The Best Alien Invasion Books

Alien invasions are an incredibly popular theme in sci fi. What were you looking for when I asked for your top five?

I was looking for books that are a little rebellious against the question. Everyone probably has a good founding in alien invasions from popular media – things like Independence Day, a classic alien invasion movie, or War of the Worlds, which has been adapted (with more or less success) a few times. They set the baseline: the aliens show up, they start killing us, we try to figure out what they want and why they’re here to murder us, and we do something about it – or we don’t do something about it, but fate helps us. None of the books we’ll discuss, except the one I wrote, meets this description.

I love those books. I grew up with classic alien invasion novels like Footfall by Larry Niven, which is like a Reagan-era fever dream – it’s basically about how aliens show up, and if only we build the Star Wars missile defence program everything will be fine, and we need to get rid of journalists, liberals, anyone who’s against nuclear power, to get them all out of the way so that we can kill the aliens. But none of these five books are really like that, because I trust that if you want to find those, you have a billion options. I love those stories. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re not what I personally bring to the table.

Then let’s look at what you have brought to the table today. Tell us about your first choice: Blindsight, by Peter Watts.

Blindsight is one of the only books I’ve ever read where I said, ‘Oh, this has to be science fiction.’ There are many great science fiction novels where you could probably tell the same story in a different setting and still make it work. So a lot of Ursula Le Guin novels, which I love, are so much about people and culture that you could probably take out the speculative elements and still have a great story – which is not a bad thing. But Blindsight, a novel by a former marine biologist – and, I think he’d agree, a pessimist about people – has to be science fiction. It has footnotes. It has long chunks of technical exposition. But it is, above all else, an amazing haunted house story.

The plot of Blindsight is that one day in the near future, aliens take our picture. We know they take our picture because millions and millions of flash bulbs go off in the sky, and we track these exploding flash bulbs back to where they came from. We send a crew on a ship to find the aliens that took our picture and figure out why they are here. What do they want? And the result is much, much stranger than anything you will get in Star Trek or Star Wars, or even books that are about aliens but still about people. In, say, CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner books, which are about an ambassador to an alien species, there’s still something like communication going on. Blindsight is much more existentially terrifying because, in the confrontation with aliens, it proposes something about the nature of us that I had never heard proposed before. It challenges an assumption we have about ourselves and our place in the universe that is fundamental. I don’t want to spoil what it is… Many authors will tell you that science fiction is about holding a mirror up to humanity. The aliens are really reflections of ourselves. Blindsight basically says, ‘The hell with that.’ What if they were really aliens, and when you look in the mirror, you don’t recognize what you see?

The book is mostly set aboard this nightmarish alien construct, a growing ship called Rorschach. The conditions aboard Rorschach are extremely hazardous. There’s radiation everywhere, and there are electromagnetic fields so intense that they cause hallucinations. Things are happening to the characters’ minds which, if you’ve taken any psych classes or read a book like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, you’ll recognize as real things that can go wrong with the human brain. In fact, the book is named for one of these: blindsight is when people’s eyes work fine, but their consciousness has been disconnected from their vision, so they believe they’re blind. If you throw a ball at them, they can catch it, but they don’t know why they can catch it, and they will usually come up with an excuse.

It’s all about digging into this gap between who we think we are and how our minds actually work, and then the gap between how our minds work and how an alien mind might work. And it is just so scary.

People will often ask me, ‘Do you really believe the things this book says?’ I don’t really care! What I care about is that the book is great horror, and great horror that can only come through a confrontation with something that is abhuman, and very not like us. So if you enjoy Alien or even Prometheus books about people going out and finding something that’s not what they expect, I really recommend Blindsight. I just can’t say enough good things about it. It’s a very weird book. You probably won’t like any of the characters or understand quite a bit of what is going on, but it doesn’t matter.

Is that because of the expertise of the characters on board? I know we’ve got a biologist, and a linguist…

The characters are all variously tweaked and augmented humans. The linguist has what we today would think of as dissociative personality disorder: she has multiple headmates, alters. But in the future of Blindsight, this has been recognized as something normal, and they now look back on efforts to cure this condition as something monstrous. Other characters have had therapies where all their motor neurons have been reallocated, so they have spasms and twitches, because so much of their brain is being used for processing that they can’t really control their bodies. The protagonist had half of his brain removed to cure a seizure disorder, which is a real procedure, and he thinks it’s left him less human – it’s not clear to me that this is actually true.

