Constructing America's enemies: the invasions of the USA.

ABSTRACTS

As soon as the USA began to emerge as an imperial power in the late nineteenth century, writers began to publish narratives describing how the country was being attacked by different hostile forces. The identity of these forces was sometimes clear (as in Yellow Peril narratives); sometimes they were figured more ambiguously as alien species. Whatever particular form they took, these agencies are used by the writers concerned to probe perceived weaknesses and anxieties in the USA such as the nation's lack of military preparedness, or post-Second World War fears of depersonalized conformity. This essay examines a range of examples from the 1880s through to the Cold War period.

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In 1693 Cotton Mather warned his readers that

An Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the Center, and after a sort, the First-born of the English Settlements: and the Houses of the Good People there are fill'd with doleful Shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural. (1)

This may be the first American invasion narrative; certainly it sets a paradigm that later fiction has developed. The godly terrain of the emerging nation is described as under siege from demonic, invisible forces that have forced an entry even into the citadel of the home. Mather initiates a long tradition in American writing in which the underside of manifest destiny is explored--the fear of failure, defeat, and subversion. Since Mather's day, invasion has become such a routine term in American culture that it is now variously applied to biological species, terrorism, Chinese agents, businessmen (Japanese and European), and drug trafficking. The proliferation of American invasion narratives in the late nineteenth century coincides historically with the emergence of the USA as an imperial world power. These narratives draw on a range of methods, all related to science fiction, in that they describe a speculative sequence of events through futuristic reportage or symbolic parable. Surveying cultural expressions of the fear of invasion, Eric Mottram proposes six rough categories: the fear of alien intelligent beings; fear of an underground expressed as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil; fear of insurrection; fears of internal oppressive agencies; 'fear of invasion from without'; and the fear of total surveillance. (2) It is the second and fifth of these categories that primarily concern us here. Briefly, these creatures embody an inverted and demonized version of cherished American values. During periods of anxiety about immigrant labour or nuclear supremacy, invasion narratives give imaginative form to a testing out of national ideology, speculating about possible weaknesses not just in civil defence but also in presumptions about social cohesion. It seems that America's cherished values of independence, providential guidance, and technological progress could not be imagined without agencies endangering these values. In short, the USA could not conceive of its own nationhood without imagining an enemy.

The Yellow Peril and Other Dangers

In his survey of treatments of the Chinese in American fiction, William F. Wu identifies Atwell Whitney's Almond-Eyed (1878) as the earliest novel to describe an Asiatic threat to the USA, which became popularized as the so-called Yellow Peril. Wu finds a pattern in these narratives of presenting the Chinese as an unthinking mass, terrifying because of their sheer number; they infiltrate the USA through California as immigrant workers and then subvert the nation from within, acting like a fifth column. (3) Pierton W. Dooner's Last Days of the Republic (1880) similarly presents a near-future chronicle, which records the gradual takeover of the USA by the Chinese Empire. The starting point for Dooner's chronicle is the California Gold Rush, which pushes the door ajar to cheap Coolie labour. Indeed, the whole book can be taken as a warning against the dangers of unfettered immigration. Because he is writing extrapolated history, Dooner paints his action with a broad brush, giving us mass processes that impress by sheer number. Very little attempt is made to dramatize the action; instead, Dooner describes what he presents as an inevitable sequence of events, which, with the benefits of hindsight, America should have recognized from the beginning. He introduces the Chinese anonymously through their collective cultural and racial characteristics as a people 'incapable of assimilation, or of social intercommunication [...] Servile to the last degree, they seemed to be a people ordained by nature to be the servants of all mankind'. (4) Dooner sets up these generalities as cues to the reader to recognize the Chinese before they are named. Essentially, he traces out a process of racial determinism against which the American people prove powerless. The Chinese are suspicious 'by nature', and when their other dominant characteristics are added, we have the motivation of a massive conspiracy: 'This unwholesome spirit, seconded by a consuming avarice, and directed by a most incredible cunning, laid the foundation of a scheme of conquest unparalleled in the history of the human race.' (5)

As controls on immigration slacken and as demand for unskilled labour in America rises, the Chinese infiltrate in greater and greater numbers. Despite local agitation against the immigrants, nothing can halt this process. Consolidating their position in California by taking over the governorship, the Chinese then seize control of the railroads and spread into the South, where the authorities naively assume they are just more slaves. In contrast with the economic chaos in the USA and the international decline of Britain towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese are shown to be inspired by a conviction of imperial supremacy. Theirs is a manifest destiny displaced from America and directed against it: 'How manifest the design that had fostered a country for such specially attested ends.' (6) These ends gradually become evident as infiltration turns into open combat. The Chinese put down a white rebellion in the southern states, defeat the American naval fleet, and finally crush the last resistance in Washington: 'The Republic had fought its last battle; and the Imperial Dragon of China already floated from the dome of the Capitol'. This is the symbolic point where Dooner's jeremiad ends. Last Days of the Republic performs an autopsy on a republic whose racial defeat is signalled by the ultimate demise: 'The very name of the United States of America was thus blotted from the record of nations and peoples, as unworthy the poor boon of existence'. (7) In a kind of inverted millenarianism, the Empire of China rises on the ruins of America.

Two years after Dooner's novel was published, the US government wrote exactly the same anxieties into law with the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned immigrant labour for ten years. The act was subsequently extended, and made permanent in 1904; it was not repealed until 1943. In its preamble the act stated as justification that 'the coming of Chinese labourers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities'. (8)

Immigration also figured in Jack London's contributions to Yellow Peril writing. Indeed, that growing tradition gave him the title for one of his dispatches from Manchuria to report on the Russo-Japanese War. 'The Yellow Peril' (1904) opens with a series of contrasts between Northern Korea and China, which, for London, sum up the culture of both countries in no uncertain fashion: 'The Korean is the perfect type of inefficiency--of utter worthlessness. The Chinese is the perfect type of industry. For sheer work no worker in the world can compare with him. Work is the breath of his nostrils.' (9) This industry is at once the main value of the Chinese and also the root of their threat to the West:

The menace to the Western world lies, not in the little brown man [the Japanese], but in the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man undertake their management. The Chinese is not dead to new ideas; he is an efficient worker; makes a good soldier, and is wealthy in the essential materials of a machine age. Under a capable management he will go far. (10)

This perception of threat overlays a covert respect for Chinese industry. London's anxiety also emerges in his conviction that Western culture--in practice, American-led culture--has built itself on Christian values like the appeal to conscience, which cannot be taught to the Oriental.

