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Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Edgar Rice Burroughs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Rice_Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
BornSeptember 1, 1875
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
DiedMarch 19, 1950 (aged 74)
Encino, California, U.S.
Resting placeTarzana, California, U.S.
OccupationNovelist
Period1911–1950
GenreAdventure novel, fantasy, lost world, sword and planet, planetary romance, soft science fiction, Western
Notable works
Signature

Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 – March 19, 1950) was an American fiction writer best known for his celebrated and prolific output in the adventure and science-fiction genres. Among the most notable of his creations are the jungle hero Tarzan, the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, and the fictional landmass within Earth known as Pellucidar. Burroughs' California ranch is now the center of the Tarzana neighborhood in Los Angeles. 

Biography


Early life and family

Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, in Chicago (he later lived for many years in the suburb of Oak Park), the fourth son of Major George Tyler Burroughs (1833–1913), a businessman and Civil War veteran, and his wife, Mary Evaline (Zieger) Burroughs (1840–1920). His middle name is from his paternal grandmother, Mary Coleman Rice Burroughs (1802-1889). He was of almost entirely English ancestry, with a family line that had been in North America since the Colonial era.

Through his Rice grandmother, Burroughs was descended from settler Edmund Rice, one of the English Puritans who moved to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th Century. He once remarked, "I can trace my ancestry back to Deacon Edmund Rice." The Burroughs side of the family was also of English origin and also emigrated to Massachusetts around the same time. Many of his ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Some of his ancestors settled in Virginia during the colonial period, and Burroughs often emphasized his connection with that side of his family, seeing it as romantic and warlike, and, in fact, could have counted among his close cousins no less than seven signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, including his third cousin, four times removed, 2nd President of the United States John Adams.

Burroughs was educated at a number of local schools. He then attended Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, and then the Michigan Military Academy. Graduating in 1895, and failing the entrance exam for the United States Military Academy at West Point, he became an enlisted soldier with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. After being diagnosed with a heart problem and thus ineligible to serve, he was discharged in 1897.

Burroughs's bookplate, showing Tarzan holding the planet Mars, surrounded by other characters from his stories and symbols relating to his personal interests and career
 
Typescript letter, with Tarzana Ranch letterhead, from Burroughs to Ruthven Deane, explaining the design and significance of his bookplate
 
After his discharge Burroughs worked a number of different jobs. During the Chicago influenza epidemic of 1891, he spent half a year at his brother's ranch on the Raft River in Idaho, as a cowboy, drifted somewhat afterward, then worked at his father's Chicago battery factory in 1899, marrying his childhood sweetheart, Emma Hulbert (1876–1944), in January 1900.

In 1903, Burroughs joined his brothers, Yale graduates George and Harry, who were, by then, prominent Pocatello area ranchers in southern Idaho, and partners in the Sweetser-Burroughs Mining Company, where he took on managing their ill-fated Snake River gold dredge, a classic bucket-line dredge. The Burroughs brothers were also the sixth cousins, once removed, of famed miner Kate Rice, a brilliant and statuesque Maths professor who, in 1914, became the first female prospector in the Canadian North. Journalist and publisher C. Allen Thorndike Rice was also his third cousin.

When the new mine proved unsuccessful, the brothers secured for Burroughs a position with the Oregon Short Line Railroad in Salt Lake City. Burroughs resigned from the railroad in October 1904.

Author

By 1911, after seven years of low wages as a pencil-sharpener wholesaler; Burroughs began to write fiction. By this time, Emma and he had two children, Joan (1908–1972), and Hulbert (1909–1991). During this period, he had copious spare time and began reading pulp-fiction magazines. In 1929, he recalled thinking that
...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.
In 1913, Burroughs and Emma had their third and last child, John Coleman Burroughs (1913–1979), later known for his illustrations of his father's books.

In the 1920s, Burroughs became a pilot, purchased a Security Airster S-1, and encouraged his family to learn to fly.

Daughter Joan married Tarzan film actor, James Pierce, starring with her husband, as the voice of Jane, during 1932-34 for the Tarzan radio series. The pair were wed for more than forty years, until her death, in 1972.

Burroughs divorced Emma in 1934 and, in 1935, married the former actress Florence Gilbert Dearholt, who was the former wife of his friend (who was then remarrying himself), Ashton Dearholt, with whom he had co-founded Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises while filming The New Adventures of Tarzan. Burroughs adopted the Dearholts' two children. He and Florence divorced in 1942.

Burroughs was in his late 60s and was in Honolulu at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Despite his age, he applied for and received permission to become a war correspondent, becoming one of the oldest U.S. war correspondents during World War II. This period of his life is mentioned in William Brinkley's bestselling novel Don't Go Near the Water. 

Death

After the war ended, Burroughs moved back to Encino, California, where after many health problems, he died of a heart attack on March 19, 1950, having written almost 80 novels. He is buried at Tarzana, California, US.

When he died, he was believed to have been the writer who had made the most from films, earning over $2 million in royalties from 27 Tarzan pictures.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Burroughs in 2003.

Literary career

Aiming his work at the pulps, Burroughs had his first story, Under the Moons of Mars, serialized by Frank Munsey in the February to July 1912 issues of The All-Story – under the name "Norman Bean" to protect his reputation. Under the Moons of Mars inaugurated the Barsoom series and earned Burroughs US$400 ($10,385 today). It was first published as a book by A. C. McClurg of Chicago in 1917, entitled A Princess of Mars, after three Barsoom sequels had appeared as serials and McClurg had published the first four serial Tarzan novels as books.

