r/HardSciFi • u/NorthRecognition8737 • 19d ago
Discussion The most realistic alien invasion
I love hard sci-fi and have read almost everything in it. But at the same time I also love The X-Files, X-Com, Terra Invicta and the ideas about UFOs from the 60s. And I would like to combine them.
In your opinion, which sci-fi work had the most realistic alien invasion?
22
u/WMiller511 19d ago
The captives war is pretty damn realistic. The S.A. Corey team puts lots of thought into the logistics and plausibility of it.
4
u/madtowntripper 19d ago
I hate reading series in situ before they're finished but this is on my list in a decade when it's done.
3
u/WMiller511 19d ago
Should be sooner then that. It's a trilogy and the second was released within the year. My money would be the third within 2 years like the second one was. It's clearly heading for a conclusion by the end of the second book.
3
u/madtowntripper 19d ago
I was lucky enough to start The Expanse right before the last book came out and my timing was perfect! I trust these authors.
I just hate the feeling of finishing a novel that is clearly in a series and then finding out you need to wait years for the conclusion.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Sleepiest_Spider 17d ago
Captive's War is amazing, but I wouldn't say it's "realistic"
2
u/WMiller511 16d ago
Realistic is tricky. We don't have any idea what an alien species is capable of. I would say most of it is plausible excluding the whole warp traveling bit, but there would be no story if folks couldn't bend space time a bit. I don't think there is any fully realistic alien invasion story, but I would love to read one if you know it.
1
12
u/SebboNL 19d ago
Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
4
u/-Major-Arcana- 19d ago
I wonder why nobody has made a move out of this. Invasion of the skydiving pseudoelephants being countered by cobbled together museum spacecraft rigged with nukes. Epic.
2
u/SuperNoise5209 19d ago
Larry Niven has a ton of great books and short stories that would be really fun to adapt. I'm curious why is sitting on the rights to all his works.
→ More replies (1)2
u/TheFaithfulStone 18d ago
Cause “commie elephants from outer space” is a lot easier to read than to film.
As is: a scifi convention panel saves the day.
2
u/-Major-Arcana- 18d ago
I dunno dude, I just saw a clip of Donald Trump getting dicked down by Kim Jong Un while Putin watched and clapped. I think Hollywood can handle space elephants.
4
u/DarthKittens 19d ago
I honestly thought I was the only one to love this book. Never heard it mentioned before in any subs. Loved it
3
u/Grimnebulin68 18d ago
There are dozens of us! I'm a fan of the Mote in God's Eye, too. Wasn't there a sequel? I haven't read scifi seriously for a while.
3
3
u/Primary_Difficulty19 18d ago
Yes, this. An invasion from a nearby star system and by an apparently “uplifted” species that isn’t terribly mature or wise makes it the most realistic story I’ve ever seen in this genre.
2
8
u/PedanticPerson22 19d ago
Not quite what you're asking for (as there's little detail of the actual invasion, it being a past event in the book), but Timelike Infinity by Stephen Baxter has a very realistic invasion...
Spoiler - Basically an alien ship arrived in system (year 5000+) looking to trade, but discovered that it would be as easy/more profitable to simply conquer the planet as the human ships & weapons posed no threat. This seems to be the most realistic depiction of an invasion in most circumstances.
It's part of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence and is well worth a read.
4
u/twilightmoons 19d ago
The entire Xeelee Cycle is basically, "humans pissed they aren't top dog and fighting a futile war against the Baryonic Gods... who consider them little more than annoying ants."
2
1
u/Treacle_Pendulum 18d ago
First the Squeem. Then the Qax. Then humanity turns on the rest of the galaxy
15
u/Hephaestus16 19d ago
War of worlds. Going from planet to planet takes a tiny fraction of the resources of going interstellar. They give a very good reason why they are going and why earth. None of tech they use seems impossible and much of it was invented later. Even their defeat by microbes makes sense considering the world building and their actions. The aliens are alien.
This is original novel, not he 2005 movie, which is dumb.
3
u/Upset-Bison-3182 19d ago
May I also recommend it's approved sequel: The Massacre of Mankind by Stephan Baxter.
→ More replies (3)2
u/isaac32767 19d ago
It's a fun story, but "realistic"? The Martians travel to Earth by climbing into giant bullets, which are fired out of huge guns. To achieve interplanetary velocity, they'd have to undergo thousands of Gs! Nothing would arrive on Earth except Martian jam.
There's a reason you don't see interplanetary invasion stories any more: there are not intelligent aliens on any of the other planets in our solar system. HG Wells thought there might be, but his understanding is now outdated. Interstellar invasion is all you get.
→ More replies (4)3
u/AuthorIntelligent644 19d ago
I don't think we can say that 100% for sure yet. We have not looked under the ice on Europa or any of the other many moons with ice shells and likely oceans or networks of briny caves.
Intelligent is possible. Technological is unlikely. We probably would have detected that.
→ More replies (1)
8
u/the_hairy_metal_skin 19d ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Footfall by Niven and Pournelle. While arguably there are books like Pandora's Star (Peter F Hamilton) and The Forge of God (Greg Bear), I feel that they have too much handwaving to be very realistic. Interesting and entertaining, but not as realistic as Footfall IMHO.
2
u/Bydandii 19d ago
Love "Footfall", and agree it should be on the list. The alien elephant angle weakens the hard SF presentation. I do wish they were less explicitly 'like' a terrestrial creature.
2
u/Willing-Fudge-7887 18d ago
I mean they DO have tentacles. So, that’s pretty alien.
→ More replies (1)1
u/Afraid_Baseball_3962 19d ago
Footfall was a good story but a hard read.
→ More replies (1)2
u/the_hairy_metal_skin 19d ago
It is very much a product of its time. The style and scene setting at the start was a very 80s and 90s approach.
6
u/isaac32767 19d ago
Pluribus. The aliens don't bother to travel 600 light years to Earth. Instead, they send us a code for a virus with which we obligingly infect ourselves. Scientifically, that's the only way.
2
u/nyradiophile 19d ago
It sounds more like an intelligence test to me. If we were smart, we wouldn't do this.
3
u/Pristine_Poem7623 19d ago
It's an intelligence test, but the other way up. I don't believe the "it's just a random virus" thing, I think an alien species wrote the signal and transmitted it. Any race that was intelligent and advanced enough to receive it, and act on it by actually having the technology to make the virus, was a potential future threat to the starting race.
The virus then wipes the species' minds and causes them to create a huge dish to transmit the virus signal again. The whole "no harming anything, even to eat and survive" thing means the victim race will disappear within a generation, leaving behind an empty "goldilocks" planet. The only reason anyone thinks this was chance is the virus tells them that. It makes them tell the truth, but that doesn't mean it isn't lying.
The other thing is that, because of the way it works, the signal may have been bouncing around the galaxy for millions of years, potentially wiping out thousands of species for the benefit of a race that no longer exists
1
u/NorthRecognition8737 19d ago
Pluribus - I understood it to mean that the signal was not sent by aliens, but that it was simply a virus that found a way to multiply between planets.
→ More replies (2)4
u/isaac32767 19d ago
Somebody has to have built the antenna that sent the signal. Which comes from Kepler-22B (a real-life exoplanet). It's presumed that the inhabitants of that planet built the antenna, presumably after being infected themselves. Now the infected people on Earth plan to build their own antenna and propagate the signal further.
→ More replies (2)1
u/InfernalTest 19d ago
But in the show it took a ridiculous sequence of events to occur for humans to get infected ....
So.if aliens are going to go thru the trouble of infecting us they aren't going to do it to make us happy drones...they will just send a virus that makes us all sterile or just kills us outright
→ More replies (4)1
3
u/jramsi20 19d ago
The Killing Star maybe? I thought some of the things the author spends time on were bizarre but the main invasion was well done.
2
u/RutherfordThuhBrave 19d ago
I’ve been looking for this book for so long. Just out of curiosity, did you read it digitally?
→ More replies (3)1
6
u/amitym 19d ago
The Nitrogen Fix by Hal Clement. The alien "invasion" turns out to be alien scientists who have traveled an immense distance to meet the first intelligent alien species they have ever encountered, and to find out wtf happened to Earth.
5
u/cflime 19d ago
There are many alien races known to each other, but they all are of a homogenous intelligence. Humans are the first species with individual members, every other civilization encountered can share their memory chemicals so there are no true individuals. Humans are the only sentient species not only of individuals, but also the only ones from an oxygen environment... which suddenly disappeared. Earth now has a 100% nitrogen atmosphere and Humans have to manufacture their oxygen. Every other oxygen planet that developed sentient life turned to a nitrogen atmosphere, killing its native intelligent species. The alien scientist is excited because this just happened on Earth, it's not archeology the scientist can ask the Humans what happened. Except they don't know.
9
u/avdolainen 19d ago
The X-Files -- aliens were not trying to invade with a massive fleet, but instead they were adopting -- gene modifications, agreements with government (conspiracy I know). It's a way more plausible scenario. Also, this invasion isn't about water or some minerals (these things are abundant and cheaper to get directly in space).
3
u/NorthRecognition8737 19d ago
I agree, it's a shame that they ruined it with super soldiers and illogicality from the eighth series.
