#Alien invasion books series movie#
#Alien invasion books series full#
#Alien invasion books series series#

In graduate school I devoured Orson Scott Card’s Ender books – especially the second in the series, Speaker for the Dead, which so powerfully dramatises the tragedies that can result when we fail to understand the other. What does it mean to be human? Why is humanity so mired in violence? What does it do to us to welcome otherness into our very identities? Similar themes come up in Arthur C. Years ago I read Octavia Butler’s Dawn and was blown away by how Butler used an alien contact story to wrestle with big philosophical questions. There would be no containing it or saving any part of ourselves and that's about as horrify Campbell, Jr.'s Who Goes There? For me the real fear isn't for the characters in the story but in the apocalypse that would result if the creature(s) survived and made it into the world. John Carpenter's version of The Thing, based on John W. Right now I like to read Ann Leckie, Kate Elliott, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Also Larry Niven, whose style is old-fashioned now, but who I love for his strange aliens and the breadth of his vision. She showed me strangeness could be rightness, and that the real aliens are often humans. Le Guin and her The Left Hand of Darkness. I've also written an alien invasion novel of my own, Annex, which draws on all three of those inspirations and comes out this July from Orbit Books.

#Alien invasion books series movie#

The book Shade's Children, the movie Attack the Block and the video game Half-Life 2 always come to mind as particularly vivid alien invasions. Another favourite is the novel This Immortal by Roger Zelazny. In it, aliens pervert human sexuality so that men start killing off all the women, thus effectively ending the human race so that the aliens can take over the Earth. One of the greatest and most devastating alien invasion stories of all time is ‘ The Screwfly Solution’ by Racoona Sheldon, alias Alice Sheldon, who most often wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr.

#Alien invasion books series series#

Also, the 1981 British TV series The Day of the Triffids, and the TV-show V (also from the 1980s) made huge impressions on me when I was a kid. I've been a fan of Ray Bradbury since forever, and his short story ‘Boys! Raise Mushrooms in Your Cellar!’ is a story that has stuck in my head since I read it in my early teens. Richter's insanely fun 1984 film, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension George Alec Effinger's hilarious story ‘ The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything’. Beyond that: the 1978 Philip Kaufman film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is my favourite iteration of the often-adapted Jack Finney novel W.D. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, and, also of course, Orson Welles's brilliant 1938 radio drama adaptation. What are your favourite stories from this genre?

#Alien invasion books series full#

Merritt and more will make an appearance – you can see the full list of included authors here, in what promises to be an exciting line-up of otherworldly creations!

Wells, short stories and novel extracts from Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, A. Like the previous books in the series, the new stories in this anthology will be accompanied by classic fiction from the genre: as well as the seminal work The War of the Worlds by H.G. Today, we hear from them about their writing methods and the other Alien Invasion-themed stories that have really stuck with them the most. In the first part of this Q&A, authors featured in our new Alien Invasion anthology spoke about the inspirations behind their story.