London expresses the difference between Western and Asiatic cultures as an absolute barrier represented by the linguistic differences between Saxon and Chinese. Only two years later he used exactly the same linguistic/racial argument to establish a similar gulf within a speculative narrative, which results in Chinese expansion. 'The Unparalleled Invasion' (written in 1906 and published in The Strength of the Strong, 1910) describes how a crisis occurs in 1976 in China's relation with the West. Once again a difference of language and script is presented as something deeper: 'between them [the countries of the West] and China was no common psychological speech'. (11) The massive barrier of linguistic difference makes East and West into 'mental aliens'. Japan is used in this narrative as a mediator of Western practice. To realize their 'colossal dream of empire' they take over the 'management' of China, thereby enacting a process London had speculated on in the abstract in 'The Yellow Peril'. Once China has successfully assimilated these managerial methods, they expel Western and Japanese personnel. Here London finds himself in a double-bind: on the one hand, he insists that 'The Chinese was not an imperial race. It was industrious, thrifty, and peace-loving;' (12) on the other, the Chinese birth-rate facilitates an expansion of China's influence into nearby countries. Although he does not present this process as a deliberate national strategy, London agrees with Dooner about the effect of virtually the same process, and also plays on the fear of sheer numbers. The Chinese expand into and take over Indo-China, Siam, and Central Asia, at which point the West takes action. While the united Western armies mass along China's new borders, an airship drops a biological agent on the Chinese that rapidly kills off millions from cholera, smallpox, and plague. This is described literally as a form of ethnic cleansing, because the few survivors are killed off by Western troops, China is 'sanitized,' and then resettled by different nationalities under the guidance of America. Although London never describes an invasion of the USA, the expansion of China is shown to challenge American hegemony and therefore to present a crucial threat to Western (American?) culture that can only be fought off by the complete erasure of the Chinese population. In that sense 'The Unparalleled Invasion' mounts a warning to Western complacency. Its title is studiously ambiguous: is the 'unparalleled invasion' the Chinese infiltration of adjoining countries or the Western use of biological weapons?

The stories that formed the basis for Philip Nowlan's Buck Rogers series, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (1928) and The Airlords of Han (1929), carry the racial logic of the Yellow Peril fear to its ultimate conclusion. Buck Rogers falls asleep at a point where the USA is the most powerful country in the world, only to awake in the twenty-fifth century when America has become a 'total wreck' ruled over by the Mongolian Han. These rulers embody the qualities we have already encountered: a coldly scientific outlook, a willingness to sacrifice the individual to the group, and a tendency to despotism. In case the reader misses the point, we are told that their soldiers wear bright yellow uniforms. Armageddon 2419 A.D. (the subsequent collective title for the two stories) describes how the USA raises itself from serfdom to reassert its rightful position in the world. Looking back on these events, Buck reflects that the Han were a 'monstrosity among the races of men which originated as a hybrid somewhere in the dark fastnesses of interior Asia, and spread itself like an inhuman blight over the face of the globe'. Because there was 'something inhuman' about them, their fate was inevitable, and Buck appeals to the satisfaction of all right-thinking readers in stating 'the fact remains that they have been exterminated'. (13)

In the period between the wars Yellow Peril narratives were strengthened by the publication in America of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels. Up to this period Chinese strategy was hinted at through vague suggestions of behind-the-scenes government machinations. As William Wu explains, Fu Manchu made his impact as a leader. He filled a 'power vacuum that had existed in the tales of Chinese immigration and infiltration'. (14) Yellow Peril narratives do not stop with the end of the Second World War; they simply go through a further permutation during the Cold War period.

Dooner's pattern of assault and defeat is reversed in Robert Heinlein's The Day after Tomorrow (1949). Here the action starts at the moment of national collapse in America of the near future. Washington has been destroyed; Manhattan lies in ruins; and the country has been overrun by the PanAsians, referred to once as 'Mongolians' but really an amalgamation of the Chinese and Japanese. The surviving remnant hidden in a Rocky Mountain military refuge is defined in numbers: 'six men against four hundred million'. (15) And while this group devises the super-weapon to use against the invaders, the PanAsians are simply referred to as a mass, 'othered' as the enemy. Heinlein's story, originally published in 1941 under the title Sixth Column, was an idea given him by John W. Campbell and then revised 'to remove racist aspects of the original story line'. (16) Despite these changes, Heinlein's narrative rests almost entirely on Yellow Peril fears. The PanAsians are presented as a single-minded horde, cunning and remorseless in their dealings with the captive Americans. One survivor diagnoses their mentality in racial terms: 'Behind their arrogance is a racial inferiority complex, a mass paranoia'. (17) And here lies their Achilles' heel on which the American resistance group plays. Having devised a catch-all scientific weapon that can kill, transform matter, or just stun, the group takes advantage of the one thing the invaders allow the Americans--religion. Under cover of a new cult, they establish a network of centres around the country from which they launch their final, successful uprising. At every point the Americans play on the main defining characteristic of the PanAsians--their code of honour, which does not allow them to lose face. In two of the very few sequences where Heinlein focalizes events through a PanAsian official, the latter sneers at the Americans as inferior 'aborigines' and 'crazy savages,' ironically consolidating the racial level of the action.

In setting up his basic polarity of Americans against their enemy,

Heinlein attempts to introduce an intermediary racial category represented by one Frank Roosevelt Mitsui, an American citizen of mixed Hawaiian and Japanese origins. Mitsui, in fact, represents a group that the PanAsians are systematically liquidating, and he could therefore have an important role in demonstrating the Americans' lack of racism. Ultimately, however, the schematic oppositions of the novel actually minimize his participation in the action. When first seen, even by an old friend, he is deindividualized: 'the sight of a flat, yellow face' makes his friend's 'hackles rise', and when he first goes to the mountain refuge he is almost shot by the guard in a reflex action. Mitsui's part in the action is limited to giving advice about the reactions of the PanAsians, after which he is dropped until the denouement where he heroically loses his life killing a megalomaniac American officer. At this point Heinlein modifies his racial designation to a 'short stocky brown man', but still definitely not that of a white member of the reborn America. (18)

In a talk of 1941 called 'The Discovery of the Future' Heinlein stressed his commitment to the 'scientific method' and argued that science fiction could preserve reason in times of crisis:

During a period of racial insanity, mass psychoses, hysteria, manic depression, paranoia, it is possible for a man who believes in change to hold on, to arrest his judgement, to go slow, to take a look at the facts, and not be badly hurt. (19)

The Day after Tomorrow imagines such a period in the ultimate terms of a threat to America, and then describes the salvation of the republic by technological know-how and pragmatic inventiveness. Although Heinlein demonizes the PanAsians as themselves racist, he never examines the racial basis of his own narrative, which plays directly to fears of the yellow horde. Indeed, his racism is more extreme than Dooner's in that Heinlein never gives much motivation for the invasion (although he blames the US Non-Intercourse Acts for fostering ignorance), and he provides only a perfunctory account of how the invasion takes place. (20) His concern is clearly to establish the worst national situation as quickly as possible so as to begin his narrative of racial triumphalism.