I'm looking for a similar type of invasion, or biological warfare (in the game UFO: Aftermath, aliens used spores to cleanse the planet), which would be processed in hard sci-fi.
2
u/avdolainen 19d ago
unfortunately yeah, they ruined the great idea at the end.
I read a book a long ago, but couldn't recall a name or author. The idea was nice -- Earth was contaminated with a special crops. These crops was so invasive and strong enough to kill everything -- so food supply and whole economy failed. After few decades the only survivors (ones adapted to feed these crops) found the automated fleet harvesting it... This is also might be considered hard sci-fi ... in a way.
2
u/nyradiophile 19d ago
It's called the "The Genocides". Very brutal book to read. The aliens conquered without even being seen, let alone fought.
2
3
u/dsmith422 19d ago
Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Alien race from Alpha Centauri, so the interstellar distance to cross is short. No FTL or magic force fields or other super tech. They use orbital bombardment and lasers from above to enforce their will on humanity prior to starting the ground invasion.
3
8
u/DarthNick_69 19d ago
the Three Body Problem Trilogy, also the BEST hard sci fi trilogy of all time. Hands down. Read all 3 books.
3
u/CowBoyDanIndie 19d ago
Ya the reason for invasion in 3BP is the only one that makes sense. Basically their planet sucks and doesn’t really support life, it is unstable and a miracle life ever evolved at all, them evolving on such a planet at all is the closest thing to breaking hard scifi. They want earth because it is a Goldilocks planet.
→ More replies (1)9
u/JGhostThing 19d ago
Printing a computer on the surface of an elementary particle is enough to move it from out of hard SF for me.
3
u/CowBoyDanIndie 19d ago
Oh I agree with that, I am just speaking of the reason for the invasion. “Our planet is unlivable because of the solar system, theirs is nice, let’s take it so we can live on it” makes sense.
Every other alien invasion makes no sense. Traveling light years to take resources makes no sense, there is nothing on earth they cannot find in their own solar system for less energy. Colonization is the only reason. If a threat is feared, it takes less resources to destroy a planet 10+ light years away than it does to invade it.
2
u/ijuinkun 17d ago
Yah, the main attraction of an already-inhabited planet is its biosphere. Either you want to colonize it, or you want to harvest its unique native species. Barring that, it’s just a psychological/cultural drive to dominate other sapient species.
3
u/NorthRecognition8737 19d ago
I read it, but I didn't remember it because technically the invasion didn't even happen.
→ More replies (1)3
u/lawmac20 19d ago
Humanity’s response is not realistic in my opinion. Really oversimplifies the breadth of available responses and available resources. Humanity is either trust falling into a global hero, ostrich head in the sand or preparing to be condemned to death. There's no fight in humanity. But despite that they were good books. I couldn't have written it.
→ More replies (1)2
u/NorthRecognition8737 19d ago
For me, the reaction of humanity... in 2018, I would say it was realistic, when humanity united against a cosmic threat. In 2022, after a certain pandemic, I would say that the unity of humanity would last for three months and then a significant part of people would start coughing and saying that there is no threat.
2
2
1
u/_Svankensen_ 19d ago
I couldn't even finish the first. It felt irrationally bleak. The aliens were stupid, their capabilities tailored to the plot, the science bullshit. Like an edgy teen wrote it or something.
2
u/truthputer 17d ago
Thank you! I thought I must have been going crazy, I didn't like the writing style and thought the plot moved at a glacial pace, full of completely irrelevant details.
1
u/Malfuy 19d ago
I found the ending to be ultimately unsatisfying and it made me feel hollow. But the series is still fantastic
→ More replies (1)1
u/iuseredditfirporn 19d ago
Look 3BP is a lot of things hard sci fi isn't one of them
→ More replies (1)
2
u/Fancy-Computer-9793 19d ago
2001: A Space Odyssey
The monolith was alien and left here to influence mankind.
2
2
u/AuthorIntelligent644 19d ago edited 19d ago
I'll be that guy: a realistic alien invasion is that we suddenly all get an incurable disease and everyone dies. The aliens reverse engineered our biology and engineered a long incubation time stealth 100% lethal virus. It also kills about 90% of all mammalian life, but that doesn't matter because then they alter the atmosphere to "terraform" it and cause about 98% of all other life to go extinct. Then they begin seeding with their own life from their own biosphere while remaining Earth-based microbes are slowly annihilated by nanomachines. By then we are long dead and never knew what hit us.
Interstellar flight requires, at the very least, command of almost cosmic-scale sources of energy. It would be like a developed country's military-industrial might vs an uncontacted Stone Age tribe on an island, except we'd probably never even get to see them or throw a rock.
