Whether touching down on the White House lawn or simply puttering around in the Solar System, the appearance of an alien starship is valid grounds for alarm. Any civilization able to cross the gulfs of interstellar space is by definition in command of technologies vaster superior to ours. Clearly, humans would be unlikely to win any overt conflict. However, humans might also fail to survive simple indifference to our well-being. Even ostensible charity might be challenging to survive.
Consider these five tales about alien charity, or indifference, or even just plain ignorance…
“The Liberation of Earth” by William Tenn (1953)
The benevolent Galactic Federation intervenes on Earth, providing protection from the malevolent Troxxt. All the Federation requires are certain concessions both reasonable and (thanks to the balance of power) irresistible. Additionally, the Federation facilities transform Earth from a minor backwater world to a military target.
The Troxxt attack! Having driven off the Federation forces, the Troxxt explain to the surviving humans that contrary to Federation claims, it is the Federation who are the villains, against whom the Troxxt are marshalling a common defense. Now humanity, or least the survivors, are part of the glorious resistance… for as long as it takes the Federation to liberate Earth again and begin the cycle anew.
I sometimes wonder if Tenn wasn’t being just the slightest bit satirical with this otherwise heartening tale of mutual assistance and glorious liberation1.
“And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” by James Tiptree, Jr. (1972)
Luckily for humans, the aliens with whom we share the galaxy may be vastly superior in every respect, but they have no particular dislike of humans or compelling desire to commandeer Earth. The aliens are content to include Earth in their trade networks. A few aliens find humans tolerable for more intimate contact.
While being the junior partner in any trade relationship would be disheartening by itself, the biggest problem turns out to be supernormal stimulus. Many of the aliens are irresistibly attractive to humans. No human can possibly compare. Even the perpetuation of the human race is insufficient reason to settle for humans.
James Tiptree, Jr. being James Tiptree, Jr., it is always a good bet that things are or will be or have been terribly wrong. Even seemingly harmless hobbies like alien key parties will likely end in tears. Or in this case, gradual extinction.
The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffitt (1977)
Apart, neither the United States of America nor China could manage a crewed mission to Jupiter. By pooling their technical know-how, US/Chinese success in this matter is assured… if the mutual distrust between the two paranoid, oppressive superpowers does not somehow sabotage the mission.
The Cygnans don’t care a toasted fig about Earth or American and Chinese ambitions. The Cygnans simply want to convert Jupiter into fuel and be on their way. Any humans that get in their way will be added to the zoo. The technological disparity is such that the most impact that even the most obstreperous, well-armed humans can achieve is to delay the Cygnans slightly before they leave for deepest space… a delay that will expose the Earth to the Cygnans’ deadly reaction drive as the Cygnan fleet crosses Earth’s orbit.
While Moffitt’s physics are somewhat regrettable, one must acknowledge that he put more effort into his alien biology than is usually the case. It takes the humans a while to work out that they’ve grossly misunderstood Cygnan physiology. The population the humans have been interpreting as larger males and smaller females are all females of varying size. The male Cygnans are present, but because Cygnans have more in common with anglerfish than mammals, have been dismissed as pets.
Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede by Inio Asano (2014 onward)
Woefully underinformed about humans, peaceful aliens park their mothership over Tokyo. Japan attempts to blow the craft from the sky. The bewildered aliens lack the means to flee and Japan’s initial efforts fail to annihilate the visitors. While the collateral damage to Tokyo’s hapless inhabitants is significant, the benefits to the defense industry are even more significant.
For high schoolers Koyama Kadode and Nakagawa “Ontan” Ouran, the invasion scare is just part of the background. The pair focus on more immediate concerns, such as Koyama’s hopeless crush on a teacher. Life is a series of zany adventures… at least until a well-meaning person manages to doom the Earth.
Asano manages a nice narrative trick in this manga, doling out endearing escapades long enough to get the reader thoroughly invested before revealing the alarming truth about what’s actually going on, and the tragedy that preceded the current invasion. It all works out for the best… but maybe not in this particular timeline.
Takopi’s Original Sin by Taizan 5 (2021)
Octopoid Nnu-Anu-Kf hails from the Happy Planet. Nnu-Anu-Kf possesses many useful devices, good intentions, boundless optimism, and total ignorance of human nature. As far as Nnu-Anu-Kf is concerned, everyone should be happy. In fact, it’s hard for the alien to grasp that there are people who are not happy at all.
Shizuka was abandoned by her father, is abused by her mother, and is relentlessly bullied by schoolmate Marina. Shizuka is so miserable that even relentlessly ebullient Nnu-Anu-Kf can grasp that something is horribly wrong. The kindly alien sets out to fix Shizuka’s life. Surely there is no problem the correct application of Happy Planet super-science cannot correct!