The Yellow Peril was not the only imagined threat to the USA. In 1916 Thomas Dixon published The Fall of a Nation as a sequel to The Birth of a Nation (the 1915 film was based on Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman). Here two issues are awkwardly conflated: votes for women and a bill to develop the military capacity of the USA. The issue of women's suffrage takes second place to the main debate in the first half of the novel between the pacifists, who oppose an increase in arms, and the isolated voice of sanity in the senator proposing the latter bill. In an outward show of democracy the bill is defeated thanks to the machinations of the banker Waldron. In the meantime, across the Atlantic the European empires are banding together against the USA. The first sign that there is something amiss comes when secret shipments of arms are detected in New York. Shortly afterwards, the invasion starts through bombings and other fifth-column activities. Here Dixon's racism surfaces. He identifies immigration with invasion and takeover: 'It was a master stroke! There were at least a million aliens, trained soldiers of Northern and Central Europe, living in the United States.' (21) National defeat is identified with erasure: an Imperial officer declares: 'From tonight, the United States of America disappears from the map of the world.' (22) Thousands of Imperial troops land on the American coast (Dixon is sketchy to say the least about how they are transported), win a series of battles, and finally gain total superiority by using gas, at which point Dixon demonizes them as 'fiends of hell'. It seems that the fate of the USA is sealed. But then the leader of the women's suffrage movement experiences a change of heart and organizes an uprising against the occupiers, whereupon the 'alien' troops decide that they are loyal Americans after all; and so it emerges that female suffragettes are ultimately accessible to reason. In a convenient last-minute reversal Dixon describes a fantastic conversion of the 'aliens' in a move so sudden that it shows how precarious and emotive was his original conception of the internal threat to the nation.

Invasion Reportage

Dooner's future history was followed in 1907 by a pamphlet entitled The Yellow Peril in Action, dedicated by its author Marsden Manson 'to the men who train and direct the men behind the guns'. (23) Manson's pamphlet directed a warning against US government indifference to trade and strategy in the Pacific Ocean through a description of a war supposed to have taken place in 1910. After boycotting American goods, China declares war on the USA, having concluded a secret treaty of alliance with Japan. The Asiatic fleet lands an army that takes over Honolulu and then proceeds to blockade the Pacific ports. Meanwhile, fifth-columnists sabotage the country's railways. The USA is forced to sign a humiliating armistice, at which point Congress passes a law absolutely forbidding the entry of immigrant labour, and this seems to be the ultimate point of Manson's warning. He never describes the Chinese or Japanese except as an anonymous mass of workers whose presence in California triggers a series of race riots.

Julius W. Muller's The Invasion of America (1916) was, like Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903) in the British context, a warning against the lack of preparedness by the US army and navy against possible attack. Muller describes how a European 'Grand Coalition' declares war on America and attacks along the New England coast, targeting the country's industrial heartland. Despite the fact that the enemy admiral's flagship is sunk, resistance to the naval onslaught is pitifully inadequate. The bombardment of the American coast is the first of many dramatized scenes of warfare:

Streams of iron, streams of fire, streams of screaming, bursting things: things that struck the land and spun into it like beasts biting, and burst, blasting away forests, and houses and men in crimson whirlwind: things that plunged into towns and ricocheted, and pulled down walls and towers: things that darted at power plants and darkened the world: and things that burst into towns with fierce fire and set the world a-light. (24)

Throughout the book Muller evokes the irresistible force of modern weaponry and, as here, its capacity to cause destruction on an apocalyptic scale. His narrative is designed to substantiate his subtitle--that it is a Fact Story Based on the Inexorable Mathematics of War. Thus he constantly attacks the politicians for diverting funds from the military, and traces out in close geographical detail the gradual invasion of Connecticut and the New York area, which culminates in the surrender of that city and Boston to the enemy.

When Boston is taken over we are told that 'sovereignty had passed into alien hands', but Muller is very careful not to present the invaders as aliens. (25) They speak a 'precise' English and are rarely described in any detail. The reason for this strategy is that Muller describes the Coalition forces as a collective image of how the US military should be. They are a force displaying idealized efficiency, in order to dramatize the Americans' lack of materiel, men, and organization. It is therefore crucial for them to appear different from the Americans, not in kind or character but in numbers and equipment. They embody the military efficiency, Muller implies, that should belong to the American forces.

Muller uses a method of extrapolated realism, of reportage before the fact, which, if it succeeds, will help prevent the circumstances he describes from ever occurring. He is studiously vague about the exact identity of the enemy, whereas Hector C. Bywater's The Great Pacific War (1925) is scrupulously detailed about the rise of Japanese militarism and the resulting struggle for control of the Pacific. (26) Bywater follows the strategic speculations of Marsden Manson on naval tactics and on the strategic importance of Guam, among other locations, in ways that would become realized in the Second World War.

Threats could be posed to American security by a Nazi fifth column as well as a newly equipped Japanese navy. The Dutch-born historian Hendrick Willem van Loon's Invasion (1940) presents a family memoir of these Nazis' attempt to seize power in the USA, supplemented by a report from Mexico that documents the insurgents' establishment of bases there prior to invasion. Van Loon transposes the Nazis' European model of takeover on to an America where most citizens are living in a 'comfortable little dream-world', confident that this cannot happen in the USA. (27) The allusion to Sinclair Lewis's 1935 description of a Nazi revolution in America, It Can't Happen Here, is clear, and van Loon directs his narrative against such public complacency. Without disguising his name, he publishes a pamphlet, Our Battle, on the dangers from American fascism, which makes no impression at all. Meanwhile, Nazi bombers disguised as Mexican civil aircraft attack New Orleans and Galveston, and fifth columnists attempt to capture van Loon's family. A dialogue with a wounded Nazi establishes their ideology of conquest: 'We will conquer the world', he declares. 'It is our duty.' But the insurgent reckons without the Americans' 'spirit of self-self-reliance', which enables them to defeat the plan of invasion from the air. (28) Van Loon presents the fifth columnists as gangsters, rather ducking the complex issue of German-Americans' support for the Axis. Instead, he describes the success of Americans' capacity to improvise their way through a crisis and points an unambiguous moral of the need for 'eternal vigilance and the cheerful willingness of all its citizens to give unto the land of their birth and allegiance not only their strength, but [...] their lives'. (29)