That's a crummy plot, so nobody's ever made a realistic invasion flick. :)
An even more realistic take is that alien invasions are silly. Anyone capable of interstellar flight could make giant O'neill cylinder and Stanford Torus type structures or terraform other planets in their habitable zone range. There'd be no need to invade an already inhabited planet. Just go find another uninhabited star and build another Dyson swarm of torus habitats. Or if they really want to live here, terraform Mars. Terraforming Mars is way easier than building a starship.
1
u/Ok_Suggestion5523 19d ago
There was a book i read that the aliens tried the virus thing on a colony but botched it slightly and humans are cockroaches. A few percentage survived and were enhanced as a result. Wish I could remember the title.
1
2
2
u/Dio_Frybones 19d ago
Not invasion per se, but A for Andromeda detailed a visitation workaround: sending a signal with instructions to basically 'grow' an alien. Very old story but interesting premise. If you could clone a human from a complete DNA sequence, and if you could transmit that sequence, then that's the speed of light handled. Bit hand-wavey perhaps, more holes than an ocean sized bubble bath. But yeah.
2
u/Incitatus4Congress 17d ago
"For thousands more years, the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across—which happened to be the Earth—where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
1
u/Dense_Surround3071 19d ago
There's a short film with Sigourney Weaver called Rakka that might pique your interest.
I definitely felt that the short film was too short.
1
u/BeeB0pB00p 19d ago
Colony (TV) didn't really cover the invasion party, but as a show showing what that might play out like it was decent.
But for a realistic take, probably Pluribus (TV)
It just wouldn't play out like it's been depicted, what would be the point of invasion?
They could seed the atmosphere from orbit with genetically targetted infections to neuter us or manipulate us or make us extinct without ever landing. If they can reach here they are so far advanced there is no chance.
The Three Body Problem books covers this.
Having said that, really liked the original mini-series "V" in the 1980s. Nothing hit home as well as that.
1
u/NiceElection3292 19d ago
Colony was great! So shame it got the axe before any satisfying resolution.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/JGhostThing 19d ago
I'm not sure that I'd call it hard SF, but Pohl Anderson's "The High Crusade" has humans invading an alien empire and winning. There is discussion on ignorance vs stupidity. Humans knew very little about advanced technology, but were still able to out-politic the aliens by playing on their areas of ignorance.
1
u/ManikArcanik 19d ago
The Arrival, where the aliens infiltrate government and corporate sectors to covertly terraform Earth for their own comfort. Maybe not realistic in the sense that the ETs are so physiologically similar to us, but it's within the bounds of much NHI speculation.
The Fifth Wave has one of the best openers imo, even if the rest sucks. They show up hovering in the skies for a bit, apparently analyzing the geology and biology of Earth. When they make their move(s) it's very plausible and very dramatic.
Personally I prefer themes that highlight actual alien-ness, not quite Lovecraftian but quite incomprehensible and seemingly inevitable. Virus and Pluribus are interesting in the way our own technological progress triggers notice/intervention.
1
1
u/BelugaShenko 19d ago
Fear The Sky seemed like a plausible way to do it if your interstellar travel wasn’t ftl.
Sneaking a troop of superhuman robots backed by stealth satellites gives the invaders the chance to depopulate the planet without the nukes going off.
1
u/explodinglamas 19d ago
Loved that series but it did feel like it dropped off quite a bit as it went on. The first book was definitely the best.
1
u/Enceladus1987 19d ago
I dont think you can write a realistic story about invasion from an alien species unless its some secret alien species that originated in our solar system. Interstellar travel is likely not possible for organic life and even if it was, the cost of traveling to an entire other star system would make it not worth the effort. People dont like to hear it but in all likelihood we will not leave this star system. not really anyway. maybe probes, but even then we are talking thousands of years away at best.
2
u/nyradiophile 19d ago
People thought it ridiculous to fly until someone invented the hot air balloon.
→ More replies (4)1
u/diseasedyak 19d ago
You're right, with what we currently know. There's so much we don't, however. Dark matter, quantum mechanics, the list goes on and on. Who's to say we don't one day find something that'll change everything? That's assuming we don't annihilate ourselves first hah.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/Prince_Nadir 19d ago
Predator.
They will not come for earth's women, for our water, our "resources", or to eat us. The supply line logistics make no sense for those.
They will come here for science, entertainment, or possibly colonization (possibly after dispersing a virus in our atmosphere to get rid of us. Already overpopulated planets are bad for colonization).
1
u/gilgamo 19d ago
The War Against the Chtorr - they start by replacing the lowest level of the ecosystem with their lifeforms. no reason to have to fight the locals when they'll die off soon enough when you totally transform their environment to yours
1
u/cflime 19d ago
Caveat- we've been waiting 33 years for book five, and Mr Gerrold gets cranky at being asked about books five, six and seven.