Burroughs soon took up writing full-time, and by the time the run of Under the Moons of Mars had finished, he had completed two novels, including Tarzan of the Apes, published from October 1912 and one of his most successful series.

Burroughs also wrote popular science fiction and fantasy stories involving adventurers from Earth transported to various planets (notably Barsoom, Burroughs's fictional name for Mars, and Amtor, his fictional name for Venus), lost islands, and into the interior of the hollow earth in his Pellucidar stories. He also wrote Westerns and historical romances. Besides those published in All-Story, many of his stories were published in The Argosy magazine.

Tarzan was a cultural sensation when introduced. Burroughs was determined to capitalize on Tarzan's popularity in every way possible. He planned to exploit Tarzan through several different media including a syndicated Tarzan comic strip, movies, and merchandise. Experts in the field advised against this course of action, stating that the different media would just end up competing against each other. Burroughs went ahead, however, and proved the experts wrong – the public wanted Tarzan in whatever fashion he was offered. Tarzan remains one of the most successful fictional characters to this day and is a cultural icon. 

In either 1915 or 1919, Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles, California, which he named "Tarzana". The citizens of the community that sprang up around the ranch voted to adopt that name when their community, Tarzana, California, was formed in 1927. Also, the unincorporated community of Tarzan, Texas, was formally named in 1927 when the US Postal Service accepted the name, reputedly coming from the popularity of the first (silent) Tarzan of the Apes film, starring Elmo Lincoln, and an early "Tarzan" comic strip.

In 1923, Burroughs set up his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and began printing his own books through the 1930s. 

Reception and criticism

Because of the part Burroughs's science fiction played in inspiring real exploration of Mars, an impact crater on Mars was named in his honor after his death. In a Paris Review interview, Ray Bradbury said of Burroughs that "Edgar Rice Burroughs never would have looked upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it turns out – and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly – Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world." Bradbury continued that "By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special." 

In Something of Myself (published posthumously in 1937) Rudyard Kipling wrote: "My Jungle Books begat Zoos of [imitators]. But the genius of all the genii was one who wrote a series called Tarzan of the Apes. I read it, but regret I never saw it on the films, where it rages most successfully. He had 'jazzed' the motif of the Jungle Books and, I imagine, had thoroughly enjoyed himself. He was reported to have said that he wanted to find out how bad a book he could write and 'get away with', which is a legitimate ambition."

By 1963, Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction wrote when discussing reprints of several Burroughs novels by Ace Books, "an entire generation has grown up inexplicably Burroughs-less". He stated that most of the author's books had been out of print for years and that only the "occasional laughable Tarzan film" reminded public of his fiction. Gale reported his surprise that after two decades his books were again available, with Canaveral Press, Dover Publications, and Ballantine Books also reprinting them.

Few critical books have been written about Burroughs. From an academic standpoint, the most helpful are Erling Holtsmark's two books: Tarzan and Tradition and Edgar Rice Burroughs; Stan Galloway's The Teenage Tarzan: A Literary Analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Jungle Tales of Tarzan; and Richard Lupoff's two books: Master of Adventure: Edgar Rice Burroughs and Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision. Galloway was identified by James Edwin Gunn as "one of the half-dozen finest Burroughs scholars in the world"; Galloway called Holtsmark his "most important predecessor."

Selected works


Barsoom series

Tarzan series

Pellucidar series

Venus series

Caspak series

Moon series

  • The Moon Maid (1923, revised 1925; The Moon Men)
    • Part I: The Moon Maid
    • Part II: The Moon Men
    • Part III: The Red Hawk
These three texts have been published by various houses in one or two volumes. Adding to the confusion, some editions have the original (significantly longer) introduction to Part I from the first publication as a magazine serial, and others have the shorter version from the first book publication, which included all three parts under the title The Moon Maid.

Mucker series

Other science fiction

Jungle adventure novels

Western novels

Historical novels

Other works

Books on Edgar Rice Burroughs

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UFO religion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A UFO religion is any religion in which the existence of extraterrestrial (ET) entities operating unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is an element of belief. Typically, adherents of such religions believe the ETs to be interested in the welfare of humanity which either already is, or eventually will become, part of a pre-existing ET civilization. Others may incorporate ETs into a more supernatural worldview in which the UFO occupants are more akin to angels than physical aliens; this distinction may be blurred within the overall subculture. These religions have their roots in the tropes of early science fiction (especially space opera) and weird fiction writings, in ufology, and in the subculture of UFO sightings and alien abduction stories.

Summary

Some adherents believe that the arrival or rediscovery of alien civilizations, technologies and spirituality will enable humans to overcome current ecological, spiritual and social problems. Issues such as hatred, war, bigotry, poverty and so on are said to be resolvable through the use of superior alien technology and spiritual abilities. Such belief systems are also described as millenarian in their outlook.

UFO religions developed first in such countries as the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom and Japan as the concept presumes the cultural context of a society technologically advanced enough to conceive of ET as such and one in which religion of any kind is not discouraged or suppressed. The term "flying saucers" and the popular notion of the UFO originated in 1947. The 1950s saw the creation of UFO religions, with the advent of the purported contactees.