Fred Allhoff 's Lightning in the Night (1940) similarly criticizes the American lack of readiness and misplaced pacificism by showing that the latter only results in the near-defeat of the USA. Since the USA is a 'democracy that had no designs on other peoples', it cannot even conceive of invasion. (30) Across the Atlantic, Hitler completely subjugates Europe and takes over the British Empire. Jamaica is transformed into a massive military base and massed troops gather along the Mexican border. Meanwhile, in the east the Japanese attack Hawaii and Russian forces invade through Alaska. Like van Loon, Allhoff goes into no real details over the invading forces, but presents them collectively as a huge and apparently invincible military force. Just as in Invasion, this narrative focuses on the behaviour of Americans under pressure. Faced with superior forces, they fall back on the pioneer values of improvisation and local guerrilla tactics, but it seems that that these will not be enough. The culmination of America's humiliation comes when Hitler arrives in Washington for Christmas. At the ensuing conference between the two sides Hitler threatens America with destruction from atomic bombs, whereupon the President counters with the more immediate warning that US bombers are poised to drop atomic bombs on the invaders. At this point Hitler commits suicide and the invaders capitulate. Bizarrely, Allhoff has given us no anticipation of this super-weapon. All his narrative has concentrated on America's inability to resist the force of conventional weapons, and so the atomic bomb appears as a highly convenient deus ex machina.

The defeat of the Axis did not end the Axis subject. Since the end of the Second World War a series of narratives has speculated over alternative history, over what would have happened if the USA had lost the war. C.M. Kornbluth's 'Two Dooms' (1958) describes the experiences of a nuclear scientist who falls asleep in the 1940s and wakes years later to find that in 1955 the German and Japanese forces have conquered the USA. (31) Similarly, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) describes an America ruled over in the east by the Germans and in the west by the Japanese. Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (1972) weaves one of the most ingenious variations on this subgenre in presenting Lord of the Swastika as a science fiction novel by Hitler himself, followed by an afterword where an SF fan speculates on the pathological dimension to that narrative.

The Russians Have Come

In the period following the Second World War the American identification of an enemy shifted to that of the Russians. However, at least one pre-war novel had already dramatized the perceived threat to US military standing posed by Russia: Floyd Gibbons's The Red Napoleon of 1929. Strictly speaking, this novel combines a number of fears: the spread of communism, the Yellow Peril, and the loss by whites of cultural hegemony. The narrative tells in retrospect the story of the rise of Karakhan of Kazan from his obscure origins in the Urals to dictator of Russia and finally to world warlord. (32) His rise resembles in heightened form the rise of the dictators between the wars. At the pinnacle of his power as ruler of the World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, he embodies a single-minded ambition to break the regimes of the West. His forces launch attacks on the USA from the south, the western seaboard (the 'yellow masses'), and the 'Reds' from the east and north. The most dramatic passages of the novel (not surprisingly, since Gibbons was himself a war correspondent) are those that, like the reportage narratives just considered, describe in detail the bombing of New York and other similar events, which the American people had assumed were impossible because of the country's geographical position. So on one level The Red Napoleon mounts another attack on the USA's lack of military preparedness; on another, more fundamental level it articulates a fear that America might lose its identity as it becomes swamped by the mixed-race masses. Although Karakhan is defeated, he is given the last word in the novel; he attacks America's hypocrisy in professing racial openness but practising the opposite:

You Yankee race purists, you worshippers of the Nordic delusion--you organize the beauty spots of the world as you regulate your Jim Crow transportation in the southern states. Why do you discriminate against colour? I will tell you--Fear of our might. (33)

And his racial accusation stands.

In the 1953 George Pal film adaptation The War of the Worlds, one of the men who discovers the mysterious 'comet' comments that it must be a 'sneak attack' by the Soviets. Similarly, in Norman Edwards's Invasion from 2500 (1964) the sudden appearance of huge black planes that discharge tanks and ground forces after they have gas-bombed the USA is identified by one observer as 'probably them Russians'. (34) A series of novels and films thus articulates America's fear of its main Cold War enemy by describing the invasion and the subjugation of the USA by communist--which in practice usually means Russian--forces. What became routine comparisons with the communists were deployed to naturalize the reader's sense of emergency. If the Soviets might come, why not even more alien forces?

C. M. Kornbluth's Not This August (1955, UK title Christmas Eve, 1956) embodies that author's conviction that science fiction should really be occupying the socially central position generally held by realist fiction. In his contribution to Basil Davenport's collection The Science Fiction Novel he rails against the abdication from reality of SF writers by concentrating on generic staples like the rocket ship and the time machine. (35) Accordingly, Not This August minimizes its reliance on SF devices, times its action at only ten years after the first publication, and insistently relates its action to historical analogues: with Stalin's treatment of Ukraine in the 1930s, the Second World War, and the Korean War, among others. The novel describes the final phase of a war in which the USA suffers ignominious defeat, and focalizes its narrative of the gradual takeover of the country through a Korean veteran living in a small country town. Once defeat is acknowledged by the US President, neighbours reveal themselves to Billy Justin as communist 'sleepers'. When he gasps in astonishment, he is told: 'You think a Communist must necessarily be a fiend, a savage, a foreigner. You couldn't conceive of a Communist being a soft-spoken, reasonable, mannerly person. But Amy and I are, aren't we? And we're Communists.' (36) Kornbluth pursues an explicitly revisionist line here by familiarizing the very notion of communism. Far from being distant and alien, it is (initially) a newly revealed dimension to the local and even domestic. Billy Justin is invited to identify with a new group, a new collective of transformed Americans. Military invasion is taken as read. Instead, Kornbluth focuses on the experience of occupation. Like Robert Shafer in The Conquered Place (1955), he traces out a transformation of American life away from nationalism to a new international politics. (37) This shift can even be seen in Shafer's choice of title, where the USA has become erased as a national geographical entity.