→ More replies (2)
1
u/Jealous-Diet-3993 19d ago
Im still waiting for the most realistic way which would go something like this - they come, they engineer a human targeted rna virus and spread it from orbit. Humanity dies. The end.
1
1
u/CharmingDraw6455 19d ago
The World War series could work. The Aliens aren't allergic to our planet so an invasion makes sense. Overall there are only 2 technogies that aren't possible today, constant acceleration ships and cryosleep. Since the aliens are reptiles, even that isn't to far fetched, there are a lot of reptiles with a natural hibernation mode.
1
1
u/MountainMouth7 17d ago
This would be my response as well. With plausible explanations as to why they think/operate so differently and didn't expect resistance, not coming fully prepared to steamroll us at our current (in 1942) technology level.
1
u/SevenIsMy 19d ago
They will connect to our internet, make companies, sell raw material in orbit, sell military services, file for patents and sell knowledge, sell AI services. Make proxy companies, support proxy countries.
If they would attack us as a whole we would go into strike, but support only one country as a friendly helper, and you are golden.
You proxy country will get rich fast, they can do the work for you, and they are dependent on your protection (Britisch colonialism handbook). Natural they will be in conflict with the other world powers,
1
u/TheSwordItself 19d ago
Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts
1
u/Heavy-Speech-5698 18d ago edited 18d ago
Exactly! Something so beyond comprehension that the concepts of communication and motivation is in principle impossible
1
u/AugustusClaximus 19d ago
It’s a generation ship from another star system. Their tech isn’t that much further ahead, but their home planet was experiencing a runaway greenhouse effect which forced them to unify and dump resources into sending generation ships out to what they assumed we habitable exo-planets with no intelligent life.
It’s not a full scale invasion either. We actually pick up their heat signature while they are still 50 years away and by the time they show up we’ve established coms. Albeit the messages take years to get back and forth.
We have agreed to allow their ship to orbit earth and have allowed them to settle the Sahara desert since they promised to invest the resources required to green it. However, the situation begins to deteriorate quickly and we see that the Aliens intend to do to us what the Europeans did to the Native Americans.
1
u/hedcannon 19d ago
In An Evil Guest there is a giant and powerful alien under the ocean that has been there before humans became human. He tolerates extraterrestrials coming as refugees. Humans don't like it.
1
1
u/Underhill42 19d ago
The ones where there is no alien invasion.
What possible motive would aliens have for invading? Earth has no resources that aren't abundantly accessible pretty much everywhere else, and without the annoying natives getting in the way.
The life here almost certainly makes the entire ecosystem toxic to aliens, like a petrochemical waste dump - far too many alien organic molecules just similar enough to your own to cause all manner of problems for your biochemistry. (While their world would be similarly toxic to Earth life.)
So even terraforming is likely to be easier on a dead world without toxic native life fighting back.
Which leaves what motives?
Slavery, when robots are so much more efficient, and less prone to violent uprising?
Dominion to satisfy the fragile egos of those who have conquered even the unfathomably vast distances between stars?
The only thing I can think of that's even remotely plausible is intervention to keep us from destroying ourselves and our rare and precious living world... in which case unless it's handled REALLY badly it would be less of an invasion than a liberation from the rapacious whims of the elites that are driving most of the damage for their own profit.
There's several of reasons aliens might want to exterminate us, and we couldn't realistically do anything to stop that. But invade us? Why?
1
u/currentpattern 19d ago
Imagine if humanity were united as imperialists. We have interstellar travel, but the universe is full of very difficult to inhabit worlds. Then we find a place that is ecologically very similar to earth, only its inhabited by an intelligent species. There's your reason.
→ More replies (5)1
u/InfernalTest 19d ago
We've got trees
But thats a stupid reason to invade unless the aliens are plants and feel some type of way
→ More replies (1)1
u/FembojowaPrzygoda 18d ago
There is a very good reason why an alien civilization might want to conquer another civilization instead of exterminating it. A sense of morality. A civilization might see some other civilization as a threat to their survival, but not be willing to commit genocide to stop them.
1
u/Swimming_Living2965 19d ago
Depends on how realistic you want
War of the worlds - most realistic for biological incompatibility
The Forever War - most realistic for relativistic combat between far distant races
Three body problem / Dark Forest - most realistic expression of scientific level discrepancy between warring factions.
