The term “terraforming” was first used in Jack Williamson’s 1941 story “Collision Orbit.” As you know, Bob, terraforming is the process of transforming an environment hostile to Terrestrial life into a habitable environment. Humans have been doing this in a minor way for millennia, even before they started domesticating plants. But what we’re talking about here is going from “you die outside the dome” to “you can go outside, breathe the air, and plant a garden.”
Sapients from other worlds might also want to reshape other planets to suit their needs and tastes. Call it “xenoforming.” Perhaps they might want to xenoform our planet. There’s no guarantee that what suits us would suit them… and considerable dramatic potential if it does not, particularly if the aliens have better tech than we do. H.G. Wells was an early pioneer of this conceit in his The War of the Worlds—the Red Weed pushes aside terrestrial plants, at least for a time—but he is hardly the only author to use the idea. Consider these five works about hostile xenoforming.
The Tripods Trilogy: The White Mountains (1967), The City of Gold and Lead (1968), and The Pool of Fire (1968) by John Christopher
Will Parker is born and raised in an orderly world, where young people grow to adulthood and are Capped, transforming them into docile, well-behaved adults fit to serve Earth’s rulers. Said rulers are not other humans but rather the Masters, unseen aliens who govern Earth from their great strongholds. Given that Capping is a form of lobotomy, it is just as well that Will and his chums escape Capping and turn rebel, joining the miniscule resistance against humanity’s overlords.
After infiltrating one of the Masters’ strongholds in The City of Gold and Lead, Will discovers that the situation is far more serious than the resistance thought. The Masters huddle within their cities because they cannot breathe terrestrial air. The aliens have both the ability and the intention to xenoform the Earth, a side effect of which would be the total extinction of the human race (well, a few might be saved as zoo exhibits). The Masters must be stopped if humanity is to be saved…but if humanity at its height fell before the aliens, what hope is there for the rebels?
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The War Against the Chtorr series: A Matter for Men (1983), A Day for Damnation (1985), A Rage for Revenge (1989), A Season for Slaughter (1993) by David Gerrold
Military and political defeats followed by humiliating concessions to America’s enemies have shaken the United States. Distraction would be welcome, if only distraction did not come in the form of deadly plagues (that kill two-thirds of the human population) and voracious alien lifeforms (that attack the survivors).
Earth is under attack. Its native species seem incapable of withstanding the aggressive interlopers.1 Protagonist Jim McCarthy joined America’s elite military forces almost by accident, but having survived—thus far—he is determined to do his bit to convince Earth’s enemies to abandon their plan to reshape Earth. Alas, the first step in changing an invader’s mind is establishing communication…and the architects of the invasion have not yet revealed themselves.
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The Interior Life by Dorothy Heydt (as Katherine Blake) (1990)
Post-Reagan Era housewife Sue leads an unrewarding life. Her energetic children make cleaning a never-ending task. She does love her husband Fred, but there are also the days she cannot stand him (particularly when work problems follow him home). It’s completely understandable that Sue would want to escape into a fantasy world. But it is less clear why Sue keeps returning to the world she inhabits as Lady Amalia, as Lady Amalia’s troubles are so much greater than Sue’s.
It’s not clear if this fantasy world is real or imaginary. What is obvious is that the Dark is inexorably spreading across Lady Amalia’s world, displacing familiar plants and animals with…other things. If this continues unchecked, the world about which Sue daydreams will become Dark and alien. Odd that this process mirrors challenges in Sue’s own life.
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All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (Trans. Alexander O. Smith) (2004)
The aliens who dispatched the engineered lifeforms humans call Mimics did stop to consider the morality of xenoforming a world that might well be inhabited. But they concluded that xenoforming would be as ethically neutral as killing insects to make way for housing construction. No need to examine Earth before reshaping it.
Keiji Kiriya, human, thinks human needs are more important than alien schemes. Thus, his brief, glorious career in Earth’s defence forces. Thus his inevitable death the first time he encounters Mimics. His resurrection in the past—on the morning before the first battle—comes as an unexpected surprise. Alas, the results of the rerun battle are little better than the first. The same is true of the second. And the third…but by death 157, Keiji is getting the hang of the time loop in which he is trapped and well on his way to figuring out how he might save the Earth for humans.
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Winnowing Flame Trilogy: The Ninth Rain (2017), The Bitter Twins (2018), The Poison Song (2019) by Jen Williams
Eight times the Jure’lia have invaded Sarn; eight times they have been driven off by the Eborans. What they have left behind: tracts of poisoned lands haunted by malevolent spirits. This would be the fate of the whole world should the Jure’lia ever succeed. Regrettably for Sarn, the Eboran tree-god Ygseril died during the Eighth Rain. Without Ygseril, the Eborans have dwindled into a sad remnant of their former selves. If there is a Ninth Rain, the Eborans will not be able to save their land and their world.
Lady Vincenza “Vintage” de Grazon is determined to replace semidivine warriors with something far more powerful: science! She and her Eboran companion Tormalin the Oathless seek out Jure’lia relics to better understand the invader and why it behaves as it does. Perhaps Vintage will uncover a relic that, once disassembled and understood, will allow the scientist to save her world from the invaders. Or perhaps she and Tormalin will simply get eaten by a nightmarish predator.
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Of course, Wells and the five authors above are hardly the only authors to explore xenoforming as a plot device. Feel free to visit the comments below and list all the other works I could have cited.
Originally published May 2021.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviewsand the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Does it make sense to say one world’s ecosystem is more or less advanced than another’s? Have fun discussing this in the comments!
