Say the words “alien invasion” and the stories most people think of are those told in movies like Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), in which the battle lines between good and evil are cleanly divided. HG Wells dreamed up this template in 1897, with Martian invaders laying waste the home counties in The War of the Worlds. Half a century later, John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953) envisaged the melting of the ice caps not as the by-product of human negligence but as the result of a hostile intervention by alien forces.
In writing my novel Conquest, I was determined to subvert these violent stereotypes. What I find most compelling about earlier alien invasion narratives is the way they highlight how vulnerable we are, not to aliens so much as our own irrational behaviour in the face of the unknown. I wanted to reveal the theme of alien invasion as infinitely flexible, adapting itself to subtle, ambiguous stories in which the divide between human and alien is not always clear cut. My protagonist Frank Landau stands in permanent danger of losing his sanity to his obsessions. And yet Frank has a brilliant mind; in many ways, he is the most sensitive and compassionate individual in the novel. The tension between these two truths is the engine that drives Conquest, and it is this irreconcilable contradiction between delusion and epiphany I find most fascinating in other alien invasion stories. Here are 10 of my favourites:
