Space Opera Fans discussion

This is an obvious but frequently missed point about alien invasion novels. The enemy are obviously far more technologically sophisticated than we are. They're capable of crossing the icy wastes of space before they end up in the backwoods of Kansas probing good old boys. It seems a foregone conclusion that they ought to win, just like Cortes did against the Aztecs - after all, Cortes only had a technological advantage of a thousand years or so, and these guys might have a million on us. So what is the most ingenious means by which mankind wins? I offer, as the first and probably still best manufactured human victory, the accidental defeat of the Martians in The War of the Worlds. Has anyone read another book that plausibly explains how we might win?

Ender's War

Depends on the universe. In the MMO City of Heroes we had superheroes to repel the first invasion. The second one where the aliens returned prepared for superheroes was foiled because they had split into two nearly-equal political factions, one pro-war, one pro-peace, which weakened their resolve.

In Known Space and (many) other stories, humans tend to be more ferocious than the aliens. This usually comes as a surprise, with someone eventually commenting incredulously, “But they’re a Type 3 civilization that still fights wars! Inconceivable!”

Another possibility I’ve seen a few times is where human survivors of an alien invasion master the advanced technology and use it against the invaders. The most famous variation of this is the Terminator franchise. By not getting everyone, they leave open the possibility of a human resurgence. “There are always survivors,” as Heinlein once wrote. “You should have gone for the head,” said Thanos.

Footfall and Turtledove’s World War books had another path where the aliens were only *slightly* more advanced than humans, and numerically far smaller. That’s probably more a case of being overconfident than anything else.

Another one is where humanity is used as pawns in a larger conflict between two alien factions, seen as nothing more than barbaric cannon fodder. Usually this ends up with humans taking over. I find these stories particularly satisfying because of the whole “boy, they sure underestimated those Terrans” angle.

I find stories where the good guys win by being smarter very satisfying myself. In Pandora’s Legions by Chris Anvil, the invaders are from a huge interstellar civilization that has been there a long time, but their average level of creativity is much lower than humans. They win the initial invasion, but between the guerrilla attacks and the con artists holding Earth is quite difficult. It really snowballs when the Earth humans get loose on multiple planets, with ships they conned from the aliens.

Oh good the lookup is working again: Pandora's Legions by Christopher Anvil

Low levels of creativity is basically the same idea as Survival Game by Colin Kapp (and Footfall by Niven and Pournelle). In both of those, the BEMs have been gifted with advanced technology by a third-party, now-vanished benefactor race, and don't really understand it.

Replying to Trike, in *The Warriors* (in Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven) Niven effectively tells the story of how the humans are going to win the man-kzin wars - the kzinti are warriors, but the (pacifist) humans on the first human colony ship to encounter kzinti are engineers. The first thing they do is to use their ship's own drive exhaust on the kzinti as a weapon.