But his role is something we are just starting to see happen in real life –  and I admire the book for predicting this, despite the fact that I despise large language models and ChatGPT and the like. His job is to take data produced by very intelligent non-human systems, both AIs and some of his colleagues who’ve been upgraded and tweaked, and render it understandable to regular people. He’s an advisor, but he himself doesn’t understand how he does what he does. He thinks of himself as like a rotator: he’ll take a pattern and change it in certain ways, and now people can understand it, but that doesn’t mean he understands the original pattern – which ties back to this idea of seeing without seeing. And in reality, when you train machines to do huge data analysis and to find patterns, those machines often don’t know why the patterns they find work.

There’s another hard-to-comprehend alien entity in your next choice. Could you tell us about Mindscape by Andrea Hairston? What sort of invasion is this?

Mindscape is a challenge book for me, and hopefully for anyone reading this. Andrea Hairston is a genius. She has done a billion things. She’s a musician, she’s a poet, she’s a playwright, and she wrote this novel –  which belongs to a category of alien invasion story I think people really like, even though it doesn’t involve aliens coming out and waving their tentacles and talking to us. That category is the barrier story.

A famous example is Annihilation, the Alex Garland movie based on the Jeff VanderMeer book. The Jeff VanderMeer book got a lot of hype in the last ten years. It’s a fantastic novel. Annihilation is about this region called Area X that is surrounded by a bubble, and inside the rules of nature are different, and strange things are happening. An expedition goes into this bubble, and it’s much weirder than they expect. Or Roadside Picnic, the novel that inspired the classic Soviet film Stalker and the Ukrainian video S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:  Shadow of Chernobyl… They’re all about zones where reality is different, and people go in there to find precious things; but they also encounter great danger, and they’re transformed.

This is an alien invasion of our geography, but also of our mastery over the world. Humans have pretty much mapped the whole planet, and we’ve figured things out. We’re not used to a part of the world saying, ‘No, you don’t know what’s here.’ Our biggest problem right now is finding species before we kill them. So I think we are fascinated and frightened by, and romanticise, the idea of an alien force taking part of the landscape and saying, ‘This is now other. This is something else that can kill you, that can change you. You don’t know what’s in there.’ Annihilation and Stalker are great examples of this kind of work.

So what’s the barrier in Mindscape?

It’s such a hard book to describe. The basic premise is that Earth is chopped up by this winding, crazy energy barrier into many little pockets, and people at first cannot pass between these pockets. So civilization breaks down. Nearly everyone dies. The book is set when people have figured out how to re-establish contact between the surviving pockets of civilization, moving through the barrier in a dangerous but controlled way, and they’re trying to rebuild a world government and culture.

It’s not an easy book. I’m white, and this is a Black book: Andrea Hairston is Black, and she writes a character in this book who is supposed to be what she calls an ‘ethnic throwback’ – a Black woman who has the culture of a Black woman from the 1990s or the early 2000s, talks in African American vernacular English, and just makes no concessions to the reader that she’s going to act white for you. And I think that’s a really important part of her message, because the book is about how this alien barrier divides humans, and as soon as humans reestablish contact across it, there are differences of race, economics, health… The world has gotten into a really shitty place. And the question of the book is, ‘Can we overcome these barriers? What will it take to do that? What is the value of our barriers?’ Sometimes they’re a good thing, because they allow different kinds of people to exist. What do we get out of reaching across them?

This mysterious barrier is not here to take our resources or to kill us all, or to set up a colony and pretend to be our friends while sterilizing us, or any of the things aliens do in stories. It’s much weirder than that. If you want a chewy read, go for Mindscape.

Do humans come to understand the functioning of the barrier, or do we just deal with its effect?

There are people who can communicate with and even open passages in the barrier, and they come from what I believe is an animist African tradition. They’re kind of griots, or singers. They do a lot of drugs. They have a very spiritual connection to the barrier, because the barrier is psychological as well as physical, and they’re very important to the story. The book starts with the most important one of them signing the treaty that’s going to bring all the separate domains of humanity back together, and almost immediately an assassin comes out of the crowd and tries to shoot the people behind her, and she puts her body in the way and takes the bullets. That’s the first thing that happens in the book. So the relationship between these women and the barrier is very mysterious and important.

