The martians only invaded southern England, killed a few thousand people and then died to bacteria.
Keep in mind I’m talking about “serious” alien invasion stories. Basically stories where their defeat isn’t a gag and it’s not a children’s thing where the aliens wouldn’t be allowed to cause much destruction anyway.
Comments
Reminders for Commenters:
All responses must be A) sincere, B) polite, and C) strictly watsonian in nature. If “watsonian” or “doylist” is new to you, please review the full rules here.
No edition wars or gripings about creators/owners of works. Doylist griping about Star Wars in particular is subject to permanent ban on first offense.
We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world.
Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story)
Aliens invade modern day Earth armed with matchlock rifles. Spoiler alert: >!The invasion does not go well for them.!<
What I find funny is that if they invaded now with the same technology they would be so massively outclassed. Oh, your deadly heat ray needs line of sight? Would be a shame if you were blasted into oblivion from beyond the horizon
The population of London alone was over five million in War of the Worlds. Most of those people could not have been evacuated and most of those remaining would have died, if only from starvation.
Compare that to the Battle of Manhattan where the Avengers manage to contain the invasion to its initial beachhead of a few square blocks, before exploiting a convenient trick weakness to kill all the invaders. Their defeat wasn’t a gag, but was pretty easy all things considered.
Am I misremembering or did they not have many pods that hit all over earth and we just read about it from the perspective of the one MC is all?
Like another guy said: nothing in the story gives the indication that it only happens to London from my memory, at least, just the book only takes place in London.
This would be like reading a book about the Battle of Stalingrad and thinking only one city was involved with the war.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a human mutters an offhanded sentence that is sucked through a spontaneous wormhole which ends at a meeting of diplomats. While what he said was completely innocent in our language, it was the worst insult in theirs. That led to a long and bloody war until they realized where the insult came from. The forces make peace and set off to punish Earth for causing their people to go through so much pain. When their armada arrives on Earth >!it is eaten by a small dog because they are verrrrry tiny.!<
So that invasion was even less successful and they were very serious about it.
At the end of the book, it’s implied that the Martians decided to take over Venus instead, which means that they still had plenty of resources available for colonization. The invasion we see was likely intended to be a probing attack to soften up Earth’s defenses by destroying the most powerful empire of the time and give the Martians a beachhead from which to launch further attacks. Things went sideways when they forgot that bacteria exist.
I dunno, this one was pretty shite as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_Invaders
They invaded a small town in Illinois and mostly got their asses kicked by traffic. They did destroy much of the town via hijinks however, but the only real casualties was one of their own enforcer bots.
I think Signs has to be the top in useless alien invasions.
They had been scouting Earth for decades, and on the day the finally decided to attack they realized they were deathly allergic to water and couldn’t be bothered to so much as bring a rain coat or water proof gloves to a planet 70% covered in water. Where what is the equivalent of poison rain amd fog could come by at any time….
World’s stupidest invasion plan
The Body Snatchers has plant-like pods that create physical duplicates of humans. They only manage to replace a small town in California before they are defeated. Most film adaptations have them more successful.
No and it’s not even close. Harry Turtledove’s “The Road Not Taken” has alien invaders whose tech, with the exception of FTL travel, hadn’t progressed past the Age of Sail. They took on the modern US military with blackpowder muskets.
Needless to day the invasion was over in an afternoon.
Gate – Thus the JSDF Fought There! has people from another dimension with the technology of Roman soldiers open a magic portal to our world, kill a few civilians, and then after that they only fight the small group of Japanese soldiers that are stationed on their side of the portal.
Remember, this is set at the peak of the British Empire
“Just Southern England” would be comparable to wiping out Washington DC and NYC today. Sure, not as massive as some potential Invasions, but the MCU has a bunch of Invasions that are less effective.
Dragon Ball-
Baby Goky is sent to take over Earth, hits his head and does not fullfill it at all. He kills one person. Raditz and Frieza are other 2 alien characters that arrive on Earth and kill like 1 person as they are put down in single combat.
Is The Thing an alien invasion? It arrived on a ship. It kills less than 30 people in Antartica.
Signs aliens are def the least successful.
They invaded the whole world, were SUPER obvious with their recon (Seriously, their INVISIBLE ships still showed LIGHTS at NIGHT. Dumbasses) and they only managed to kidnap a few people before realising humans have a ton of water in us on a planet filled with water, so they immediately began to bail.
You have to remember this book was written and is set when the British Empire was the most powerful and technologically advanced empire in the world and also this is the first story of its kind.
You also need to remember that this novel pretty much invented the Alien Invasion genre of story.
Since then, and with the advancement of real world human technology, writers have tried to one up each other and raise the stakes. But this was a time when Britain controlled a big chunk of the entire world.
This was a story about the most powerful and technologically advanced nation in the world, instead of being the one invading and conquering, being invaded right in in the centre of power and being pretty much helpless against the alien invaders. It’s a big deal and shocking, especially when it was written.