined that aninvasion of the Earth by technologically superior ALIENS might appear to Britons in much the same light as the eventually genocidal invasion ofTasmania by Europeans had appeared to the luckless Tasmanians (see alsoThe WAR OF THE WORLDS). Although it was (very narrowly) anticipated in some respects by Kurd LASSWITZ's Auf zwei Planeten (1897; cut trans as Two Planets 1971), Wells's novel was far more influential in making the roleof invader central to the fictional image of the alien for the next half-century.Mundane invasions remained fairly commonplace in UK fiction between the wars, although the fear of occupation per se was outweighed and largely superseded by the fear of the aerial bombardment which might be its prelude; in the UK such stories far outnumbered stories of alien invasion, although there were some notable examples of the latter: G. McLeod WINSOR's Station X (1919) and Bohun LYNCH's Menace from the Moon(1925), as well as the Martian invasion included in Olaf STAPLEDON's future history LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930). This general dearth of alien-invasion stories is understandable. Separated from continental Europe by a mere 22 miles, the UK was especially vulnerable to the threatof invasion - and Britons understood how narrowly such a fate had been averted in 1588 and again in Napoleonic times.The USA was far less vulnerable to such anxieties - although they found expression in such novels as Thomas DIXON's The Fall of a Nation (1916) and Floyd GIBBONS's The Red Napoleon (1929), as well as in various lurid accounts of the"Yellow Peril", including Parabellum's (Ferdinand GRAUTOFF's) Bansai! (1909), Philip Francis NOWLAN's Buck Rogers stories (1928-9) and the series begun by Arthur Leo ZAGAT with "Tomorrow" (1939) - but in general the possibility of alien invasion probably seemed to US citizens not too much more remote than the probability of invasion by another nation.Early pulp melodramas of alien invasion include J. Schlossel's "Invaders from Outside" (1925), Nictzin Dyalhis's "When the Green Star Waned" (1925),Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's The Moon Maid (1926), Edmond HAMILTON's "The Other Side of the Moon" (1929) and John W. CAMPBELL Jr's Invaders from the Infinite (1932 AMZ Quarterly; 1961). An interesting story by P. Schuyler MILLER in which the "invasion" is by spores rather than sentient beings is "The Arrhenius Horror" (1931), a theme which he recapitulated in "Spawn" (1939); a later development of it was Jack FINNEY's The Body Snatchers (1955; vt Invasion of the Body Snatchers), filmed twice as INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Alien-invasion stories quickly became a staple of the specialist sf pulps, and Campbell went on to conduct a sober and rather peculiar analysis of the idea of alien conquest and the subjugation of humankind in four of his "Don A. Stuart" stories: "The Invaders" (1935), "Rebellion" (1935), "Out of Night" (1937) and "The Cloak of Aesir" (1939)- stories somewhat at odds with his later conviction that humanity was destined to get the better of any and all alien species. One of the side-effects of this later human chauvinism was Campbell's de-emphasizing of alien-invasion stories in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION - it is surprising how few such stories appeared in ASF in the decade separating The Dark Destroyers (1938 as "Nuisance Value"; 1959) by Manly Wade WELLMAN from"Late Night Final" (1948) by Eric Frank RUSSELL, even though such stories could certainly (as did both the examples cited) champion the human against the nonhuman. Joseph J. MILLARD's The Gods Hate Kansas (1941; rev 1964) is a notable example from elsewhere.A sparse but interesting line ofstories featuring invasions launched from UNDER THE SEA runs from Owen Oliver's antique "Out of the Deep" (1904) and Eden PHILLPOTTS's The Owl ofAthene (1936) to John WYNDHAM's The Kraken Wakes (1953; vt Out of the Deeps US) and Murray LEINSTER's Creatures of the Abyss (1961). These often bring the typical features of mundane and alien invasion stories into uneasy combination.Hypothetical Asian invasion continued to crop up occasionally in GENRE SF - as in Robert A. HEINLEIN's Sixth Column (1941 ASF as by Anson MacDonald; 1949; vt The Day after Tomorrow) and C.M.KORNBLUTH's Not this August (1955; vt Christmas Eve UK) - although they were easily outnumbered by attempted and successful conquests of a more exotic kind, even if most of these were featured in the less prestigious magazines. Invasions came not only from outer space but from other DIMENSIONS, as in Murray LEINSTER's "The Incredible Invasion" (1936 ASF;1955 dos as The Other Side of Here), from the microcosm, as in "Invaders from the Atom" (1937) by Maurice G. Hugi (1904-1947), and eventually from the