Once the occupation takes hold in Not This August, Kornbluth traces out a process whereby the initial actions of the occupiers appear mild but then become more and more oppressive. Once again, startling recognitions take place. It seems as if Russian soldiers are not so different after all, at least those in the regular army. But after they are replaced by the Soviet equivalent of the SS, the occupation really begins to bite. Kornbluth appears to be questioning the demonization of the enemy, but then a contradiction begins to emerge. On the one hand, he defuses what is called the 'Awful Thing, the thing you dreaded above all else'; on the other, the occupation demonstrates the reduction of the USA to a state of slavery. (38) And this is where Kornbluth keeps an ace up his sleeve. Buried in a secret silo near Justin's home town are nuclear weapons, unknown to the Soviets, that can be used as counters in resisting and then defeating the invaders.

Jerry Sohl's Point Ultimate (1955) portrays an America dominated by communist forces (the 'invulnerable Red giant') over twenty years since the original invasion. The novel describes how Emmet Keyes, the son of an Illinois farmer, explores the working of the regime, finally uncovering its closest-guarded secret. Following their destruction of urban centres with H-bombs, the invaders released a deadly bacterium into the atmosphere, with the result that captive citizens have to report every month for inoculation boosters, except that the 'boosters' turn out to be a controlled infection rather than its cure, the aim being to keep the captive population docile. Point Ultimate explores the situation of subjugation, not invasion as such, and draws no ethical distinction between the military and other Americans. The former are simply the authorities.

By implication, Sohl presents Russian occupation of the USA as a pathological as well as a political state, which reflects the prevalence of the discourse of political 'health' during the Cold War and also anticipates Oliver Lange's attack on national supineness in Vandenberg (1971: retitled Defiance: An American Novel in 1984). Here the USA has once again fallen prey to the communist invaders, who have taken a calculated risk based on Americans' perceived capacity for resistance: 'The Russians bet heavily that the decades of cold war we'd functioned under had preconditioned our entire life to fragment when certain stresses were applied.' (39) Vandenberg himself sets out to unravel the enigma of why America submitted so easily to the occupying forces. Thus, on the one hand, we follow his survivalist inventiveness in exploring the possibilities of resistance; on the other, we gradually learn more and more of an elaborate state apparatus where psychological interrogation techniques make it virtually impossible for a captive to hide the truth. Once again, the alien identity of the occupiers is suppressed, only to be replaced by a different category of American collaborators. Ironically, it is the stated aim of the Soviet Military Government that it should fade out of existence when its functions have been taken over by Americans. Lange stresses the ease of this transformation to the point where Vandenberg turns into a satire on the lack of national morale.

Slugs and Pods

Ever since 1947, the year in which UFOs were allegedly seen in Washington State, reports of aliens have proliferated to the point where, as Bryan Appleyard puts it, 'extraterrestrials are now a routine aspect of our culture'. (40) Certainly, in the post-war period invasion fantasies frequently portray assaults on America as threats to the human species, and, in line with Cold War fears of subversion, describe invasions by stealth. In her famous essay on SF narratives of the Cold War Susan Sontag argues that SF monster films present a 'negative imagination of the impersonal'. The invading creatures either 'proceed with an absolutely regular, unalterable movement' if they are non-human; if human, 'they obey the most rigid military discipline, and display no personal characteristics whatsoever'. (41) As a general warning to consider symbolic displacements, Sontag's essay is useful but risks flattening out these narratives into standardized repetitions of Cold War themes. In fact, as Cindy Heathershot has shown, even the most overtly ideological SF films tend to be more complex than Sontag suggests, and they sometimes conflate the Soviets and Nazis into a composite enemy. (42) Her discussion further strengthens my general argument here that invasion narratives involve national and cultural self-examination. The nature of the threat often raises questions about perceived cultural weakness, partly shown through Americans' inability to identify and therefore resist that threat.

Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951) opens with a retrospective question ('Were they truly intelligent?') which tantalizes the reader by withholding information, but which at the same time reassures us that a danger has passed. Whoever 'they' were, they are no longer a present threat. Heinlein screens his invasion behind an SF cliche of the period--flying saucers--in order to set up his own narrative, which plays on our primal fears. Heinlein's invaders are amorphous blobs originating from Titan that fasten on to the base of their victims' necks and direct the latter's actions. The first time this creature is described, the reaction evoked is one of disgust: 'Grayish, faintly translucent, and shot through with darker structure, shapeless--it reminded me of a giant clot of frogs' eggs. It was clearly alive, for it pulsed and quivered and moved by flowing.' (43) The object represents potential life, but has attached itself to an adult human and so comes to embody a transformational process that seems to be unnervingly psychological while carrying minimal physical markers--primarily the appearance of having a humped back. Throughout most of the novel these creatures are referred to as 'slugs', which risks familiarizing them and which strikes an awkward note of slowness, awkward because Heinlein actually describes the takeover of the central USA within a very brief timespan.

The Puppet Masters plays to fears of subversion by making the victims virtually indistinguishable from normal humans. The only way the former can be identified is by having everyone remove their clothes, the occasion for much tedious sexual by-play. But the assault is primarily a psychological one. Even the narrator, a member of an elite intelligence agency, is taken over with the following results:

I saw things around me with a curious double vision, as if I stared at them through rippling water--yet I felt no surprise and no curiosity about this. I moved like a sleepwalker, unaware of what I was about to do--but I was wide awake, fully aware of who I was, where I was, what my job at the Section had been. There was no amnesia; my full memories were available to me at any moment. And, although I did not know what I was about to do, I was always aware of what I was doing and sure that each act was the necessary, purposeful act at that moment. (44)

The description is carefully paradoxical. The narrator is both asleep and awake, aware and not aware. Every time he attempts to describe the experience of possession, a new analogy adds a further dimension and therefore confusion to the account. If he feels like a sleepwalker, this suggests moving like an automaton. At another point, it resembles the feelings of a horse being ridden. This analogy displaces humanity from the victim on to his 'master', who is directing all movement. The lack of consistency in the analogies drawn increases the eerie nature of the slugs' actions and encourages readers to project their own significance on to the narrative.

