Background I have currently thought about developing a world based on the following prompt "Extraterrestrials besiege Earth". The main premise is basically a Deconstruction of stories involving humans fighting off alien invaders and other fantastic threats by exploring the troubling and overlooked aspects of these stories.

The main purpose of the thread is to depict life under an extraterrestrial siege of Earth by expanding on the setting. I have currently more explanations on the setting, but I abridged it for time constraints. Feel free to add opinions and suggestions for this setting.

Setting

The Earth has been under siege by an extraterrestrial force for 25 years. It began when a planetary barrier enveloped the entire exosphere, a prelude to the first attack by the besiegers.

Constant battles between the human military and the extraterrestrial armies has caused the deaths of 5 billions along with untold damage to global infrastructure and Earth's biosphere. Societal breakdown occurs on a massive scale as humanity is forced to deal with a international refugee crisis, runaway climate change, political instability, worldwide economic depression and other crises related to it.

Flash-forwards to the present of the setting, humanity is at the losing end of an attrition war. The remnants of humanity are concentrated into heavily-fortified bastions as the remaining military force are placed on the defensive to stall the inevitable defeat. All able-bodied humans are drafted into mandatory military service as the military is facing a constant stream of losses from battling the besiegers.

Why did it take so long? If the invaders made it to earth from however far without us spotting them early and have the technology to set up shop outside the atmosphere while maintaining an apparently impenetrable forcefield for decades, presumably they could railgun every political and military installation without having to worry about a protracted siege, or just nuke everywhere if they're not too worried about colonizing the planet. I'm assuming human technology isn't significantly past modern levels, right?

These aliens seem never to have read How to Invade an Alien Planet.

It depends on what they want and what tech advances have been made in the interim.

But a lot depends on what theme you're going for. Is it 'don't go gentle into the night' about resisting evil even in the absence of hope? Is it 'violence isn't the answer' about negotiating a new peace? Is it 'we're smart enough to overcome' about technological advancement saving us? Is it 'we're tough enough to overcome' about defeating them by sheer strength? What theme/emotion you're trying to invoke will shape a lot about the setting, at least to me.

This is a good point. "I want a setting where aliens have laid siege to Earth" is good enough as it goes, but it's just as important to figure out what themes you want your story to have, what the major story arcs are, and how you want things to end.

We can go even simpler. More important than how the aliens are invading is why.

Context is indeed important.

For example: Are the Aliens energy beings that just decided to make a "pit-stop" to "recharge their solar-batteries" and picked a planet in safe distance from the sun for maximum charging, pulling the shield around (to soak up the sun) and not even knowing the planet was inhabited due to never having encountered any life on other planets beforehand?

And all the misery on Earth is actually caused by mankind itself, due to screwing itself over when trying to launch nukes at the shield (due to faulty communication when the energy beings decided to clean up all the "junk" floating in orbit for the shield and destroyed the entire communication system on earth by accident.) and triggered a nuclear-winter as a result?

Do the aliens even notice humanity at all?

Things like that.

Let me give you context on the antagonists of the setting:

The Setting - The Besiegers

The Besiegers are a collective federation of numerous sentient and highly advanced species from across the extreme reaches of the universe. They are led by a mysterious, godlike being referred to as the Entity.

The main objective of the Besieger's on Earth are completely unknown - but observations on the Besieger's activities against humans in violation of the The Laws and Customs of War (e.g. summary execution, torture of prisoners, enslavement coupled with forced labor, unethical experimentation and human bombs) along with operations calculated to bring about mass death as a feature - suggest a motive to wage a war of extermination against the humanity.

The major troop formations that currently besiege the Earth are formed from identified 152 major sentient species and 255 non-sentient invasive species. This does not count the miscellaneous, unidentified and sporadic species that engage combat with humans or act as support for the armies.

A small selection basic troop species (Sentient) commonly encountered by the army during combat include:

• Automatons: A race of Mechanical Lifeforms resembling humanoid mechas without pilots, or in rough terms - Transformers without the ability to change into a car. They function as heavy infantry because of their capability to inflict and sustain heavy damage in the frontlines.
• Beastfolk: A race of therianthropic humanoids that range from mostly humanlike Beast Men to completely werebeast in appearance. Their tech levels are at early 20th century levels and function as Cannon Fodder for mass wave attacks to overwhelm the human armies.
• Blobs: A race of amorphous, mucilaginous creatures similar to slime molds found on Earth. These creatures are used a rapid-deployment infantry as they have the ability to rapidly regenerate and polymorphic shifting. It can congregate itself into larger creatures and specialize it cells at cost of its polymorphic shifting abilities and debilitating regenerative capacities.
• Elementals: Living, sentient beings composed of natural elements similar to the mythical elementals in occult and alchemical works. They have a distinctive protrusion that creates a dark scrawl around their bodies. They are used for combat support roles such as bridge-building and demolition.
• Imposters: A race of shapeshifting creatures capable of assuming a human disguise and changing parts of its body into living weapons. The function as infiltrators, spies and saboteurs against high value targets, seeking to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt among the humans.
• Infantryman: Human soldiers employed by the Besiegers. They are genetically and phenotypically identical to humans on Earth. The main difference is that Besieger-aligned humans are dressed in strange, brightly-colored if sometimes ridiculous uniforms/armors depending on sub-faction, and are armed with weapons ranging from primitive spears to blasters.
• Large-Scale Aggressors (LSA): A collective designation for gigantic creatures in violation of the Square-Cube Law. These creatures tend to cause mass destruction in cities upon deployment and are used to lay siege against major defensive positions.
• Psionics: A collective of lifeforms with disproportionately enlarged craniums with Psychic Powers. They are all-purpose troops that can serve in many roles - reconnaissance and long-range attack/defense - but very weak to physical attack without being shielded.