future, as in Invasion from 2500 (1964) by Norman Edwards (Terry CARR and Ted WHITE). Among the more bizarre alien invasions is Fredric BROWN's "The Waveries" (1945), in which electrical energy-beings hijack ourairwaves. Despite the sobering conclusion of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, in which lowly bacteria must compensate for human impotence, confidence in human ability to repel alien invaders sooner or later always ran high in pulp sf, one lone man occasionally being adequate to the task, as in A.E. VAN VOGT's "The Monster" (1948). In some stories, of course, humans arethemselves the alien invaders of other worlds, and works of this kind (which rarely appeared in ASF) were often fiercely critical of such humanfollies as racism and imperialism; examples range from Edmond Hamilton's "A Conquest of Two Worlds" (1932) through Robert Silverberg's Invadersfrom Earth (1958 dos) and Downward to the Earth (1970) to Ursula K. LE GUIN's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972 in Again, Dangerous Visions edHarlan ELLISON; 1976).From their earliest inception, stories of invasion featured a paranoid anxiety that the invaders might already be lurking undetected in our midst. William Le Queux was an indefatigable propagator of the notion that a Fifth Column of German agents was already in the UK, preparing to play its part in open conflict, and many US Yellow-Peril novels likewise featured Fifth Columnists. This kind of PARANOIA could be taken to extremes in sf, where aliens could easily be credited with the power to masquerade as humans. The notion was understandably attractive to low-budget film-makers, and it was extravagantly deployed in the magazines and in the CINEMA during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the early Cold War period. The new wave of paranoid alien-invasion stories was launched by Murray Leinster's The Brain-Stealers (1947 Startling Stories as "The Manin the Iron Cap"; 1954) and Ray BRADBURY's "Zero Hour" (1947), but it really hit its stride with Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951), quickly followed by INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), Eric Frank RUSSELL's Three to Conquer (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I MARRIED AMONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958). By this time, however, the comic potential of alien invasion was being more widely exploited, too, in such works as Fredric Brown's Martians Go Home! (1955) and Richard WILSON's The Girls from Planet 5 (1955). The possibility of benign invasions wasconsidered, notably by Arthur C. CLARKE in CHILDHOOD'S END (1953), by Algis BUDRYS in "Silent Brother" (1956) and (somewhat perversely) byTheodore STURGEON in The Cosmic Rape (1958).By the 1960s the alien-invasion story appeared to be old hat, fit for cynical display in such stories as Thomas M. DISCH's The Genocides (1965), in which humans are relegated to the status of irrelevant vermin, and his Mankind under the Leash (1966; vt The Puppies of Terra UK), in which they become pets; or surreal parody, in such works as Keith LAUMER's The Monitors (1966) and Philip K. DICK's and Ray NELSON's The Ganymede Takeover (1967); orromantic nostalgia in such works as Robert SILVERBERG's Nightwings (fixup 1969). Serious treatments of the theme were rare: William BURKETT'sSleeping Planet (1965) and Piers ANTHONY's Triple Detente (1968 ASF as "The Alien Rulers"; exp 1974) do not quite qualify, although Gordon R. DICKSON's The Alien Way (1965) and John BRUNNER's The Day of the Star Cities (1965; rev vt Age of Miracles 1973) might. More recent attempts to revitalize the theme have been relatively few in number; by far the most determined and most successful is Footfall (1985) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE, a conscientiously controlled melodrama. Other notable examplesinclude Jack CHALKER's Dancers in the Afterglow (1978) and the "invasion" subplot of Gregory BENFORD's Across the Sea of Suns (1984).A notable theme anthology of early genre stories is Groff CONKLIN's Invaders of Earth (anth 1952).

   BS/DP

2) INVASION

   Film (1966). Merton Park/AIP. Dir Alan Bridges, starring Edward Judd, Valerie Gearon, Yoko Tani, Lyndon Brook. Screenplay Roger Marshall, based on a story by Robert Holmes. 82 mins. B/w.

   This interesting UK film tells of two humanoid aliens who crash-land on Earth outside a country hospital. It turns out that one is a prisoner of the other. Further aliens, membersof an extraterrestrial police force, arrive and demand that the hospital doctor hand over the prisoner; when their request is refused they place an impenetrable FORCE FIELD around the hospital, but are finally outwitted by the protective doctor. Bridges creates a powerfully strange atmosphere despite a very small budget.

   JB/PN