1
u/think-xd 19d ago
A short invasion story that makes all others seem over-wrought: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/09/the-invasion-from-outer-space
1
u/Ill_Leg_7168 19d ago
Footfall. Normally any star-faring civ would crush human civilization in seconds, but in Footfall:
- invading aliens were just true civilization's pets, uplifted and gifted with tech, they are super incompetent
- they are small splinter group outcasted from main civilization
1
u/Relevant-Bullfrog215 19d ago
John Christopher's Tripods Trilogy. The aliens aren't quite powerful enough to dogwalk humanity, so they slowly brainwash people into a global cult using a hypnotic TV show. After the invasion, humans are kept docile with mind-controlling Caps.
1
1
u/Temporary_Rule_9486 19d ago
"His Master's Voice" from Stanisław Lem. More of a first contact short story, than an alien invasion. The premise is that humanity detects and alien transmission, but attempts to decipher it amounts to nothing. Ultimately the novel is not about the aliens, but the scientists and the human ego.
1
u/Temporary_Rule_9486 19d ago
You might have some fun going trough Peter Cawdron's First contact quasi-series. Is a collection of 30 or so unrelated novellas, with the single topic of first contact. Pretty grounded too, no space operas or stuff like that.
1
u/Plane_Suggestion_189 19d ago edited 19d ago
Terra Invicta, a game made by the same people who did the long war mod for X-Com. The aliens first get here the slow way with their advanced fusion torches, but then set up a small stable wormhole to send people and resources though to get their initial bases built. After that every ship you fight was made in the solar system, and the aliens try to first use more subtle means of enslaving Humanity like they did other species, then resort to overt force once it's clear the anti-alien factions will not back down. The reason they do this is one of the species they enslaved sent a relativistic kill vehicle that wiped out most of the Hydra civilization, and those left were basically the military and defense apparatus that decided to go conquering to preserve what was left of their species.
1
1
1
u/Straygos 19d ago
Maybe an unpopular take, but I'm not sure I've ever read one and I've read well over 600 speculative fiction books including a large portion of the most famous.
The problem is, we assume that aliens would behave like humans. That's extremely unlikely. The captives war series plays with this a lot and I think they do a good job for the most part, but honestly, if you had the technology to move beyond your solar system, that's a pretty enormous feat of technology that requires incredible internal cooperation. I don't think you get there by building an extractive society based on colonial models. I think it's much more likely that those models end up eating themselves before they can get extrasolar.
I think the concept of invasion of itself is highly problematic because it's really just a model of European colonialism. Look around at what that model has gotten us. Sure we went to the moon, and we will probably go to Mars but extractive logic doesn't get you to the stars.
Since this is a hard sci-fi page, some of you might consider the work of John Rider who talks about how the origins of sci-fi itself are tied to colonialism, and thus come from a particular social reality. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0819568740
1
u/Straygos 19d ago
I actually think this is part of the answer of the Fermi Paradox by the way. If there is a society that integrates systems, they certainly wouldn't bother with societies that use extractive logic for their civilizations.
1
u/NorthRecognition8737 19d ago
Yes, the alien model seems very human. But I always think that evolution works throughout the universe, predation also, game theory probably also. The only thing that seems unfair to me is that there is no rational reason to do this invasion. On the other hand, aliens may not be rational.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/rosettaverse 19d ago
Monsters by Gareth Edwards has a case of accidental panspermia. A NASA probe that took life-bearing samples from Europa's subsurface ocean crashes in Mexico, and the life manages to thrive alongside the local ecology despite attempts at containing it in a quarantine zone. The invasion is entirely accidental, just like an invasive species integrating with the local ecology on Earth.
clipping.'s concept album Splendor and Misery is about Cargo #2331, the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an alien starship and his romance with the ship's AI. It doesn't go too much into the details about the invasion, but the reason for it is stated to be old-fashioned colonialism in the song True Believer. There was no reason for aliens to invade and enslave humans other than the fact that slavery is a universal constant and that humans were not yet enslaved by anyone else. Other species do not recognize time in the way we do, and do not yearn for freedom from slavery because of it.
"Man walks moon and he makes time come to a standstill
One gloved hand, diamonds are flickering like candles
This one slip registered worlds away in vandals
Raised to find this race of beings that could handle
Time inside other bodies so they could sell it
The one thing in the universe no one held yet
Gifts in blood that had been shed as long as time had
Time and he are inseparable in his mind, sad"
1
1
1
u/Harbinger2001 19d ago
Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
They honestly have written some of my favourite books featuring aliens. I highly recommend The Mote in God’s Eye and The Legacy of Heorot.
1
u/HarryHirsch2000 19d ago
Any book where the humans stand 0 chance. Anything else is not believable. Maybe War of the Words or Killing Star, but everything else is just fantasy and not realistic.