The corpses soon start piling up…
Japan excels in the production of utterly charming manga featuring quiet stories about characters enjoying to the fullest their delightful, life-affirming existences. Readers wanting a respite from life’s daily crises would be well advised to seek out such tales. But please note: Takopi’s Original Sin is not one of those manga. It’s more of a bleak examination of ill-informed good intentions running aground on the shoals of grim reality.
Science fiction authors being the cheerful crew that they are, there are many stories in which alien charity, indifference, or ignorance are just as dangerous for humans as actual hostility. I might well have missed one of your favorites. If so, please mention it in comments below.
- Still, Earth fares better in this story than it did in Tenn’s 1983 “There Were People on Bikini, There Were People on Attu.” ↩︎
I have been slowly going through the J-Novel Pulp translations of the Perry Rhodan Neo series (think of it as a reboot of the original German series)…I recently finished a sequence involving a race called the Fantan, who goes around earth taking whatever suits their fancy (which they call “Besun”) and putting them in their spacecrafts (think a galactic supermarket shopping spree)–whole buildings, bridges, monuments, people, and all sorts of other things are stolen from the planet. They’re indifferent to anything that doesn’t interest them, though, like a cosmic race of magpies.
Wow, that’s a crazy idea. Who could imagine a more powerful colonial power invading and running off with, like, whole temples and statues and monuments and taking them back to their home world where they keep them in a museum with a mold problem.
I don’t know about the current version but the Silver Age Brainiac was in the habit of shrinking cities to carry off with him. Terribly rude of Brainiac, but it did mean the Bottle City of Kandor survived Krypton’s destruction.
A bit more messy in continuity these days, but Brainiac is still doing it.
In James Alan Gardner’s League of Peoples backstory, aliens offering a free trip to better worlds facilitate enough emigration to crash Earth’s economy. Which is bad.
One could argue that the classic 1962 Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” (based on a Damon Knight short story) might fit into this category. Aliens with advanced technology land on Earth, where they are able to solve all energy and food shortages and prevent international warfare. What is the downside? We discover in the final scene (spoiler alert) that the handful of earthlings who voluntarily sign up to visit the aliens’ home world will become their tasty treats. The aliens likely saved and improved the lives of many more people than they actually shipped home to become gourmet snacks. One could even argue that this secret outcome was helpful to Earth in solving the inevitable secondary problem of overpopulation that got aggravated by their solving our other problems.
Tiptree’s Help might be an even better example – alien missionaries who intend to convert humanity to the One True Religion.
Or Else.
See also Busby’s Demu, who just want to Demu-form lesser species.
I recall the collection of Poul Anderson stories The Gods Laughed has several of these, the only one I recall clearly has a punchline that goes “Why didn’t you tell us we had immortal souls?”
The alien looked at him with infinite pity in his eyes. “You don’t.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is another classic indifference of aliens story. Sure, the Vogons destroyed the Earth, but it wasn’t personal. The plans were on file, we could have contested them. And the whole thing was an experiment anyway, but again, it wasn’t about us, we were just a by-product (or a bug, depending on interpretation).
The aliens in Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven were benevolent but caused a lot of damage because of their initial inability to understand how humans communicated.
I think the aliens were originally malevolent, as the unexpected consequence of Haber instructing Orr to dream an end to earths wars, which resulted in a common enemy for earth to fight on the moon. Then Heather slipped an instruction to dream that the aliens are no longer on the moon, resulting in their invasion of earth. Then Haber has Orr dream they are benevolent, and they end up having a knack for running antique shops.
There was an SF novel I read in the 1980s (while guarding a factory that had been hit by a tornado) that featured vast and powerful aliens that lived in the depths of space. They didn’t pay attention to planets, except that every so often a planet would start emitting annoying radio sound. The cure was easy: they’d just turn down the noisy planet’s star for a while and then the radio noise would stop.
(This is not a Fred Pohl novel)
That sounds like the Photino birds from Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee Sequence.
Oh, obviously the Presger from Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radsch series, starting with ‘Ancillary Justice’. The Presger could wipe us out in an instant, we don’t really understand them, but we (sort of) have a treaty with them so they’ll leave us alone. Maybe. Unless we have no idea what the Presger really think. Which we don’t. The $@@@@@#$$# Presger Translators aren’t much of a help either. But they do like our fish sauce. Maybe that will save us.
I think “The Liberation of Earth” was inspired by/ was a parable of the Korean War.