There’s a real art to taking readers with you to meet something incomprehensibly alien. I’d love it if you could tell us about your own book Exordia, and how you went about handling this. The book goes into mathematics and information theory, but even with my humanities background, I felt I was with you all the way… it was comprehensible and it was fun.

So I will say up front that probably a good chunk of readers did not find it comprehensible and fun, and I do wish we had done more aggressive editing to tighten it up. But I love stories about investigating the unknown, especially when it’s dangerous.

Have you heard of the SCP wiki? ‘Secure, contain, protect.’ It is a community, a horror website that began with a brilliant, formal idea – formal in that it’s literally about a form. Someone wrote a series of procedures for keeping an object safe and unable to kill you, without describing what the object itself was until the end. You get clues about what the monster is from the instructions for handling it.

Exordia sprang from a desire to have a bunch of characters investigating something weird and analysing it methodically, and running into the boundaries of human knowledge – but not necessarily the boundaries of their own ingenuity.

It is a book about a woman, Anna. She lives in New York. She is a war orphan, for very distressing reasons, from Kurdistan. She was raised by foster parents in America. She is very unhappy, and one day she meets an alien in Central Park. She’s the only one who can see it, and because of the particular way she is screwed up, she doesn’t conclude that she’s hallucinating, but rather that this alien is real and has a special connection to her. So when the alien later shows up at her apartment, bleeding to death, and says, ‘Listen, I need your help. There’s something on this planet that is important to the fate of the whole universe, and you and I have this cosmic bond that will help me find it’ – she just accepts it. She rolls with it because she wants to be in the kind of story where she matters.

One of my favourite lines was when she realises she doesn’t have to date or pay rent anymore, she can just save the world.

The object that the aliens are looking for, which ends up being called Blackbird by most of the humans, seems like a crashed spaceship at first. But when you get near it, it changes you, and it changes you in ways that are constantly changing.

So a lot of the book is devoted to running experiments. What happens if we put a mouse near this thing? What happens if we send a signal to it? And the humans involved must make – I hope! – intelligent, thorough efforts to not die as a result of the experiments. Their failures have to be both unforeseeable enough that you don’t blame the characters for not predicting it, but just tantalizingly comprehensible enough that you can believe there’s a solution –  which there is. Blackbird is trying to do something, and all of its apparently bizarre behaviour is united by an underlying principle, which is really what a lot of the book is about. Is there an underlying logic to the universe, to different kinds of behaviour? And I do, in a modest way, attempt to propose the reason the universe exists…

I do think one of the fundamental questions in science is the same as one of the fundamental questions about aliens. Why do we exist? Given that we exist, is our existence inevitable or a complete freak accident? Are we alone in the universe because the existence of life is just incredibly unlikely, or is the universe in some way set up – not by a divine hand, but by its own logic – to produce complex systems that end up looking like human beings or aliens? Is there some basis, without resorting to the divine, for the idea that the universe is driving towards life? Not because it has a plan, but because the laws of mathematics and nature themselves somehow militate towards a certain kind of complexity?

There are people who’ve suggested in real life that, with good enough math, you can prove that a system of random stuff happening – like static on a TV screen – given energy and time, will tend to evolve structures that maximize its ability to capture that energy and release it as waste. We think of entropy, the idea that everything breaks down, as something that rots and simplifies, but maybe part of thermodynamics is that systems will tend to get more complex and structured so that they can produce the maximum amount of waste, so that they can use up as many resources as possible. We humans are pretty good at using up energy and turning it into waste, and more advanced aliens than us would probably be even better at capturing energy from the sun or whatever, and using it to do things.

So yes, Exordia is pretentious enough to propose a fundamental reason for all of existence. Why else write science fiction?