The human militaries dedicate to researching these troop species and developing countermeasures against as their strong abilities and the otherworldly nature of these troop species caused the massive human military losses during the early stages of the siege because the human militaries were not prepared to face an Outside-Context Problem.

It sounds like you're creating a game system, not a setting to write stories in.

If these aliens want to exterminate humanity, why not just destroy the biosphere? Do they want Earth for something?

Considering the "Fantasy assemblage", I'm starting to think these "aliens" (or more less "Fae" by another name) haven't destroyed the planet due to wanting to put Mankind to sleep and harvest the energy-wavelength that comes from its "dreams"...

Also, I have a question regarding the Elementals. Assuming they're based off the traditional Elemental Powers and not the Periodic Table of Elements as you say, if there's a Fire Elemental involved, how would they work in space and non-oxygen-rich atmospheres? Because keep in mind that fire as we know it needs oxygen to burn.

I may be mistaken, but I think that fire can occur with other oxidisers than oxygen.

Space—and indeed, zero-/micro- gravity—is a problem, however.

That said, both could potentially be dealt with via an appropriate space-craft—or indeed, just via magical or supernatural matters.

Setting - Wormholes

However, there are weaknesses and drawbacks of using wormholes:

• Interdimensional travel through wormholes is a one-way trip, meaning troop deployments cannot retreat back to Another Dimension in which they dub the Shadow Vortex, and commanders really need to be cautious on how many troop formations are deployed on Earth.
• Despite the capability to deploy multiple wormholes around the world, it cannot just deploy a huge amount in one place. This is because wormholes can easily interfere with each other if their Luminiferous Fields overlap, and eventually the wormholes annihilate each other. Thus, the Besiegers have to be careful when pinpointing and deploying wormholes to prevent disaster.
• Hawking radiation can cause a wormhole to dissipate. If the concentrations of Hawking radiation emissions is not carefully monitored, this will cause wormhole to evaporate and collapse. This forces engineers and commanders to build beachheads to dampen Hawking radiation as well giving humans the chance to shut down by deploying Hawking Radiation Emission Bombs (HREB).
• Wormholes can only be deployed in open spaces. This means wormholes cannot open underground or underwater or crowded areas, in fear of causing inpenetration accidents despite able to destroy anything if it forms. It cannot be deployed in tactically hazardous terrains or hard-to-reach places as Besieger military strategy states it needs to construct beachheads and bases to secure their foothold on Earth. Nor it can be put in the vicinity of bastions because all of them are equipped with Background Hawking Radiation Emitters.

Ok, that's good and all, but that still doesn't answer some of our above questions.

Also, what are "Luminiferous Fields"? Some context behind that could be helpful.

Sorry for ignoring your previous question. I was introducing the basic rules of wormholes to provide consistency for the warfare.

The Elementals are basically sapient constructs of their respective elements. They come from another world via wormholes and not brought down from space. And also, try to read Post #11 by Ars Thaumaturgis for a clarification.

The Luminiferous Fields are fields composed of Einstein-Bose Condensate generated by Wormholes to stabilize its structure and sustain indefinitely so that the bridge linking the two dimensions remain open. This manifests a bright, glowing nebula-like thing surrounding the 'hole' in the wormhole.

Yes. Chlorine triflouride is famously one such compound.

Quoth John Drury Clark in the rather excellent non-fiction book Ignition!

"They come from another world via wormholes and not brought down from space"

Well that solves the space problem with a number of Elementals, not just Fire Elementals (Water Elementals would either evaporate or freeze depending on distance from a star, Wind Elementals would disperse due to lack of air pressure held by gravity). Of course, this is me just assuming you use the traditional elements featured in Elemental Powers, which you haven't really disclosed yet.

That said, I get the impression that the Besiegers are like a combination of the Covenant and the Combine. That's how I feel, anyway.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Jan 22nd 2022 at 4:45:07 AM

"More important than how the aliens are invading is why."

The audience may not know, the characters may not know, but you the author certainly should. So what's the answer?