Notable UFO religions


Aetherius Society

The Aetherius Society was founded in the United Kingdom in 1955. Its founder, George King, claimed to have been contacted telepathically by an alien intelligence called Aetherius, who represented an "Interplanetary Parliament." According to Aetherians, their society acts as a vehicle through which "Cosmic Transmissions of advanced metaphysical significance" can be disseminated to humanity. These "transmissions" were recorded on magnetic reel-to-reel tape by persons present during each "telepathic transmission" as George King sat in a state of "Samadhi" and the "transmission" was "delivered" via his own voicebox. In 1956 and 1957, and on occasion before a public audience, several of these "transmissions" forecast flying saucer activity in specific parts of the world on certain dates (You Are Responsible! Aetherius Society 1961). Shortly after these dates, newspapers, such as the Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph, reported sightings which coincided with the dates and locations forecast in these "transmissions". As a spiritual teacher, George King taught certain yoga practices, spiritual healing, Eastern mantra and "dynamic prayer"—tools for spiritual self-advancement and service to the world—which the Aetherius Society is principally based upon.

Church of the SubGenius

Founded in 1979 with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1 by Ivan Stang and Philo Drummond, the Church of the SubGenius has been known as a "parody religion" due to its extensive use of comedy and parody. In spite of this, the organization claims over 10,000 followers worldwide who have paid $30 to become "ordained SubGenius ministers", and it has been embraced by many skeptic and atheist groups. With the publication of The Book of the SubGenius in 1983, the Church of the SubGenius prophesied that its founder, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, was in contact with an exterrestrial race called the Xists ("X-ists"), and these Xists were scheduled to launch a worldwide invasion of Earth on July 5, 1998. (See also: X-Day (Church of the SubGenius)) The day of the scheduled invasion came and went without an appearance by the Xists, but church members remain unconvinced. The church now holds annual "X-Day" celebrations on July 5 of every year. The church also claims that its members are not entirely human, having descended from the Yeti.

Heaven's Gate

The Heaven's Gate group achieved notoriety in 1997 when founder Marshall Applewhite convinced 38 followers to commit mass suicide. Members reportedly believed themselves to be aliens, awaiting a spaceship that would arrive with Comet Hale-Bopp. The suicide was undertaken in the apparent belief that their souls would be transported onto the spaceship, which they thought was hiding behind the comet. They underwent elaborate preparations for their trip, including purchasing and wearing matching shoes and living in a darkened house to simulate the long journey they expected to have in outer space.

Nation of Islam

The Nation of Islam subscribes to the belief that UFOs are man-made machines that are piloted not by extraterrestrial beings, but by humans. It is believed that these machines will have a hand in the Day of Judgment. Its late leader Elijah Muhammed claimed that the biblical Book of Ezekiel describes a "Mother Plane" or great "Wheel". Elijah reported in his books that his mentor, Wallace Fard Muhammad, claimed that there was hidden technology on the Earth which selected scientists all around the world are secretly aware of. Fard explained that he had had a huge "Mother Plane" or "Wheel" constructed on the island of Nippon (Japan) in 1929. The movement's current leader, Louis Farrakhan, describes the "Mother Plane" thus:
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us of a giant Motherplane that is made like the universe, spheres within spheres. White people call them unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, saw a wheel that looked like a cloud by day but a pillar of fire by night. The Hon. Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the original scientists. It took 15 billion dollars in gold at that time to build it. It is made of the toughest steel. America does not yet know the composition of the steel used to make an instrument like it. It is a circular plane, and the Bible says that it never makes turns. Because of its circular nature it can stop and travel in all directions at speeds of thousands of miles per hour. He said there are 1,500 small wheels in this mother wheel which is a half mile by a half mile (800 by 800 m). This Mother Wheel is like a small human built planet. Each one of these small planes carry three bombs.

Raëlism

The International Raëlian Movement has been described as "the largest UFO religion in the world." Raëlians believe that scientifically advanced extraterrestrials, known as the Elohim, created life on Earth through genetic engineering, and that a combination of human cloning and "mind transfer" can ultimately provide eternal life. Past religious teachers, like Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad, are said to have been sent by these scientifically advanced extraterrestrials to teach humanity. The Elohim are said to be planning a future visit to complete their revelation and education of humanity.

Raëlian Priest Thomas said on this topic, "The difference between Raëlians and Heaven's Gate and Jim Jones etc., is that the others destructively believed in a God who would give them a better life after death, just like most believers in a monotheistic religion do today, and hence the risk for suicide chasing afterlife rewards … as Raëlians we want the best right now in our life, who would want to die now in that scenario with all those pleasures to enjoy? Raëlians believe in enjoying life now, with happiness and laughter."

Scientology

Scientology has been discussed in the context of UFO religions in UFO Religions by Christopher Partridge, The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of UFO Religions by James R. Lewis, and UFO Religion: Inside Flying Saucer Cults and Culture by Gregory Reece. Stories of extraterrestrial civilizations and interventions in past lives form a part of the belief system of Scientology. The most well-known story publicized and held up to ridicule by critics is that of Xenu, the ruler of the Galactic Confederacy who is said to have brought billions of frozen people to Earth 75 million years ago and placed them near a number of volcanoes, and dropped hydrogen bombs into them, thus killing the entire population in an effort to solve overpopulation. The spirits of these people were then captured by Xenu and mass implanted with numerous suggestions and then "packaged" into clusters of spirits.

From the early 1950s onwards, Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, published a number of books, lectures, and other works describing what he termed "space opera".

Scientology teaches that all humans have experienced innumerable past lives, including lives in ancient advanced extraterrestrial societies, such as Helatrobus and the Marcabians. Traumatic memories from these past lives are said to be the cause of many present-day physical and mental ailments. Scientologists also believe that human beings possess superhuman powers which cannot be restored until they have been fully rehabilitated as spiritual beings through the practice of "auditing", using methods set out by Hubbard in his various works.

