The Other Invasion

Thus far, I've talked primarily about the type of invasion that tends to involve the greatest possible number of explosions-the war invasion. Basically, the aliens show up, use guns or bombs, and kill everything in sight.

Then there's the other type of invasion, infiltration. Subtle manipulation, usually combined with mimicry, symbiosis/parasitism, and/or messages of peace are every bit as effective, if considerably less dramatic, than the explody kind of invasion.

In fact, they're probably considerably more efficient and effective, especially in circumstances that preclude using faster than light technology and warfleets (and if the invaders just want to kill us all and they can already build huge spacecraft, why don't they just drop rocks on us from orbit? It's not like we could do anything about it).

I like the first kind of invasion, but I'll admit that it's pretty stupid, all in all. With a few exceptions, most explody invasions don't make much logical sense.

It's just that the other kind of invasion is usually too boring to bother watching.

Sure, there are classic horror films and all that... but you can only do that so often before it gets repetitive and unintentionally self-parodic.

So if you see it done well and in original fashion, be sure to take note.

Yesterday (in essentially two sittings) I read Timothy Zahn's Odd Girl Out. It is the third in a series of books about a setting which I will refer to, for convenience, as the Quadrail setting.

I'll mention that Zahn is one of my favorite authors; he's probably my outright favorite among those who are still writing as of now. (This has little to do with Star Wars; while his Heir to the Empire trilogy introduced me to him, by this point that's just the icing on the cake of reading his works.) It's like reading mystery novels, except with more science fiction and (usually) fewer detectives and crime-solving.

Which makes the Quadrail setting ironic, because the main character of the setting, Frank Compton, is a private investigator.

Now, see, the brilliant thing about the setting is, interstellar travel is easy-radically so, in fact. To use a metaphor, travel within a solar system is like riding an ocean liner. Travelling from star to star is like riding an excessively fast train.

Yes, it takes days to travel around solar systems, but hours to go from here to the far end of the galaxy. Almost. (You actually have to go to the edge of any given solar system to reach the Quadrail, which is the space train, and implicitly, hitting the far end of the galaxy might take a day or two.)

Part of the point of this is that, in this case, there's no parallel between the void of space and the oceans. There are no fleets of battle craft, because spacecraft can't travel that far. (Don't ask me how the setting got built-I've only read the third book.)

So all international conflict must occur through the space trains.

And it turns out that there's a hive-minded alien intelligence who uses the space trains to get around just as easily as anyone, because it is based on nearly undetectable parasites that can control their hosts' minds (anything from subtle twists of behavior to full out hostile takeovers).

And of course, the scary thing is that the only people who are fighting against it are the private investigator and a few of his friends. And the hive mind doesn't care much about its individual tools.

That's some enjoyable reading right there, and I'm not even a big fan of detective stories, Sherlock Holmes aside.

-Signing off.