The slugs are clearly a parasitic organism. Years before William Burroughs articulates his conviction of humanity acting as unconscious host to parasites, Heinlein and his contemporaries gave graphic and sensational expression to takeover by alien organisms. Murray Leinster's The Brain-Stealers (1954) follows Heinlein in describing an invasion by vampiric alien creatures that oddly combine a capacity for thought-projection with basic physical appetites. They resemble a 'round, pinkish, hairless ball, nearly without features' that becomes domesticated as a 'little fella', a kind of household pet cared for by the families they have taken over. (45) Heinlein's analogy is with slugs; Leinster's is rather different: 'essentially they were parasitic in exactly the fashion in which lice are parasitic, only with a highly specialised ability to implant desired thoughts into the consciousness of other organisms. That was all.' (46) That is not all, however, because the creatures once again can be read on the level of metaphor. Leinster's creatures are important primarily for their effects: 'When desire to serve the Things became a passion as sincere and unreasoning as patriotism, their victims set about the enslavement of their fellow-men'. (47) Leinster hardly makes even a gesture towards explaining why his creatures invade, or why they choose particular spots in America, and in a sense that does not matter. The 'Things' induce a parodically extreme version of patriotism whereby anyone not participating in their collective impulse to serve the 'little fellas' is hunted down and killed. Denied any subjective life of their own, they pose a threat by altering the subjectivity of American citizens and inducing a dangerous group mentality.

As M. Keith Booker has noted, Heinlein's narrator draws parallels between the slugs (renamed 'titans' to signal their planetary origin) and the Soviets, as in the following passage:

I wondered why the titans had not attacked Russia first; Stalinism seemed tailormade for them. On second thought, I wondered if they had. On third thought I wondered what difference it would make; the people behind the Curtain had had their minds enslaved and parasites riding them for three generations. There might not be two kopeks difference between a commissar with a slug and a commissar without a slug. (48)

These lines suggest that Heinlein's invading parasites are a literalized metaphor of mind control, whose physicality is less important than their consequences for society in inducing unthinking conformity. For M. Keith Booker, the fact that America combats the slugs with biological weapons gives The Puppet Masters its main topicality within the Cold War. Just as Western perceptions of the Soviet Union showed that it was willing to use any weapon to destroy American capitalism, so 'one of the central messages of the book is that we need, not only to remain eternally vigilant, but also be willing to use any resources at our disposal to defeat our enemies'. (49) The slugs are another form of the 'bugs' confronting humanity in Starship Troopers (1959), and the same kind of weapon needs to be used in fighting them as when invasive organisms have to be purged to maintain cultural and ideological purity.

The main effect of possession is for the subject to lose all autonomy and to merge into an ever-increasing group directed by motivation inaccessible to human consciousness. Heinlein, ironically, explains the slugs' purpose as bringing peace and the joy of surrender. Similarly, in Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers (1955, later retitled Invasion of the Body-Snatchers) the invading parasites offer release from thought and entry into a mindless group life, which clearly suggests contemporary perceptions of communism. Where Heinlein is more explicit in his comparisons with the Soviets, Finney hints at the creation of a new collective identity in his agent of transformation--giant seed pods. The Body Snatchers describes a dual process of estrangement and erasure. The action begins when members of a small California town tell the local doctor that members of their family have become strangers. Then an apparently human body is found where the fingertips--a prime feature in identification--are blank. And finally the seed pods themselves are discovered by Miles Bennell, the doctor, at a point where they are opening and mutating into human simulacra:

It's hard to say how long we squatted there, staring in stunned wonder at what we were seeing. But it was long enough to see the grey substance continue to exude, slowly as moving lava, from the great pods out on to the concrete floor. It was long enough to see the grey substance lighten and whiten after it reached the air. And it was long enough to see the crude head- and limb-shaped masses grow in size as the grey stuff spilled out--and to become less crude. (50)

Unlike Heinlein, Finney describes the actual process of transformation as a travesty of foetal growth, a transposition of the human on to the vegetable. But once again, the key change is psychological not physical. The human victims are replaced by their simulated selves when they are asleep, in other words at their point of maximum passivity, and once this process has taken place there is no identificatory sign visible at all beyond a general loss of affect. What makes Finney's vision more powerfully paranoid is the way that it becomes impossible to know others. Everyone, actually or potentially, becomes a threatening stranger. Booker rightly stresses the disturbing dimension of this narrative in problematizing our capacity to distinguish Us from Them: 'It demonstrates a typical 1950s doubleness by offering multiple interpretations of the significance of the pod people.' (51) From the political right, they could represent yet another version of communist brainwashing; from the perspective of liberal individualism, they could embody a new social conformism. Fletcher Pratt's Invaders from Rigel (1960) renders metaphors as crudely concrete. (52) Here a comet crashes on Earth, bringing with it alien life forms that transform humans into machines by changing their bodies into metal. The evolutionary irony in this invasion is pointed up--again crudely--by designating the attacking birds as 'dodos'.

In his pioneering study of the input of psychologists into US foreign policy during the Cold War, The Making of the Cold War Enemy (2001), Ron Robin demonstrates that behaviourist policy advisers produced grossly simplified paradigms of the ways in which communist regimes worked. They 'reduced ideology to a rationalisation of the thirst for power' in a way that precluded any recognition of political difference; and in effect the Cold War enemy could be more effectively 'othered' as a brutal and animalistic force that had to be confronted on the level of power. (53) In other words, they had to be confronted on the level of slugs, lice, 'bugs,' or other creatures polluting American humanity. The depiction of America's enemies as threatening organisms places them on a subhuman, and therefore subverbal, level that precludes any form of dialogue. It also installs a dimension of ultimacy and emergency whereby the 'host' nation has to defeat the organisms to survive.

In many post-war cases the enemy is constructed as a force with no precise form. As we have seen, the most paranoid possibility lies not in slugs or pods themselves, but in their capacity to transform and thereby estrange American citizens from each other so severely that the observer can no longer distinguish friend from foe. If the individual who focalizes these narratives loses visual discrimination, a further twist of paranoia projects threatening power as a huge eye from whose gaze none can escape. Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky (1957) describes the fracturing of reality into a series of personal solipsistic realities, where no individual can validate the authenticity of their experience. One character experiences a quasi-spiritual elevation, rising higher and higher until he reaches a moment of realization, at first assuming he is approaching a lake: 'It wasn't a lake. It was an eye. And the eye was looking at him and McFeyffe! He didn't have to be told Whose eye it was.' (54) The action of Eye in the Sky unfolds against the background of the McCarthy era, and this startling, gigantic image encapsulates all-seeing surveillance, the FBI writ large, where the enemy is an invasive but domestic authoritarian agency. In contrast, Max Ehrlich's The Big Eye (1959) uses the same image within an anti-nuclear parable. Here the world stands poised on the brink of nuclear war, which could break out at any moment. New York and other areas have been evacuated because the threat appears so imminent. The novel's title denotes the biggest telescope in the world, which embodies the triumph of American technology but which also, ironically, reflects the lack of foresight that has brought the world to the nuclear brink. Then Ehrlich introduces the second source of fear and the second eye. It is discovered that a new planet is heading for Earth on a collision course. Consider how an astronomer reveals its appearance:

   David inserted the slide.
   And then they saw the face of Planet 'Y'.
   But it was not really a face at all.
   It was a leering, malevolent, staring EYE! (55)

Suddenly the technological gaze into outer space is reversed into a prolonged and hostile gaze directed at the Earth. The latter could be read as satire (the detached view of planetary politics no player in the Cold War game can manage), or as a displaced version of American perceptions of Soviet hostility. Quite literally, a super-weapon has also become an instrument of critical surveillance. J. Hunter Holly's The Flying Eyes (1962) describes the assault on a small town by floating eyes; they induce a zombie-like passivity in their victims, who then march down a nearby hole in the ground, being 'consumed' by these organs. (56) The novel superimposes an allegorical topography on its realist setting. The eyes resemble flying weapons but function as iconic images of power. They are revealed to be the projected organs of huge underground forms, humanoid giants whose sheer size reflects their apparent invincibility. All three instances just discussed weave variations on the trope of God's all-seeing eye. Indeed, Dick's editor asked him to remove overt references to Christianity in Eye in the Sky for fear of causing offence. (57)

Post-war invasion narratives often use crude technical devices to dramatize a recurring fear that our closest relations might turn into sinister strangers. In the 1953 film Invaders from Mars aliens land in a family's back yard and transform them into passive instruments by implanting a small control device at the base of their necks. The invaders' purpose is made clear by the fact that the victims sabotage military installations and then, once they have served their purpose, are themselves destroyed. The narrative is focalized through a small boy who sharply registers changes in those around him, including his father: 'David took a broad step back, staring up in disbelief at his dad. The tiny smile wrinkles on his face no longer seemed warm and friendly, and his eyes were like a stranger's, unfamiliar and uncaring.' (58) Once the film actually shows the lumbering Martian drones and their master (a Wellsian creation with a gigantic brain and atrophied body), the film lapses into bathos. It is only by keeping the nature of the invaders studiously vague that an imaginative space can be opened up on to which the reader/viewer can project their own anxieties. Joseph Millard's The Gods Hate Kansas (1964) yet again draws on The War of the Worlds (and also possibly The Wizard of Oz) in describing 'meteorites' crashing in the Kansas countryside. The sentient beings inside these craft dispose of unwanted humans by starting a 'Crimson Plague' (an epidemic which draws on Poe and London, and which brings death through an apoplectic seizure), and appropriate, useful humans by attacking at the same point of body access: the base of the neck. This can only be seen through a special projector:

The image on the screen showed something alien and incredible--a ball of glowing violent luminescence clinging tightly to the nape of Lansdon's neck at the base of his brain. It was like nothing that Temple had ever seen before, a globule of pure radiance without form or features. When he looked past the screen, the thing was invisible. Viewed through the film again it was still there, pulsing with a malevolent life of its own. (59)

For the enemy to be defeated, it first has to be seen. The scientist-protagonist thus has the double task of giving shape to beings who apparently operate through 'pure mind energy', and of finding a means to combat them. This he eventually does, but the narrative is set up specifically as a challenge to American science and technology.

Narratives that cast America's enemies as bugs at one and the same time privilege the USA as a representation of humanity itself, and also pose a special problem for those being invaded. If the enemy is some kind of subhuman creature, that might carry an evolutionary consolation, but it also cues in an essential role for the specialist. The protagonists of Cold War invasion narratives tend to be experts in different fields: Heinlein's narrator in The Puppet Masters is a member of an elite intelligence agency; Leinster's Jim Hunt is a scientist convicted for illegal research into thought transfer; and Miles Bennell is a small-town doctor investigating what he takes at first to be a mass psychosis. (60) Confrontation with invaders on an equal level of, for example, armaments opens up an obvious means for achieving supremacy. If, however, the invaders are of a different species, their ways have to be laboriously learnt before they can be resisted; hence the recurrence of protagonists who are scientists. In Murray Leinster's The Other Side of Here (1955) Steve Waldron doubles as detective and physicist in identifying the invaders, who apparently can kill off a whole city (Newark) or freeze thousands in their steps (New York). Leinster cleverly captures the ambiguous role of the media in selectively reporting the news and also in juggling the popular interpretations of the invasion: it must be a plague, the Reds, or flying saucers. But ultimately the invaders prove to be an enemy within: humans transported to another proximate dimension of reality. Thus they are at once near and strange; familiar yet the Other. Leinster exploits this uncertainty to set up conditions of emergency. As one character exclaims, 'My country is in a war that it doesn't yet know exists--waged by a nation none of us have heard of.' (61) When a matter-transporting device is explained through comparisons with a mirror, the analogy reveals the odd circularity of Cold War fears of the alien. Within Leinster's narrative, attacks from outside have become absurd popular cliches. The real enemy lies within our world, hidden and waiting. Hence there arises a powerful source of paranoia in citizens' difficulties in locating and identifying their foes.

In a sense, all the narratives considered here describe the testing of the American nation by assaults from enemies with different identities, even different species. Whatever their racial or biological nature, these enemies have a common function. Their actions probe the authenticity of American ideals. The enemies are imagined--sometimes with concrete specificity, sometimes en masse--as agencies that subject the nation to the ultimate test of whether it will survive or not. These narratives position themselves variously in relation to realism, but always invite the reader to suspend some criteria of reality when processing them. It scarcely matters, for instance, that it is fantastic to imagine massive invasion fleets carrying thousands of soldiers crossing the Atlantic; what is important to register is the negative projection of imperial military might against an America that should by political rights itself possess such a force. Again, it is irrelevant to criticize an invasion of slugs as implausible, because the slugs are a concrete embodiment of the loss of autonomy to a hive mind in a transformation figured as biopolitical. Such enemy forces are the necessary agencies in these speculative critiques of the American nation.

Parts of this essay have profited from discussions with my graduate student Mark Thomas, who is gratefully acknowledged.

(1) Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World (London: John Russell Smith, 1862), p. 14 (italics and capitals in original).

(2) Eric Mottram, 'Out of Sight but Never out of Mind: Fears of Invasion in American Culture', in Blood on the Nash Ambassador: Investigations in American Culture (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), pp. 138-80 (pp. 138-39).

(3) William F. Wu, The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982), pp. 31-37, 42-46.

(4) Pierton W. Dooner, Last Days of the Republic (New York: Arno, 1978), p. 15. Dooner was a Los Angeles lawyer who helped organize the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

(5) Dooner, p. 17.

