The Arts
October 2020
Alien Invasions!
The History of Aliens in Pop Culture
by Edited by Michael Stein; foreword by David J. Hogan
Written by a team of internationally renowned experts on the subject, Alien Invasions! Explores how aliens—and the ways we perceive them—have evolved over the years across a wide range of media, from books and magazines to film and television. Within these richly illustrated pages, you’ll meet aliens with eyes on stalks; the tentacled aliens of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds; Frank R. Paul’s barrel-chested Martians of the 1930s; the blob-like B-movie creatures of the 1950s; H. R. Giger’s nightmarish creation for Ridley Scott’s Alien; Steven Spielberg’s friendly visitor in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial; and many, many more. Each of the book’s chapters tackles its subject from a different vantage point, beginning with the earliest fictional examples by Wells and others, before looking at the pulp-magazine explosion of the 1920s and 1930s; the UFO phenomenon of the 1950s, in print and on screen; comic-book aliens, from Buck Rogers to the present day; the B-movie boom of the 1950s, heralded by The Thing and The Day the Earth Stood Still; invaders from within, in the form of Body-Snatchers and Triffids; aliens’ interactions with Earth women; small-screen aliens, from Star Trek to Falling Skies; and blockbuster invasions, from Close Encounters to Arrival. Along the way, you’ll encounter ray guns, seedpods, mind control, and body transference, not to mention a whole galaxy of friendly visitors and fearsome invaders. Never before have so many aliens assembled in one place!