According to Hubbard, a thetan (the Scientology term for a soul) has a body. When that body dies the thetan goes to a "landing station" on the planet Venus, where they are re-implanted and are programmed to forget their previous lifetimes. The Venusians then "capsule" each thetan and send them back to Earth to be dumped into the Gulf of California; whereupon, each thetan searches for a new body to inhabit. To avoid these inconveniences, Hubbard advised Scientologists to simply refuse to go to Venus after their death.

Unarius Academy of Science

Founded by Ernest L. Norman and his wife, Ruth, in 1954, the Unarians are a group headquartered in El Cajon, California, who believe that, through the use of Four-dimensional space physics, they are able to communicate with supposed advanced intelligent beings that allegedly exist on "higher frequency" planes. Unarians believe in past lives and hold that the Solar System was once inhabited by ancient interplanetary civilizations.

Universal Industrial Church of the New World Comforter

The Universal Industrial Church of the New World Comforter is a UFO religion founded in 1967 by Allen Michael.

In 1947, Allen Noonan was a pictorial sign painter in Long Beach, California, who that year claimed to have an encounter with Galactic Space Beings. While painting a signboard he said he was beamed up into a Mothership. He then changed his name to Allen Michael. He claimed to have physically encountered a flying saucer in 1954 at Giant Rock in the Mojave Desert of California. During the Summer of Love, he began the One World Family Commune with a vegan restaurant on the northeast corner of Haight and Scott streets in San Francisco, California, called the Here and Now. 7 similar restaurants followed. His communal group lived in two large houses during the early 1970s in Berkeley, California. In 1969, the commune established a vegan restaurant in a much larger space on Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street in Berkeley and the name of the restaurant was changed to the One World Family Natural Food Center. They published a vegetarian cookbook called Cosmic Cookery. There was a large mural on the side of the restaurant painted by Allen Michael that had written above it the phrase Farmers, Workers, Soldiers Unite — The People's Spiritual Reformation 1776–1976! The farmer was holding a pitchfork, the worker was holding a hammer, and the soldier was holding a gun, and they had their arms around each other's shoulders. Above the three were three flying saucers coming in for a landing. In 1973, Allen Michael founded "The Universal Industrial Church of the New World Comforter" and published the first volume of his channeled revelations, The Everlasting Gospel. In 1975, the church headquarters and the vegetarian restaurant relocated to Stockton, California. Allen Noonan ran for president of the United States in the 1980 and 1984 elections on the Utopian Synthesis Party ticket.

Universe People

The Universe People or Cosmic people of light powers (Czech: Vesmírní lidé sil světla) is a Czech movement centered around Ivo A. Benda. Its belief system is based upon the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations communicating with Benda and other "contacters" since October 1997 telepathically and later by direct personal contact. According to Benda, those civilizations operate a fleet of spaceships led by Ashtar (sometimes written Ashtar Sheran) orbiting and closely watching the Earth, helping the good and waiting to transport the followers into another dimension. The Universe People teaching incorporates various elements from ufology (some foreign "contacters" are credited, though often also renounced after a time as misguided or deceptive), Christianity (Jesus was a "fine-vibrations" being) and conspiracy theories (forces of evil are supposed to plan compulsory chipping of the populace).

UFOs in other religions


Share International and Maitreya

The Theosophical-influenced guru Benjamin Creme of Share International claimed that the Messiah figure he referred to as Maitreya, who, he taught, will soon declare himself publicly, is in telepathic contact with the space brothers in their flying saucers. Creme subscribed to the view that Nordic aliens from Venus pilot flying saucers from a civilization on Venus hundreds of millions of years in advance of ours that exists on the etheric plane of Venus. These flying saucers are capable of stepping down the level of vibration of themselves and their craft to the slower level of vibration of the atoms of the physical plane (Creme accepted George Adamski's UFO sightings as valid). According to Creme, the Venusians have mother ships up to four miles long. It is also believed by the Theosophists in general as well as Creme in particular that the governing deity of Earth, Sanat Kumara (who is believed to live in a city called Shamballa located above the Gobi desert on the etheric plane of Earth), is a Nordic alien who originally came from Venus 18,500,000 years ago. The followers of Benjamin Creme believe there is regular flying saucer traffic between Venus and Shamballah and that crop circles are mostly caused by flying saucers.

Ascended Master Teachings

The Ascended Master Teachings are a group of religions based on Theosophy. In the traditional Ascended Master Teachings of Guy Ballard and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, no mention is made of UFOs or flying saucers. However, the Ascended Master Teachings teacher Joshua David Stone in his teachings began, beginning in 1993, to refer to Ashtar, believed by some UFO enthusiasts to be the commander of a flying saucer fleet called the "Ashtar Galactic Command" that operates near Earth (manned mostly by Venusians), as a Master along with the more traditional ascended masters. He continued to include "Ashtar" on his list of ascended masters that he mentioned he received dictations from when speaking at his yearly Wesak Festival Mount Shasta gatherings that began to be held in 1996. Stone also taught that the Master Jesus, under his "galactic" name Sananda, sometimes rides with "Commander Ashtar" in his flying saucer fleet.

Tempelhofgesellschaft

A neo-Nazi esoteric Nazi Gnostic sect headquartered in Vienna, Austria, called the Tempelhofgesellschaft, founded in the early 1990s, teaches what it calls a form of Marcionism. They distribute pamphlets claiming that the Aryan race originally came to Atlantis from the star Aldebaran (this information is supposedly based on "ancient Sumerian manuscripts"). They maintain that the Aryans from Aldebaran derive their power from the vril energy of the Black Sun. They teach that since the Aryan race is of extraterrestrial origin it has a divine mission to dominate all the other races. It is believed by adherents of this religion that an enormous space fleet is on its way to Earth from Aldebaran which, when it arrives, will join forces with the "Nazi Flying Saucers from Antarctica" to establish the Western Imperium.

New Message from God

The New Message from God claims that aliens are on Earth to take advantage of imminent, global environmental collapse: "Humanity is now facing competition from beyond the world, intervention from races beyond the world who seek to take advantage of a weak and divided humanity, who seek to benefit from the decline of human civilization."

Training centre for release of the Atma-energy

This sect was originally a splinter group of the Brahma Kumaris and is known for a police and media scare in which an alleged attempt to commit ritual suicide took place in Teide National Park in Tenerife in 1998. Apparently, the 32 members of the sect believed that they would be collected by a spacecraft and taken to an unspecified destination.
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Alien invasion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
The alien invasion from Mars in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, as illustrated by Henrique Alvim Corrêa.
 
The alien invasion or space invasion is a common feature in science fiction stories and film, in which extraterrestrials invade the Earth either to exterminate and supplant human life, enslave it under an intense state, harvest people for food, steal the planet's resources, or destroy the planet altogether. 

The invasion scenario has been used as an allegory for a protest against military hegemony and the societal ills of the time. H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds extended the invasion literature that was already common when science fiction was first emerging as a genre.

Prospects of invasion tended to vary with the state of current affairs, and current perceptions of threat. Alien invasion was a common metaphor in United States science fiction during the Cold War, illustrating the fears of foreign (e.g. Soviet Union) occupation and nuclear devastation of the American people. Examples of these stories include the short story “The Liberation of Earth“ (1950) by William Tenn and the film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

In the invasion trope, fictional aliens contacting Earth tend to either observe (sometimes using experiments) or invade, rather than help the population of Earth acquire the capacity to participate in interplanetary affairs. There are some notable exceptions, such as the alien-initiated first-contact scenarios in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Arrival (2016). A trope of the peaceful first-contact is humanity attaining a key technological threshold (e.g. nuclear weapons and space travel in The Day the Earth Stood Still or faster-than-light travel in First Contact), justifying their initiation into a broader community of intelligent species.

Technically, a human invasion of an alien species is also an alien invasion, as from the viewpoint of the aliens, humans are the aliens. Such stories are much rarer than stories about aliens attacking humans. Examples include the short story Sentry (1954) (in which the "aliens" described are, at the end, explained to be humans), the video game Phantasy Star II (1989),[1] The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, the Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Invaders from Earth by Robert Silverberg, the movies Battle for Terra (2007), Planet 51 (2009), Avatar (2009) and Mars Needs Moms (2011).

As well as being a subgenre of science fiction, these kinds of books can be considered a subgenre of invasion literature, which also includes fictional depictions of humans invaded by other humans (for example, a fictional invasion of England by a hostile France strongly influenced Wells' depiction of a Martian invasion). 

Origins

Martian war machines destroying an English town in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds
 
In 1898, H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds, depicting the invasion of Victorian England by Martians equipped with advanced weaponry. It is now seen as the seminal alien invasion story and Wells is credited with establishing several extraterrestrial themes which were later greatly expanded by science fiction writers in the 20th Century, including first contact and war between planets and their differing species. However, there were stories of aliens and alien invasion prior to publication of The War of the Worlds.

Voltaire's Micromégas (1752) includes two aliens, from Saturn and Sirius, who are of immense size and visit the Earth out of curiosity. Initially, they believe the planet is uninhabited, due to the difference in scale between them and human beings. When they discover the haughty Earth-centric views of Earth philosophers, they are very much amused by how important Earth beings think they are compared to actual titans such as themselves.

In 1892, Robert Potter, an Australian clergyman, published The Germ Growers in London. It describes a covert invasion by aliens who take on the appearance of human beings and attempt to develop a virulent disease to assist in their plans for global conquest. It was not widely read, and consequently Wells' vastly more successful novel is generally credited as the seminal alien invasion story.

Wells had already proposed another outcome for the alien invasion story in The War of the Worlds. When the Narrator meets the artilleryman the second time, the artilleryman imagines a future where humanity, hiding underground in sewers and tunnels, conducts a guerrilla war, fighting against the Martians for generations to come, and eventually, after learning how to duplicate Martian weapon technology, destroys the invaders and takes back the Earth.

Six weeks after publication of the novel, The Boston Post newspaper published another alien invasion story, an unauthorized sequel to The War of the Worlds, which turned the tables on the invaders. Edison's Conquest of Mars was written by Garrett P. Serviss, a now little-remembered writer, who described the famous inventor Thomas Edison leading a counterattack against the invaders on their home soil. Though this is actually a sequel to Fighters from Mars, a revised and unauthorised reprint of War of the Worlds, they both were first printed in the Boston Post in 1898.

The War of the Worlds was reprinted in the United States in 1927, a year after the Golden Age of Science Fiction was created by Hugo Gernsback in Amazing Stories. John W. Campbell, another key editor of the era, and periodic short story writer, published several alien invasion stories in the 1930s. Many well-known science fiction writers were to follow, including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford Simak, plus Robert A. Heinlein who wrote The Puppet Masters in 1953.

Fictional variations


Alien infiltration

This is a familiar variation on the alien invasion theme. In the infiltration scenario, the invaders will typically take human form and can move freely throughout human society, even to the point of taking control of command positions. The purpose of this may either be to take over the entire world through infiltration (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), or as advanced scouts meant to "soften up" Earth in preparation for a full-scale invasion by the aliens' conventional military (First Wave). This type of invasion usually emphasizes common fears during the Cold War, with the Communist agents suspected everywhere, but has also become common during any time of social change and unrest.

Beneficial alien invasion

In Henry Slesar's 1958 story The Delegate from Venus, an alien robot cautions Earth that it will be destroyed if its people do not learn to live in peace
 
This theme has also been explored in fiction on the rare occasion. With this type of story, the invaders, in a kind of little grey/green man's burden, colonize the planet in an effort to spread their culture and "civilize" the indigenous "barbaric" inhabitants or secretly watch and aid earthlings saving them from themselves. The former theme shares many traits with hostile occupation fiction, but the invaders tend to view the occupied peoples as students or equals rather than subjects and slaves. The latter theme of secret watcher is a paternalistic/maternalistic theme. In this fiction, the aliens intervene in human affairs to prevent them from destroying themselves, such as Klaatu and Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still warning the leaders of Earth to abandon their warlike ways and join other space-faring civilizations else that they will destroy themselves or be destroyed by their interstellar union. Other examples of a beneficial alien invasion are Gene Roddenberry's movie The Questor Tapes (1974) and his Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth" (1968); Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, the novel (later anime) series Crest of the Stars, the film Arrival (2016), and David Brin's Uplift series of books.

Other examples

The cult film They Live (1988) uses its own alien infiltration back story as a satire on Ronald Reagan's America and the 1980s as an era of conspicuous consumption, in which the hidden aliens and human members of the elite oppress poverty-stricken humans and a shrinking middle class. 

The beginning half of the popular video games Halo 2 and Halo 3 deals with the defense of Earth against a genocidal alien empire, the Covenant. The protagonist of the game along with Earth's military force, the UNSC, and a group of former Covenant who rebelled, the Covenant Separatists, eventually repel the invasion and topple the Covenant.

The Mass Effect franchise features a race of massive semi-organic sentient starships called Reapers who destroy any civilization advanced enough to devise artificial intelligence, based on the perceived inevitability of it rebelling.

In Orson Scott Card's series Ender's Game, an insectoid race of hiveminded aliens known as the Formics invade Earth on two different occasions, known as the First and Second Formic Wars. The first invasion resulted in tens of millions of deaths, but the second resulted in very few casualties. After this second invasion, the conglomerate of nations known as the International Fleet decided to launch their own invasion that would completely devastate the Formic home planet.
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The Shape of Things to Come

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come
 
Shape of things to come dust jacket.jpg
First edition dust jacket
AuthorH. G. Wells
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
GenreFuture history
PublisherHutchinson (UK)
Macmillan (US)
Publication date
September 1933
Media typePrint

The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by British writer H. G. Wells, published in 1933, which speculates on future events up to the year 2106.

A long economic slump causes a major war that leaves Europe devastated and threatened by plague. The nations with the strongest air-forces set up a benevolent dictatorship that paves the way for world peace by abolishing national divisions, enforcing the English language, promoting scientific learning and outlawing religion. The enlightened world-citizens are able to depose the dictators peacefully, and go on to breed a new race of super-talents, able to maintain a permanent utopia.

Some of Wells’ short-term predictions would come true, such as the aerial bombing of whole cities and the eventual development of weapons of mass destruction. Others, such as the withering of state-power and the dissolution of Islam, were wide of the mark.

Plot

As a frame story, Wells claims that the book is his edited version of notes written by an eminent diplomat, Dr Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2106 and wrote down what he could remember of it. It is split into five separate sections or "books":
  1. Today and Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration Dawns – The history of the world up to 1933.
  2. The Days After Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration – 1933–1960.
  3. The World Renaissance: The Birth of the Modern State – 1960–1978.
  4. The Modern State Militant – 1978–2059.
  5. The Modern State in Control of Life – 2059 to New Year's Day 2106.
The Shape of Things to Come was written as a future history. In late 1933 or early 1934, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt's failure to implement the New Deal and revive the US economy and Adolf Hitler's failure to revive the German economy by rearmament causes the worldwide economic crisis to continue for thirty years, concurrently with the war, as described above. 

Wells predicted a Second World War breaking out with a European conflagration from the flashpoint of a violent clash between Germans and Poles at Danzig. Wells set the date for this as January 1940 – quite close to the actual date of September 1939. But where Wells' imagined war sharply diverges from the actual WWII is in Poland proving a military match for Germany – and they engage in an inconclusive war lasting ten years. More countries are eventually dragged into the fighting, but France and the Soviet Union are only marginally involved, the United Kingdom remains neutral, and the United States fights inconclusively with Japan. The Austrian Anschluss happens during, rather than before, the war. Czechoslovakia avoids German occupation and its president, Edvard Beneš, survives to initiate the final "Suspension of Hostilities" in 1950.

Wells' prediction was widely off the mark with regard to Spain, which the book assumed would manage to stay away from the violent passions sweeping the rest of Europe – where in fact the Spanish Civil War would become the main focus of these passions, two years after Shape of Things to Come was published. Evidently, Wells greatly overestimated the influence of Spanish Liberals such as Unamuno on Spanish society as a whole.

Wells correctly predicted that the coming war would involve both sides launching heavy bombings of each other's main cities (his detailed depiction of the destroyed Unter Den Linden closely predicted the boulevard's actual fate in the war). However, Wells was wrong in assuming that land fighting would quickly bog down as in World War I, and that the idea of using tanks to develop a war of movement would come to naught. Wells predicted that submarines would become the launching pads for "air torpedoes" (i.e. missiles) carrying weapons of mass destruction, enabling a country to threaten the destruction of places halfway around the world – which actually happened, though not in World War II but decades later. 

Wells' predicted war ends with no victor but total exhaustion, collapse and disintegration of all the fighting states and of the neutral countries, equally affected by the deepening economic crisis. The whole world descends into chaos: nearly all governments break down, and a devastating plague in 1956 and 1957 kills a large part of humanity and almost destroys civilization. 

Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship, "The Dictatorship of the Air", arising from the controllers of the world's surviving transport systems, who are the only people with global power. This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca and eradicates all religions, setting the world on the road to a peaceful utopia. When the dictatorship chooses to murder a subject, the condemned person is given a chance to take a poison tablet (modeled on the Hemlock given to Socrates). 

The achievement of a classless society is not via a Marxist Dictatorship of the Proletariat, an idea which Wells completely rejected. Rather, the working class is massively "pulled upwards" and completely eliminated in several generations of intensive upward social mobility – in effect leaving a humanity entirely composed of "middle class intellectuals". The limited amount of physical labor still needed is performed by the world's youths, undergoing two years of "labor conscription" instead of the no longer needed military conscription. 

Eventually, after about 100 years of reshaping humanity, the Dictatorship of the Air is overthrown in a completely bloodless coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourable retirement, and the world state "withers away". The last part of the book is a detailed description of the utopian world that emerges. The ultimate aim of this utopian world is to produce a world society composed entirely of polymaths, each and every one of its members the intellectual equal of the greatest geniuses of the past. 

The book displays one of the earliest uses of the abbreviation "C.E.", which Wells explains as "Christian Era", but it is now more usually understood as "Common Era".

Suppression of religion

One of the major aspects of the creation of the World State is the abolition of all organised religion—an act deemed indispensable to give the emerging "Modern State" a monopoly over education and the complete ability to mould new generations of humanity.

The abolition of Islam is carried out by the Air Police, who "descend upon Mecca and close down the main holy places", apparently without major incident. Eventually, Islam disappears, its demise accelerated by the decay of Arabic and its replacement by "an expanded English". Some twenty mosques survive, deemed to be worthy of preservation on architectural grounds. The Lebanese-American scholar George Nasser remarked on this aspect of Wells' book: "In the 1979 imagined by HG Wells, a self-appointed ruling elite composed mainly of Westerners, with one Chinese and one Black African and not a single Arab member, would establish itself in the Arab and Muslim city of Basra and calmly take the decision to completely extinguish and extirpate the Muslim religion... In the 1979 of real history, Khomeini's Islamic Republic of Iran came into being".

There is only a brief reference to the abolition of Buddhism and no reference to any serious problem encountered by the Modern State in eradicating it from East Asia. 

The most prolonged and formidable religious opposition envisaged by Wells is from the Catholic Church. (There is little reference to Protestants.) The Pope and the entire Catholic hierarchy are gassed unconscious when blessing the new aircraft built by a revived Fascist Italy. After the Catholic Church is decisively crushed in Italy, it finds refuge in Ireland, "the last bastion of Christianity". Ireland is also subdued, and then Catholic resistance is maintained only in Latin America, under "a coloured Pope in Pernambuco", until it too is finally put down.

Wells gives considerable attention to the fate of the Jews. In this history, an enfeebled Nazi Germany is incapable of systematic murder on the scale of the Holocaust. However, Jews greatly suffer from "unorganized" persecution, and there is a reference to anti-Jewish pogroms happening "everywhere in Europe" during the chaotic 1950s. Then, in a world where all nation-states are a doomed anachronism, Zionism and its ambition to create a new state come to naught. In the later struggle between the emerging world state and its opponents, Jews are seen as caught between the hammer and the anvil. Following the launch of its antireligious campaign, the Modern State closes down all kosher butcheries still in operation, while the opening act of the "Federated Nationalist" rebels opposing this state is to perpetrate a pogrom against Jews in the Frankfurt area. Eventually, in Wells's vision, it is the Modern State's forced assimilation that triumphs and the Jews, who had resisted earlier such pressures, become completely absorbed in the general society and lose their separate identity. 

Democracy, Fascism and Communism

In the 1930s, especially after the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazi Germany, the survival of European Democracy seemed in doubt. Wells – not a great supporter of Democracy even in its more robust times – clearly shared this outlook. The future history book, from the vantage point of 2106, notes that at the outbreak of war in 1940 France was still a Parliamentary Democracy – the implication clearly being that that was an outmoded form of government, on its way out. The visionary Gustave de Windt, setting out the blueprint for the coming "Modern State", rejects categorically "The Principle of Opposition" – which by definition rules out Parliamentary Democracy. 

Wells' posterity remembers Fascism more as a ridiculous and stupid movement than as a horrible one. In the war envisioned in the book, an enfeebled Nazi Germany got bogged down in its war with Poland, never achieved vast conquests nor engaged in a systematic murder of Jews, and finally collapsed and disintegrated (no mention is made of Hitler's ultimate fate, and the historian of 2106 clearly considers it unimportant). 

German Nazism disappears without a trace, and an attempt to revive Italian Fascism is easily swept away by the resurgent Modern State. The book notes that many people who were Fascists or Nazis in their early years had become staunch adherents of the Modern State in the more mature part of their lives. 

This posterity remembers Stalin as having been narrow and limited in his understanding, but not as a bloody dictator. The Soviet Union is less affected than other countries by the worldwide chaos and disintegration of the late 1940s and the 1950s. With the rise of the Modern State, Russia experiences a bloodless takeover by the pilots and other skilled technicians, who displace the Communist Party bureaucrats and eagerly assimilate into the new worldwide state. In the transition time, the old Hammer and Sickle is displayed side by side with the Modern State's Winged Disk.

Altogether, of the three competing systems of government – Democracy, Fascism and Communism – only the last would be remembered by Wells' Modern State as having been to some degree a predecessor of itself. 

Relation to Brave New World

The Shape of Things to Come was published two years after Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The two share the same basic outline of humanity's future – i.e., a massive war leaves the world in ruins, a self-appointed elite takes over, rebuilds the world and engages in very thorough social engineering to completely refashion human society. Wells explicitly acknowledges this relationship in the book itself; when the future history book discusses the "Dictatorship of the Air" and its leadership, it is noted that "As Aldous Huxley, one of the most brilliant of the reactionary writers, foretold of them, they tidied up the world".

The crucial difference is in the kind of future society built up in the two books. The future society envisioned by Huxley is rigidly hierarchical, divided into five psychologically-conditioned castes, ranging from the highly intelligent and assertive Alphas on top to the subservient and moronic Epsilons at the bottom. As Huxley's cynical administrator Mustafa Mond asserts, such moronic underclasses are absolutely essential as society's "gyroscope" – since a society composed entirely of the intelligent and assertive "Alphas" would inevitably collapse in all-out conflict, as each of its members would seek to improve his or her position at the expense of the others.

It was this vision which, in Wells' view, would cause Huxley to be remembered by posterity as a "reactionary writer". Much of Shape of Things to Come is devoted to demonstrating that – given a century-long dedicated and intensive work by an elite possessing complete control of world education – such a society of intelligent and assertive "Alphas" could be made harmonious and functional, with no underclasses under them.

Adaptations

Wells loosely adapted the novel for the screenplay of the film Things to Come, produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies, and released in 1936. It also takes elements from Wells's non-fiction book The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931). The film stars Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke and Margaretta Scott. 

H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come is a Canadian science fiction motion picture first released in May 1979. Although credited to H. G. Wells, the film takes only its title and some character names from the original source material. The film's plot has no relationship to the events of the book. The film was an attempt to capitalise on the popularity of such recent successes as Star Wars, and TV series such as Space: 1999 and Battlestar Galactica, although the film had only a fraction of the production budget of any of these.

Big Finish Productions released a 2017 audio adaptation loosely based on the novel, adapted by Guy Adams, starring Nicola Walker and Sam Troughton and directed by Lisa Bowerman. This version presents events as taking part in an alternate timeline which Raven is shown, rather than the dreams of the original novel. 

Influence on later science fiction

Theodore Wein pointed out that "Wells' Things to Come was at its most influential in the six years between its publication and the moment when the course of its predicted war was overtaken and overshadowed by the actual fast-unfolding events of the Second World War. These same years of the 1930s were the time of incubation for the people who were destined to become the greatest names in Science Fiction, the time when they read ravenously any SF on which they could lay their hands and started to formulate their own ideas. It is not surprising that traces of Things to Come are clearly visible in what they wrote in the 1940s and 1950s." Among such great names of Golden Age Science Fiction, Wein noted Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson, and he enumerated in the work of all three – as well of some lesser known SF writers – some influences which could be traced to "Things to Come".

Rex Warner's dystopian novel The Aerodrome (1941) is partly a fictional critique of The Shape of Things to Come, with Wells' "Air Police" transformed into the fascistic "Airmen".

Wells depicted the European social scientist Gustave De Windt sitting down at the British Museum Library and setting out the precise blueprint for a transformation of the world which he would not live to see. This, in Theodore Wein's opinion, may have inspired Isaac Asimov's character Hari Seldon. Wein noted: "Wells' De Windt, conducting his library research in London, capital of the declining British Empire, realized that the world was about to fall apart, and set out a detailed blueprint of how to put it together again. The bulk of Wells's book details how De Windt's disciples, the Modern State Society, set about implementing De Windt's vision. Asimov's Seldon conducted his library research in the Imperial Library of Trantor, capital of the declining Galactic Empire. He realized that the Galaxy was about to fall apart, and set out a detailed blueprint of how to put it together again. The bulk of Asimov's Foundation Series details how Seldon's disciples, the First Foundation and the Second one, set about implementing Seldon's vision.".

Wein also points to Wells' "Encyclopaedic organization which centres upon Barcelona, with its seventeen million active workers" which is tasked with creating "the Fundamental Knowledge System which accumulates, sorts, keeps in order and renders available everything that is known" as a possible inspiration for Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica, whose compilation was the original task of the First Foundation and quotes from which are sprinkled throughout the Foundation Series.

The British Wells had the planes of the emerging World State overfly Washington, D.C. and undermine the authority of the President of the United States. A decade later, the American Robert Heinlein wrote "Solution Unsatisfactory" in which planes of the International Patrol do the same. Later, Heinlein upgraded the International Patrol into an Interplanetary Patrol, a self-appointed elite of highly motivated and rather puritanical spacemen reminiscent of those enforcing Wells' "Dictatorship of the Air". 

Wells depicted "Federated Nationalists" who had banded together only so that they could fly at each other's throats once they had smashed the budding world government. Poul Anderson in his early future history, The Psychotechnic League, depicted precisely the same kind of Nationalists violently opposing the United Nations' efforts to make itself a true world government and rebuild the war-torn world.
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