Via some very earthly political themes which are also in there…

Yes. The book is set in the long-ago, nostalgic year of 2013, which really seems to slip by people sometimes – they’re like, ‘Why is this book constantly talking about Obama?’ One reason is that it is set in Kurdistan, and I wanted to have a character who had been through Anfal, the genocide campaign against the Kurds by the Iraqis, and was still fairly young. So I couldn’t set it in the present day, although there are plenty of old women who survived that genocide, and I do try to speak about them in the story. But another reason is that one of the basic premises of Exordia is: what if aliens showed up and they treated us the way America treats the Middle East? A place to send agents, proxies, and drones. One of the protagonists, who works in the Obama administration, is trying to explain to American soldiers, ‘Listen, the way you have treated Iraqis and Afghans and Pakistanis is the way the aliens are treating us, so the fact that they just accidentally killed a bunch of us? You’ve just got to take it. We can’t do anything about it.’ There’s a fair bit of anger in there from me, but also from my attempt to represent the perspective of Kurds and other people about how America acts as an alien invader, going into these situations it doesn’t really understand, pursuing a very narrow objective, and leaving devastation in its wake.

There’s so much to think about in this book.

There’s the other part of Exordia, too, that is kind of trashy… I just love books like The Andromeda Strain, the classic Michael Crichton novel from the 1960s, where a space probe crashes in a town in Arizona, and there’s something inside that just kills everyone. It clots their blood within seconds, and they are found lying dead on the ground with their bodies just full of hardened scab, and the rest of the book is scientists trying to figure out what did this. They’re all in their space suits and laboratories, and we get details of all the instruments and the experiments they’re running…. I just love that stuff. I love the soldiers walking around in the hazmat suits, waiting for an alien to jump out and bite them. I can’t get enough.

Yes, the combination of tones is so striking. And I love that your alien is, on one level, a many-headed monster of a more conventional type… Which brings us to your third choice, perhaps. Could you introduce us to The War Against the Chtorr series by David Gerrold, which begins with A Matter for Men?

The War Against the Chtorr is perhaps best known to people who haven’t read it as a series that has gone unfinished longer than Game of Thrones. I think fans have been waiting 30-something years for the next book. David Gerrold has had an incredible career: among other things, he wrote probably the most beloved episode of the original Star Trek series. He worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He wrote a script that was going to tackle gay rights and AIDS, because he’d been promised as a gay man that Star Trek was going to tackle that. Unfortunately, at the time, some of the people involved were very against that, and they never made the episode.

He’s a great writer. You can tell he’s a good writer because this book involves one of my least favourite things in classic science fiction: constant flashbacks to a high school civics class where an old man explains how the world works to a bunch of kids. And of course, the way the world works is: you can’t have feelings, you’ve got to be rational, you’ve got to have rights, you’ve got to be a self-reliant Robert Heinlein person. But The War Against the Chtorr is just smart and complicated enough to let you think, this isn’t necessarily true. It’s what one character believes, and tells the protagonist. But you don’t have to buy it. A lot of people in this book are full of shit.

The plot of the book now seems somewhat more chilling than when it was written. About two-thirds of the human species dies in the span of a couple of years, of explosively infectious plagues. Humanity is just starting to get itself back together from this, when someone points out, ‘Hey, there’s weird stuff growing in certain places. There’s this red scum on the ocean.’ And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell the reader that there’s an alien ecology now growing on earth, and the first book, at least, doesn’t tell you where it came from or how it got here.

So the invasion begins here – with the red scum?

This is an alien invasion from the bottom up, starting with soil bacteria and plankton in the ocean being replaced by a more competitive alien alternative. If you were to set about invading an alien planet, that is probably the most effective way to do it. It’s really not very cost-efficient for super advanced aliens to individually land and shoot us all with lasers, which is what they tend to do in alien invasion stories. War Against the Chtorr is an ecological invasion, kind of like Annihilation. But instead of being metaphysical, it’s just biological. These animals are just going to replace all of our animals, and we’re going to die unless we do something about it.

The book is very clever and very careful about never giving you an alien commander to talk to or an alien language to translate. As humans, we want to think there’s something in charge that reads and writes and talks and has a plan. But of course, nature doesn’t work like that. The things we’re looking for up at the top of the pyramid depend on these things at the bottom, like soil bacteria.

That said, the iconic part of the series is these enormous worms, which give the Chtorr their name, because that’s the noise they make when they’re upset. The worms do eat people, and gather people as livestock. It’s not clear they’re intelligent in any way, but they’re frightening, and our protagonist really hates them.

Ah, a classic enemy at last!

I think one of the curious things about the book is that it offers you this serving of xenophobia, of fear of the other, which we all find very compelling: the monster that wants to kill us, and we want to burn it before that can happen. But again, like with its politics, the book is just challenging enough to make you say, ‘Is fear and burning really the right response here, or just the human one?’

Of all the books I’ve listed, it is probably the easiest read. That’s not a bad thing. And it’s very psychologically acute. It’s easy to think that a book written in the 70s or 80s is going to be somehow less clever or less human than the books we write today, but that’s just a whiggish approach to literature, where things steadily get better and better. David Gerrold, a gay man, is writing about queerness in addition to burning alien worms. Science fiction was obviously tackling those themes in the 70s and 80s, but maybe we have forgotten that.

It’s a great adventure book, as well as asking some good questions about how we would behave if human society fell apart, and which values we actually care about – and which ones we only hold to because they make us feel nice. I want to feel nice. I really value some of the things this book questions, and I want to believe that they are vital to human survival. But the book says, ‘Do we really need this?’ Because the book is willing to challenge me on these things, and not just tell me, ‘Hey, you’re wrong, we should all become fascists and kill aliens,’ I get the sense that I’m playing with it. The book isn’t here to hit you on the head. It’s here to just poke you. I like that.

Your next choice is also an ecological invasion, but inverted – we become the invaders. Tell us about Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Red Mars is a classic, the first in a 1990s trilogy, followed by Green Mars and Blue Mars. It’s about how humans would colonize Mars. This is something that people love to lionize. It’s the next step for a species, going to Mars and living there.

One thing I’ve got to tell you about these books up front: they love exposition. It is a rule of science fiction that you should not get bogged down in exposition, in just telling the reader stuff, because people mostly care about people. They want to know what people do, what people think, how people feel. If you’re going to give the reader information, a good rule of thumb for writers is to have a character care about the information, so that you can use that character’s emotions as a way in. Kim Stanley Robinson does not give a f*** about that. He will just tell you stuff for pages about the geology of Mars, about what chemicals can be found on the planet, and how they could be used to change its atmosphere, about politics and economics. And for me, it works. I enjoy reading that stuff. I don’t always agree with his political views or his characterizations of different kinds of people, but I respect the effort.

And what I respect most is his willingness to say, ‘Why do we want to go to Mars?’ Is it intrinsically good, making more of ourselves, making Mars more suitable to humans? I think many people would agree, not without good reason, that a plane of rock without life on it has no intrinsic value. We should just do whatever we want with it. It’s not like there’s a species there that depends on it for its habitat. It’s just dead matter. And Kim Stanley Robinson has characters who say, ‘No, for intrinsic philosophical and spiritual reasons, this place is more valuable left alone than it would be if we made it livable for humans.’ That’s not a philosophical stance I personally find easy to support, but reading characters who support it and feel very powerfully that it’s important is valuable to me.

Red Mars is not all about people arguing over whether we should touch a rock. It’s soap operatic. There are weird love triangles, and people being assassinated, and terraforming on a vast scale – they melt the ice caps on Mars, and characters get caught in the flood and have to try to survive… It’s dramatic and large-scale. But at the core of it is this question: what right do we have to the natural world? What’s going to happen to us if we go to this other planet and change it to suit us?

This is another very multi-faceted book, then.

A big part of the book I haven’t touched on at all is that Earth wants to control these Martian colonies and use them for stuff, whether it’s getting resources or as a place to dump unwanted population. And that, of course, leads to war. It’s not the Robert Heinlein kind of war – in his book, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the moon is a libertarian paradise, and Earth tries to control it, but the clever people on the moon figure out how to stop it. In Red Mars, the revolutionaries, like many revolutionaries in real life, are facing a huge, powerful, established state that wants to control them. It’s similar to The Quiet War by Paul MacAulay, which is about Earth trying to reconquer humans who live around Jupiter and Saturn: it recognizes the very centralizing power of the state. It doesn’t try to suggest that we’ll go to Mars and build super lasers with Martian diamonds and fight off the Earthers and have a new society. We bring our problems with us.

The actual details of how to invade Mars itself and destroy it are now scientifically out of date. I just find the people involved so vivid and their ideas so strongly expressed that you can’t help but care about them. It was also a huge influence on Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, one of my favourite video games ever.

We’ve come to your last choice, and you’ve saved up a very alien foe, in the form of a vacuum… Let’s talk about Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan. Could we maybe start with the explanation we need to understand the novo-vacuum plot? 