Creatures who don’t really understand humans used to be called fairies rather than space aliens, and there are many tales about them.
These days they are called politicians.
Lest not forget Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud. It’s your typical vast and uncaring entity, just stopping by to soak up some sun and freeze the Earth solid until our hero scientists manage to contact it.
Sounds a bit like Galactus in Marvel comics.
Calvin and Hobbes, 1992 August 9th.
“The aliens came from a far distant world
in a large yellow ship that blinked as it twirled.
It rounded the moon and entered our sky.
We knew they had come, but we didn’t know why…”
Speaking of indifferent aliens:
The Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic take place in the aftermath of an alien non-invasion: the aliens came, ignored us, did their thing for a little while, and then went away; leaving a mass of their stuff behind them, rather like picnickers who don’t clean up after themselves; humans (illegally) brave the zones where the stuff is, hoping to get rich at great risk: rather like the folks who risk the Heechee ships in Fred Pohl’s Gateway et. seq.
This idea was taken up, somewhat in Silverberg’s The Alien Years, only this fix-up takes place during the aliens’ presence. Again, they pay essentially no attention to the pesky humans.
The ultimate indifferent aliens, though, would be the unseen aliens in Disch’s The Genocides, who essentially plow the Earth under to grow their crops without any concern about humans (or other distinctive terrestrial, Terran life forms).
As for aliens whose help is unfortunate, or at least ambiguous, one might mention Butler’s Oankali (from the “Lilith’s Brood/Xenogenesis” trilogy), who not only rescue the survivors of a nuclear war, but clean up the planet for said survivors; the question becomes, however, to what extent the survivors are still human.
if you haven’t watched the movie, Stalker, based on Roadside Picnic, you should. awesome.
I just went to IMDB and found two movies by that title; neither shows the Strugatskys as source-material writers (though one does list Hermann Hesse).
Wikipedia has the Russian movie Stalker with a screenplay written by the brothers. It is also in IMDB at:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Thank you. (And they are co-writers with Tarkovsky, whom I’m betting did most of the stuff that made it a film instead of a novel.)
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters – humanity reduced to living in the walls of the huge structures built by Earth’s gigantic alien invaders, who treat us as domestic pests, somewhat like our situation vis-a-vis house mice.
Pohl & Kornbluth’s Wolfbane has a similar slant: Earth has been taken into interstellar space (with an ignited Moon to provide barely enough warmth) by beings who occasionally harvest tranced-out humans for unknown purposes.
Childhood’s End? Though the aliens don’t cause the eventual Uplift…
A lot of Varley, esp. Steel Beach. Aliens had helpfully cleared away the pests bothering the planet’s dominant species, the cetaceans… The only survivors had been (fortunately for them) living on the Moon.
The invaders didn’t kill humans directly, just shut down their technology. I believe we learn some humans survived on Earth in Ophiuchi Hotline.
I’m thinking of an episode of The Simpsons involving Kang the alien…
Also certain aliens from The Ophiuchi Hotline. Who beam a signal at Earth, its info containing lots of helpful tech. Helpful in getting Earth peoples out into the solar system and away from Earth.
Perhaps The Aliens Who Knew- I Mean Everything?
Alan Dena Foster’s “Cyber Way”. Thousands of years ago aliens visiting the southwestern US accidentally left instructions on how to access alternate dimensions which the locals encoded into Navajo sand paintings. Then someone figures out how to access those dimensions, and the beings living inside those dimensions, who may not be particularly friendly. And that’s not the worst of it…
Greg Costikyan’s “First Contract” – helpful aliens show up and offer to share their advanced technology with us for the low, low price of the planet Jupiter. Cue Earth’s economy crashing as human manufacturers can’t compete with the products of superior alien tech.
I’m a little (but sadly, not very) surprised that no one has mentioned John Varley’s wonderful 8 Worlds series of novels and stories, mostly set just about everywhere in the solar system except the earth because a mysterious alien power wiped out just about all of humanity on earth, leaving the surviving population in orbit or on the moon to somehow find a way to survive without the mother planet. (Why the aliens came, and stayed, is never made clear, though a suggestion is made at one point that they are talking with cetaceans.)
Anyway, Varley is far too seldom talked about nowadays, so I feel I’ve done my civic duty, because he wrote some wonderful things.
in Tim Pratt’s The Wrong Stars, one of the characters is a beneficiary of emergency medical care by powerful aliens who were not 100% clear on minor details of human physiology like “there are actually two survivors of this shipwreck, and they do not need to be surgically combined into one organism”.
I loved The Jupiter Theft when I first read it a long time ago. I need to re-read it.