The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber Nagamatsu’s subtle, heartfelt novel is constructed as a series of linked stories, beginning with the discovery of the virus and moving forward through time to reveal a world irrevocably altered by the resulting pandemic, and not always for the worse.ģ. The alien presence in this book was on Earth all the time: a prehistoric virus, released from melting permafrost as the result of climate change. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu The scientists who venture into Area X find it impossible to communicate the reality of their experiences there, a failure of language that makes the encounter all the more traumatic.Ģ. Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy charts the exploration of alien incursions in a remote, segregated area of wilderness that keeps expanding.
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. And yet Frank has a brilliant mind in many ways, he is the most sensitive and compassionate individual in the novel. My protagonist Frank Landau stands in permanent danger of losing his sanity to his obsessions. 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. 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. In writing my novel Conquest, I was determined to subvert these violent stereotypes. 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. HG Wells dreamed up this template in 1897, with Martian invaders laying waste the home counties in The War of the Worlds. S ay 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.
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