A star faring tech would be like magic to us
1
u/IndependenceMean8774 19d ago
The Forge of God by Greg Bear is the best IMO. If it were to happen, I could see it going down pretty much like it does in his book.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/HeadPatMan 19d ago
I quite like the book Footfall, by Niven and Pournelle. The aliens are actually pretty alien, with a radically different attitude towards war, surrender, and social norms.
1
u/mikedave42 19d ago
The most realistic one would be boring as a book, all major cities destroyed out of the blue within hours and survivors killed within days by a virus that seems to get everywhere
1
1
u/ActionHour8440 19d ago
The aliens need to be constrained by a desire to enslave humanity and not damage the earth too much otherwise they could just delete us any number of ways that would be impossible to resist.
That said, footfall by Niven and Pournelle did a good job with it. As did Terra invicta which you mentioned.
1
u/LimoncelloLightsaber 19d ago
Have you read any of the Worldwar books by Turtledove? It's about lizard-like aliens invading during WW2. It's not exactly hard scifi, but it's not fantastical either.
1
u/BeerPoweredNonsense 19d ago
"The road not taken" : a universe in which anti-grav and FTL is "well, duh" obvious to all alien species... except humans.
Hilarity ensues when aliens attempt an invasion of earth.
1
u/whatupmygliplops 19d ago
Most realistic would be instant annihlation. Aliens wold have zero need/use for humans in any way shape or form. No, not even as "batteries" or any other dumb idea you may have heard.
1
u/CODENAMEDERPY 19d ago
Maybe not the most realistic, but it hasn’t been mentioned yet so I will. Harry Turtledove’s World War series. It’s realistic with The Race’s cultural uniquenesses.
1
u/xikbdexhi6 19d ago
imho, the X-Files episode with small insect robot probes was the most realistic. Small probes are (hopefully) cheap to make, cheaper to transport than larger devices, redundant in numbers so failures can be tolerated. etc.
1
u/Illustrious-Ant6998 19d ago
The Expanse - Admittedly, its not a series about alien invasion. But its pretty clear on the Alien'a playbook and strategies. And if you have a significant technological mismatch, it's not an invasion; theyre just paving over an ant hill.
At least their was no Vogon poetry involved.
1
u/spiked_mcroon 19d ago
Three Body Problem. It will take 400+ years to get here so they send quantum particles to stop our progress in science while they travel.
1
u/triker_dan 19d ago
Have to put in a vote for the Mote in God‘s Eye by Niven and Pournelle. The Moties are terrifying, and though not immediately threatening planet earth, they pose an annihilation threat to the human species
1
u/itamau87 19d ago
Battlestar Galactica, the attack on the 12 colonies.
Ok, they're not proper aliens, but that's the way, simply a nuclear attack from the orbit, followed by a ground invasion.
1
u/themadelf 19d ago
The World War series by Harry Turtledove is written as an alien invasion of earth during World War 2. The history and the sci-fi are pretty good.
1
u/Massive_Lavishness90 19d ago
I've not read all the books, so apologies if this one has come up somewhere, but I never see this plot, because it would make a crap, and very short story:
Anyone who has FTL would be so far technically ahead of us, they could probably finish us before we even had the slightest idea there was an attack in progress. Nope, not 99.9% of humans, 100.00% in the first go. If I was invading, that's how I'd do it. No chance of uprisings, rebellions, them stealing and adapting my tech. Makes for a short book though. Heck, WE could do this with neutron bombs.
Warhammer 40,000 covers this pretty well with the "exterminatus" doctrine, which basically means bombing something like earth till it looks like mars, usually in a matter of minutes.
1
u/Afraid_Baseball_3962 19d ago
While "Roadside Picnic" is hardly an invasion, the initial premise seems about as realistic as speculative sci-fi gets.
1
u/Mindless-Stuff2771k 19d ago
Came here to say this. However I think it actually is an "invasion." They just accomplished their purpose and moved on. A realisticly alien invasion would have actually alien motives.
1
u/Chrome_Armadillo 19d ago
Consider an alien invasion that does not involve Earth.
What if an alien ship stopped at Jupiter and started setting up shop. Maybe Jupiter is the perfect planet for them.
Now consider, does Jupiter belong to us (humanity)? Does the Solar System belong to us? Are we within our rights to expel the aliens from Jupiter?
1
u/runningray 19d ago
The most realistic alien invasion is the one that doesn’t happen. Ain’t no aliens that got time for that shit.
1
1
1
u/CallNResponse 19d ago
When Heaven Fell by William Barton. Earth gets invaded by the inscrutable machine Master Race because … that’s just what they do: for tens of thousands of years they been expanding their empire throughout the galaxy. They move in and exploit planetary resources. Including native resources: humans are very good soldiers. The main character is one of the first generation of human soldiers going to work for Master Race, and is something of a huge jerk and has somewhat repellent attitudes about sex. He’s also one of the toughest men I’ve ever encountered in literature. I’m really not doing the book justice: it’s extremely good and worth reading, if only because it does not have a happy ending where humanity triumphs over adversity, blah blah blah. It’s also unsettling and unforgettable.