The answer is supposedly extermination, in which case, if they're invading and there's so many of them, they could just use nukes. Nothing can really stop nuclear weapons if there's enough of them being thrown. If they don't want to drop nukes for radioactivity reasons, railguns exist now currently in the real world, and will presumably be far better with more advanced tech, certainly enough to destroy everything they want to destroy without throwing meat troops at the humans like they seem to be doing. Or they could use a wormhole (of the kind that they apparently have) to let parts of the sun into the atmosphere high up where people can't reach to stop it before everything's exploded, or throw meteors at relativistic speeds.

These invaders sure seem to be taking the long way around. If they want to enslave people, why can't they just use robots that are better at the jobs, cheaper to maintain, and less likely to be angry about being enslaved? If they want to kill a bunch of people for some reason or another, they already could have done it, because there aren't really any defenses that can stop large-scale railgun shots or relativistic meteor drops or sun-wormholes or nuclear weapons, simply because physics on such high levels of energy doesn't really allow for states of matter that aren't essentially liquid, gas, or plasma.

I would posit that it actually is pretty reasonable to assume similar trains of logic for clearly highly social-but-not-eusocial highly violent and intelligent species capable of diplomacy or at least tenuous alliance of some form with one another. Octopuses are a different matter, where the main difference is that they aren't social and so have different intelligence priorities. If we were just given the information "there are aliens" sure, it might be reasonable to not make assumptions about their rough trains of logic, but with the information we've been given about their organization, I think it's reasonable to assume that they're at least somewhat humanlike.

So then why are they doing it? You should have an idea as the author, and knowing how to depict the situation will rely a lot on why exactly there's an invasion happening.

Edited by Florien on Jan 23rd 2022 at 1:56:30 AM

That is presuming on the basis that the alien invaders even operates based on "human logic" at all.

("Human logic" is something unique to earth and Humanity, and assuming anyone else with a higher mind would use it as "standard" is just arrogant and presumptuous on humanity's part, to be honest...)

They might see us as we see octopuses...

And do note the Besieger's assumed motive of exterminating humanity during the Siege of Earth is considered comprehensible speculation by humans. The human researchers cannot understand why didn't the Besiegers just deploy a world-wrecker instead of laying a protracted siege for 25 years.

Employing a world wrecker implies that they don't want to use the planet afterwards. Perhaps they want to.

I'm sorry, but I don't quite follow with your explanations. You seem to be glossing over a lot of people's important questions here, like the Besieger's motivations or how practical their invasion really is.

Operation Barbarossa was also impractical and yet it took place. And "escalation of committment" - when people have difficulty with backing out of a bad plan - is a well-established phenomenon.

@Florien:

I'll give you the true reason why the Besiegers are invading Earth:

Setting - The Dark Truth Behind The Siege of Earth

The reason why the Besiegers attack Earth is because Earth is basically an anomalous singularity where Shadow Vortex and the Main Universe overlap. The barrier between the two worlds are weak, so it is easy to create wormholes with minimal energy compared to using other points in the Main Universe.

The commanders of the Besiegers know it is horribly impractical to lay siege on Earth and destroy all forms of human resistance, but they do it out of desperation from the following issues:

• The threat of the Shadow Vortex: The chaotic nothingness of the Shadow Vortex is slowly approaching the Terminal Nexus, threatening annihilation to their existence. This necessitates an escape from the Shadow Vortex.
• One-in-a-million chance: The anomalous singularity that bridges the Earth with the Shadow Vortex only happens once in some nameless eons, so the Besiegers cannot afford to squander the opportunity to escape.
• Limited technological capacity: Large swathes of science and technology is lost due to the previous civilizations which the species once comprised are gone, and any remaining advanced technology that could grant them instant victory over humans are used to stall the Shadow Vortex's expansion.
• Escalation of commitment: The commanders know their entire Siege of Earth is going to be futile someday once the humans gain any advantage enough to repel it coupled with the weaknesses of the wormholes, but all their time, effort, resources and manpower must not be for naught.

Does this provide a satisfactory explanation? Or do you have any more questions to ask?

If I'm tracking correctly, Earth is basically an escape hatch for these guys to get away from certain doom?

If that's the case, do they have a way to close the hatch behind them?

And I guess more critically, assuming they have spaceflight capability (hence the barrier), why not just run through the escape hatch and leave?

I guess if they don't have space flight capability, then they require the capability to seal the hatch behind them, or at least to predict when it will close on its own.

So the goal is essentially to eliminate the human population and replace them?

If that's the case, then after 25 years, that ought to be pretty visible as settlements and facilities start being constructed.

Personally, I'd add in some justification for why they haven't more efficiently committed genocide, if that's their goal. Namely, I'd have their motives be somewhat complicated by internal politics. They can't risk being turned away if they just ask and providing a warning, but at the same time, their entire society/culture is based around revering someone who saved them from genocide. So, they launch a pre-emptive strike, intended to reduce the locals to the same status that they themselves had when rescued by the entity and then integrate them, which fails due to the less-wide gap between them and humanity than between them and the Shadow Vortex. So they find themselves slip-sliding into genocide as a solution, without ever actually admitting that's what they're doing and planning for it.