There’s a concept in real-life physics called false vacuum decay… Let’s say the universe is a room, and the vacuum – the lowest energy state, just empty space – is the floor. It is possible that the vacuum around us that we live in is not the true floor of the universe that we’re standing on, but something like a blanket; and if it rips, which could happen through a particularly high-energy event, that floor will collapse into what’s underneath it, and everything above it will fall down too.

I know this is a little hard to wrap your head around. One way it’s often described is: imagine the beginning of the universe is the top of a hill. It’s a really high-energy state with lots of potential – it’s hot, with not a lot of structure yet, but so much could happen. And a ball, which in this analogy is basically the laws of physics of the universe, rolls down off the top of this hill, and you would expect it to hit the bottom, but maybe along this hill, there’s a little dip, and then a rise, and the ball gets stuck in that dip and doesn’t finish rolling all the way down. That’s a false vacuum, like the false blanket floor in my earlier metaphor. And if someone were to come along and flick that ball – which in physics would be a very energetic event (people were worried the Large Hadron Collider would do it – it wouldn’t ever have) – it might flick that ball out of the little dent it’s stuck in, and keep it rolling down the hill.

What does that mean for us? Well, it would mean that probably the laws of physics we live in would change. Not because the laws of physics are fake or made up, but because we live in one possible configuration of a larger, supersymmetric physics. Imagine origami paper: basic physics is the sheet you start with. You can fold it up into a lot of different shapes. We live in one of those shapes, and if there were false vacuum decay, the paper would change into a different shape.

That would occur in a bubble, starting at wherever this event occurred, spreading out at the speed of light. So if this has already happened in the universe, we would never see it coming. It would just hit us one day, and we would all be destroyed. There’s been a lot of debate about whether new existence could come into being on the far side of the false vacuum – but that doesn’t really matter to us anyway.

Ok, I follow. So – this is the invading force in Schild’s Ladder?

Schild’s Ladder begins in the future, where they have solved physics. They’ve figured everything out; they know how it all works. People in this world routinely upload their brains to computers so they can run super-fast and observe weird processes happening at incredibly low timescales. Some people on a space station in this universe are doing a physics experiment, and it does not go the way they expect – which is weird because they’ve figured out physics – and it triggers false vacuum decay.  Since their consciousness is running really, really fast, they’re like, ‘Oh, man, we really screwed up.’ That’s a compelling scene, because they know they’re about to be consumed, and they have nanoseconds to decide what to do about it.

The result is a bubble of new universe growing inside our galaxy. For purposes of the book – I don’t know if there’s physics behind it – it only expands at two-thirds the speed of light. So if you live on a planet twenty light-years from the bubble, in thirty years, your planet’s going to be destroyed. The only thing you can do is get on a spaceship and fly away faster than two-thirds of the speed of light, and it looks like humanity is just going to have to do this forever: we’re going to be running away from this bubble for all time, which kind of sucks. And along the way, our homes are going to be fed into it, and we’ll have to make new homes and abandon them, and that sucks too.

The book picks up the main character arriving at a station that flies just above the surface of the bubble. It’s flying away from the bubble just slightly faster than the bubble’s expanding, and they study the bubble of new universe. This alien universe has provoked two very different factions. One says we have no right to try and stop it, because there’s something new in there. We can’t destroy it, we can’t even arrest its spread, because for all we know, there’s life going on in there. And then another faction, which I think is much more relatable to most of us, says that this is a natural disaster, like a tsunami, and we have a responsibility to stop it. They’re working on a way to collapse this new universe, or at least freeze it.

Being nerds in a Greg Egan book, the people on different sides of this debate care so passionately about these issues that they see the other side as monsters. You can imagine an abortion debate, basically, over an entire cosmos. To give human drama, the protagonist and his lover are on opposite sides of this divide. As it becomes more and more likely that there is a way to stop this bubble, the two sides become more and more violent in their disagreement. This goes beyond them fighting each other, and towards attempts to destroy or not destroy this expanding new universe. And if you’re wondering what’s actually in there, you do get to find out, and it is very weird.