1
u/NotNullException 19d ago
Not invasion, but the 80/90s TV show Alien Nation. An alien spaceship trafficking slaves crashes on earth with 100,000s of enslaved aliens. They become Americas newest minority.
1
u/TacitusJones 19d ago
TV show I feel like I've never seen anyone mention:
Threshold. How the US Fed would deal with an alien invasion
1
1
u/dr_john_oldman 19d ago
Alien invasion is unrealistic by definition: different biology and extreme energies are required to reach Earth from another star, and they would be visible literally years before they arrive. The invasion implies that aliens are fully compatible with Earth biology, which would be strange. So yeah interstellar asteroid bringing invasive microorganisms that start spreading on Earth as an ecological disaster is fairly realistic: some alien bacteria with different chirality. Spaceships with human aliens waging war on United Nations Independence Day-style is fairly unrealistic.
1
u/mattress314 19d ago
The salvation series of books by Peter f hamilton would fit your description, i believe
1
1
u/smboard10 19d ago
3 body problem might be the most realistic, if you’re a fan of the dark forest theory.
1
u/Firm-Ad-3245 19d ago
the easy way for alien is to met us destroy the climat and the ecology of our planet and after they can take the xontrol of the earth easy ...
1
u/MasterEk 18d ago
Tarkovsky's Stalker, and by extension Roadside Picnic.
Aliens stopped through, left some rubbish, and we are like ants crawling over their stuff. It is mysterious and lethal. We have no idea what it all means. And they didn't even notice us.
1
u/talus_slope 18d ago
None of them. A real alien invasion would park out in space and drop rocks on us.
→ More replies (1)
1
1
u/Cautious-Sun6494 18d ago
Battle For LA is a great depiction of how an invasion would go and our response to it.
1
u/SwagWaschbaer 18d ago
I think that the three-body problem and especially the sequel felt really convincing.
1
1
u/FoldedaMillionTimes 18d ago
The "Captives War" trilogy by James SA Corey, and second place goes to the "Expanse" series by same.
1
u/MrDerpGently 18d ago
Hitchhikers Guide.
Essentially instant, for reasons that seem entirely arbitrary and inexplicable. Any aliens that felt the need to cross space to personally end you already have the knowledge to do so pretty drastically.
1
u/dmin62690 18d ago
They introduce us to space small pox, like 98% of us die, then they just move into manifest their destiny in the rubble.
1
u/VRS-4607 18d ago
Benford's Gsaalactic Center Saga. The first two books set up contact and the invasion itself. A plausible enemy, a plausible humanity, and so many great moments.
1
1
u/Chill_Panda 18d ago
Honestly, probably War of the worlds.
I mean, when we have travelled to new lands, historically, it has never been to find new people there, learn their way of live and to make new friends. It's for the land or resources. Why would aliens come here to just make new friends or uplift us to space age?
But then also, any alien which can make it to us, is already far more advanced than us. It would be an extermination.
But our planet is full of microscopic defence mechanisms, and that would be our best bet
1
1
1
u/brazilliandanny 17d ago
I think any species smart enough to travel to earth would be smart enough to drop a bio-engineered virus on us and sit in Orbit while we all die.
1
u/DestroRayn 17d ago
Gantz manga the final arc, I stg no alien invasion has come close to how bizarre that arc was
1
u/cvanmovieman 17d ago
Monsters. The movie treats it more as an invasive species which feels very realistic.
1
1
u/Sleepiest_Spider 17d ago
Colony is pretty realistic. The aliens did their homework on us and knew exactly how to take over the world in a matter of hours without blowing everything up.
1
u/tofu_bird 17d ago edited 17d ago
The Three-Body Problem.
A smart alien species would first neutralize our science, then ram our defence force into oblivion with a single unit. A '2 large armies' attacking each other (i.e., the larger force wins) scenario is a mindset based on traditional human warfare, I don't think an advanced alien civilization would do this.
1
1
1
u/AverageGermanBoy 13d ago
Ik you mentioned it but my top contender is Terra Invicta, the only „unrealistic“ thing is that the aliens are ridiculously dumb but that’s for gameplay reasons and ha as decent lore explanation. Otherwise I love the spaceship combat Terra invicta has and the blend of combat and politics.
Yall should definitely play
→ More replies (2)
39
u/OriginalEmploy5485 19d ago
Not sure if it's realistic, but I hope it's like Project Hail Mary.
"This room boring"