(6) Dooner, p. 156.

(7) Dooner, pp. 256-57.

(8) 'Chinese Exclusion Act', <http://www.cetel.org/1882_exclusion.html> [accessd 4 December 2006]

(9) Jack London, 'The Yellow Peril', in Revolution and Other Essays (London: Mills & Boon, 1910), pp. 220-37 (p. 224).

(10) London, 'The Yellow Peril', p. 230

(11) Jack London, 'The Unparalleled Invasion', in The Bodley Head Jack London, Vol. I, ed. by Arthur Calder-Marshall (London: Bodley Head, 1963), pp. 210-25 (p. 211; italics in original). This story is also collected in Curious Fragments: Jack London's Tales of Fantasy Fiction, ed. by Dale L. Walker (Port Washington, NY: Kennkat Press, 1975), pp. 109-20.

(12) London, 'The Unparalleled Invasion', p. 216.

(13) Philip Francis Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (New York: Ace, 1962), pp. 189-90.

(14) Wu, p. 173.

(15) Robert A. Heinlein, The Day after Tomorrow (New York: Signet, 1951), p. 6.

(16) Robert A. Heinlein, Expanded Universe (New York: Ace, 1980), p. 93.

(17) Heinlein, Day after Tomorrow, p. 27.

(18) Heinlein, Day after Tomorrow, pp. 30, 153.

(19) Robert A. Heinlein, Requiem, ed. by Yoji Kondo (New York: Tor, 1994), p. 212.

(20) Heinlein's allusion here is specific and ironic. The Non-Intercourse Acts were those that, from 1790 onwards, restricted the acquisition of Indian lands to the US government, or banned trade with Indians without a government licence. Heinlein's reference thus turns a discriminatory measure against the very European Americans who enforced the original laws.

(21) Thomas Dixon, The Fall of a Nation (Chicago and New York: M. A. Donohue, 1916), p. 201. Anthony Slide has shown that this novel was directly influenced by Hudson Maxim's Defenceless America (1915), which in turn influenced the film (also 1915) The Battle Cry of Peace: see American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), p. 90.

(22) Dixon, p. 209.

(23) Marsden Manson, The Yellow Peril in Action: A Possible Chapter in History (San Francisco: Britton and Rey, 1907).

(24) Julius W. Muller, The Invasion of America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), p. 56.

(25) Muller, p. 237.

(26) Hector C. Bywater, The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1925).

(27) Hendrik Willem van Loon, Invasion: Being an Eyewitness Account of the Nazi Invasion of America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940), p. 17.

(28) Van Loon, pp. 143, 184.

(29) Van Loon, p. 199.

(30) Fred Allhoff, Lightning in the Night (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), p. 108. The narrative was originally serialized in Liberty magazine between August and November 1940.

(31) C. M. Kornbluth, 'Two Dooms', in His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth, ed. by Timothy P. Szezesuil (Framingham, MA: New England Science Fiction Association, 1997), pp. 274-308.

(32) His ethnic origins anticipate those of the eponymous protagonist of M. J. Engh's Arslan (1976), a Turkestani warlord who leads communist forces in conquering the USA.

(33) Floyd Gibbons, The Red Napoleon (New York and London: Brentano, 1929), p. 351.

(34) Norman Edwards, Invasion from 2500 (Derby, CT: Monarch, 1964), p. 17. In the 1960s the work's publisher, Monarch Books, made a name by issuing anti-communist propaganda, American war narratives, and invasion stories.

(35) C. M. Kornbluth, 'The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism', in The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism ed. by Basil Davenport, 3rd edn (Chicago: Advent, 1969), pp. 49-76.

(36) C. M. Kornbluth, Christmas Eve (London: Science Fiction Book Club, 1958), p. 30.

(37) Robert Shafer, The Conquered Place (London: Putnam, 1955). Here the USA has been reduced by military defeat to a zone in Occupied Territory. Shafer's narrative gains much of its force from the cumulative details of occupation: the ubiquitous red flag, the Soviet military police, the rationing, and so on.

(38) Kornbluth, Christmas Eve, p. 35.

(39) Oliver Lange, Vandenberg (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 14 (italics in original).

(40) Bryan Appleyard, Aliens: Why They Are Here (London: Scribner, 2006), p. 2. Appleyard's survey attributes the proliferation of aliens to a complex set of factors including technophobia, fear of the Bomb, and a perceived need to believe in trans-human beings.

(41) Susan Sontag, 'The Imagination of Disaster', in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Andre Deutsch, 1987), pp. 209-25 (pp. 220-21).

(42) Cyndy Heathershot, 'Anti-Communism and Ambivalence in Red Planet Mars, Invasion USA, and The Beast of Yucca Flats', Science Fiction Studies, 28.2 (2001), 246-60 (pp. 252-53).

(43) Robert A. Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, rev. edn (New York: Del Rey, 1990), p. 18.

(44) Heinlein, Puppet Masters, p. 65.

(45) Murray Leinster, The Brain-Stealers (London: John Spencer, 1960), p. 46.

(46) Leinster, p. 60.

(47) Leinster, p. 61.

(48) Heinlein, Puppet Masters, p. 205.

(49) M. Keith Booker, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), pp. 50-51.

(50) Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1955), pp. 86-87.

(51) Booker, p. 127.

(52) Fletcher Pratt, Invaders from Rigel (New York: Airmont, 1964).

(53) Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 95.

(54) Philip K. Dick, Eye in the Sky (London: Arrow, 1979), p. 95.

(55) Max Ehrlich, The Big Eye (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), p. 171 (italics in original).

(56) J. Hunter Holly, The Flying Eyes (Derby, CT: Monarch, 1962).

(57) Gregg Rickman, To the High Castle, Philip K. Dick: A Life, 1928-1962 (Long Beach, CA: Fragments West, 1989), p. 296.

(58) Ray Garton, Invaders from Mars (London: Grafton, 1986), pp. 74-75. From the novelization of the 1986 remake.

(59) Joseph Millard, The Gods Hate Kansas (Derby, CT: Monarch, 1964), pp. 61-62.

(60) The recurring figure of invasion as disease in American SF influenced William Burroughs, who subsequently made the virus a multi-layered trope in his own writings; cf. David Seed, Brainwashing: The Figures of Mind Control (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), pp. 142-45.

(61) Murray Leinster, The Other Side of Here (New York: Ace, 1955), p. 31; original version, 'The Incredible Invasion' (1936).

DAVID SEED

Liverpool University