It is maybe the most alien you can make an alien invasion story. I don’t think it’s possible to understand what’s going on inside this new universe without higher mathematics. Greg Egan does his best to explain it to you, but you’re basically engaging with it in a poet’s way: you grasp the emotional logic. It’s an extreme point in how weird you can make something and still care about it – it’s easy to care about the destruction of everything you know and love, but how do you weigh that against something you don’t understand at all and probably aren’t trained to think about, this whole new cosmos and creation? Can humans do that? So I admire it as a long shot at the far extremes of human emotion and intellect.

It’s not a tough book to read at all. It’s not complex on a linguistic level. I think you can read it and understand it fine, but the ideas in it are so big and weird that I got a lot out of it. I really liked it.

All of these books sound amazing. Before we go, I know you wanted to give a shout-out to one piece of literature in this genre that isn’t a book… What is MotherHorseEyes?

MotherHorseEyes, like the SCP Foundation wiki I mentioned earlier, is basically internet art. But unlike the SCP wiki, which is many people working together, it’s outsider art: a guy showed up on Reddit, and he just started telling his story in comments on other threads. People were annoyed: why are you commenting on this thread about football or a celebrity’s dress with your weird rambling? But then people started putting them together, and it was a shockingly coherent story.

I don’t think anyone’s heard from this guy in years. He basically wrote it all and then disappeared. I suspect this was a creative binge: I don’t think he had anything outlined; he probably started with the first little snippet and just jammed from there. And at some point in the story, you can see him saying, ‘Oh, boy, I need to pull everything together and make it all fit and bring it to an ending’ – which he does. I really admire it. It’s like a tightrope act where you don’t have the tightrope when you start; you’re throwing it ahead of you, like a grappling hook, and just running across it and hoping you can throw another tightrope before you run out.

The premise is that in the 1960s, the CIA gave people huge amounts of LSD. This really happened. But what, as far as I know, didn’t happen in our reality, is that some of the people on LSD created with their bodies these things called flesh interfaces, which are weird and so much like the tunnels to the Upside Down in Stranger Things that people thought it was viral marketing for Stranger Things, because it came out shortly before the first season. You can go into these interfaces and go somewhere else, and come back very weird and screwed up. That’s it: that’s the whole premise. You give people a bunch of drugs, they make portals, and people can go through them.

The rest starts out as a series of secret histories about where these portals were created and what was done with them. There’s one about American soldiers finding one on Iwo Jima during World War II. There’s one about the North Koreans building a giant underwater one with whales… It’s a steady, very ADHD-friendly series of tiny story fragments, where every time you think you’re bored, it goes to a new one and introduces something new. Like many people, my attention span is shot. I cannot get through a chapter of a book without checking my notifications or switching browser tabs. So I’m really curious about stories that do manage to keep my attention. Ironically, I think now the best way to experience it is to find a YouTube video where someone just reads the whole thing, and put that on while you do dishes or whatever.

It goes to some very weird places. In addition to the initial story, which is just a narrator describing things that happened, you get first person stories from an alcoholic in a halfway house, who remembers spending a summer with a parent who had horse eyes, thus the mother horse eyes of the title; and things from back in pre-history; and then a near future narrative where a good chunk of the human population lives their whole life in these beds that keep them clean while they do virtual reality stuff… And it’s implied that this technology was derived from the flesh interfaces, and maybe has a sinister purpose.

So, in addition to being great – and I hope you’re convinced you should check this out because it’s creepy and amazing – this is the kind of alien invasion story where we invite the aliens in. We create the invasion, and we fail to stop it because of our human weakness, the same way we fail to do anything about climate change.

That sounds horribly plausible…

I think this is a very frustrating part of alien invasion stories for many readers: the invasion begins, and people don’t believe it, or there are lies, or there’s a cult that says the aliens are here to help us. Unfortunately, we found out over the past five years that’s exactly what would happen. People would latch onto lies and do the wrong thing or fail to act. MotherHorseEyes isn’t really about that – it’s about creepy LSD stuff and dealing with addiction and all kinds of other weird stuff – but it contains that truth: that if the alien invasion were slow enough and sweet enough, we would not stop it. It’s the same reason that I don’t go out and try to start a revolution, despite seeing many things wrong with the world. I have air conditioning, I have Seamless delivering food, I have LEGO sets, a laptop, and streaming services. I’m getting enough treats to not do anything. If an alien invasion gave us treats, we would probably let it happen – which is a running theme in a lot of these stories.