A couple of movies come to mind:
“The Arrival”, 1996 (not to be confused with “Arrival”) — A radio astronomer uncovers the alien conspiracy behind global warming, as they try to remake Earth in the image of their own world.
“Man of Steel”, 2013 — General Zod attempts to “Kryptoform” Earth.
Thank you so much for using the term xenoforming. It drives my pedantic mind crazy when terraforming is used in this context!
(Too many tv programmes, I’m looking at you!)
In Zelazny’s Bridge of Ashes the aliens have been arranging for us to ruin our environment to fit them better for millennia! There’s also telepathy and an immortal Adam working against the aliens.
Thomas Disch’s early novel The Genocides comes to mind: aliens replace terrestrial ecosystems with one more suited to their own needs.
Lovecraft
The Stargate SG-1 episode Scorched Earth (S4e9) is my favorite take on this. A dead civilization building itself a new home, a lost colony of hapless human caught in the way, our plucky heroes angsting over moral quandaries, AIs, aliens, first contact, and a happy ending for all.
Childhood’s End, although that’s more “reshaping humanity”.
I was going to mention the Gerrold series. My main memory of the first book was that the monsters with the ravenous appetites couldn’t digest anything from Earth so they were eating everything is sight because they were always hungry yet nothing satiated them. The poor things were starving to death.
I loved the Tripod Trilogy growing up (and still have copies of all of the books). Later on there was a prequel written that was about the start of the invasion (and is actually the book I read first in the series).
How about Marko Kloos’ Frontlines series? The powerful Lanky aliens seek to modify the environment of all Earth colonies to their preferred environment that is not particularly compatible with Earth. And, of course, they would do the same to mother Earth if they could get a foothold.
On the flip side, one of the subtexts to Cherryh’s Foreigner series is that the Earth-based humans who land on the surface of the Atevi planet slowly introduce human technologies and cultural ideas that end up reshaping the Atevis and their environment, with the speed of change accelerating under the crisis events covered in the series proper.
If you’re including aliens who are not extra terrestrials you can’t do better than the War With the Newts, by Karel Capek.
@7: it’s entirely reshaping humanity; Earth is fine until the post-humans have at it.
In William Tenn’s satire “The Liberation of Earth”, Earth is occupied in alternation (a bit like Middle Ages Berwick) by two forces of ETs, both mendacious and both focused on turning the planet into a fortress, regardless of how that affects its livability for us.
In Sturgeon’s “Occam’s Scalpel”, a polluting businessman is “revealed” after his death as an ET trying to alter our world to suit his kind.
@2. that’s one of my pet peeves as well, everytime in the series “Defiance” when they talked about the aliens “terraforming” Earth, I’d scream, “Xenoform!”
Terry Dowling’s outstanding collection of linked short stories Wormwood is a good example. Good luck finding a copy.
Footfall by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven.
It’s been awhile since I read it but I believe the aliens were dropping small asteroids into the ocean to make the world wetter and warmer.
The sf writers grabbed as alien experts was one of my favorite parts.
There are oblique references to it in Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game”; but it is fully detailed in the franchised Bugger Wars series of novels.
Chtorr is cool. I wish david finished the series. I wanted to see how bad and ruined the Earth got. Things collapsing is always interesting.
Gryphon, by Crawford Kilian, is a favorite alien invasion story for me. Humans have already reshaped the solar system, but the aliens have a plan to reshape every known world.
I suppose simply demolishing the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass can be considered an extreme form of what’s being discussed.
Worldwar/Colonisation, by Harry Turtledove
Ian McDonald’s Chaga is an interesting take on this, in which a sort of symbiosis is achieved with the transforming alien biotech.
In Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, the sanctuary planet is described as having an ecosystem that is “retarded “. Rico mention that any plants from Earth’s ecosystem introduced to this planet brushes aside the local stuff and takes over. Heinlein attributed this to Earth having more radiation in its environment, accelerating evolution.
In Philip E. High’s No Truce With Terra (1964) the alien invaders introduce metal based semi-robotic plants and animals from their planet’s ecosystem. This proceeds to overwhelm Earth’s ecosystem at the rate of several yards per day.
So Heinlein was arguing for an ecosystem that was More Advanced, but High was endorsing Better Adapted To This Particular Planet.
An interesting variation on this is The Nitrogen Fix by Hal Clement. In that book, the aliens didn’t cause the change to Earth’s environment, but some suspect they did.
The WondLa trilogy by Tony DiTerlizzi (The Search for WondLa, A Hero for WondLa, and The Battle for WondLa) is built around this; after an ecological collapse, humans withdrew into sealed vaults to wait out Earth’s thousand-year recovery. In the interim, alien colonists found the “uninhabited” planet and began remaking it.
(And for those wanting new terminology, Transformers gives us “eco-structuring,” as well as “Cyberforming,” for the process of turning a natural planet specifically into a duplicate of the factory-ecumenopolis where the Transformers come from.)
MARS EVACUEES by Sophia McDougall starts when aliens have successfully frozen the Earth to the point that some Earthling children are evacuated to Mars, which humans have bern terraforming.
There’s End of an Era by Robert J Sawyer, in which Martians colonised prehistoric Earth for tens of millions of years, and installed gravity generators to reduce Earth’s gravity to something more like that of Mars. Then 65 million years ago, the gravity generators got turned off, and all the enormous land-based life forms that had evolved in low-gravity conditions suddenly died out.