MiracleOfSound said:
Therumancer said:
I think he irritated a lot of people with some of his plot twists, not to mention the fact that some of his best work is routinely ruined by massively ridiculous moments other than the plot twists. Even "Signs" which had mixed, but general positive reviews, featured this ridiculous bit with one of these horrible alien invaders being defeated in the climactic momenet by a hick with a baseball bat... despite having somehow been a global threat.
Not to mention the plot hole of an Alien species advanced enough for intergalactic travel yet is dumb enough to invade a planet whose surface is almost entirely made up of the one thing they're allergic to
That bit doesn't especially bother me. On the flip side there is plenty of fiction about humans working to colonize incredibly hostile enviroments with dangerous natives for one reason or another. This is more or less the premise of Avatar, though it's sort of explained that it's due to seeking a nessicary mineral (though why it's so nessicary and valuable is not explained in detail, and the big problem I have there). "Signs" didn't really explore the motivations of the Aliens in much detail, choosing to leave them mysterious, but I could think of tons of reasons why they might choose to invade an enviroment that hostile to them, especially if they could somehow terraform.
I can even get into the idea of a species with intergalactic travel not being all that tough in combat. I mean science is not a linear thing, and a lot of discoveries are made as accidents while pursueing other things. What's more what people decide to research is based on the imagination. We discovered tons of things we could do with lasers that were never conceived of until we found them while trying to make the "laser gun" a reality even though the basic idea is impractical as there are more efficient ways of putting holes in things. Intergalactic travel could be discovered as a byproduct of some other area of research, or perhaps from a resources on an alien homeworld that doesn't have an Earth equivilent. Let's say a species found space travel based on something similar to the old Space 1889 game where they used "Liftwood" and propelled off of some alternate dimension like "ether" that they discovered that humans never found because we long ago became disenchanted with bothering to try and find ways to do something like that. They have space craft, perhaps even faster ones than the RPG (which was mostly in solar system) however when they get here they would be using weapons technology over a century out of date, and their technology would require an engagement doctrine which would put them into direct conflict with far superior weapons: like Jets firing missles. There have been numerous science fiction concepts that have explored ideas like this, and done so in a satisfactory enough fashion where I do not nessicarly agree that a species with intergalactic travel is by definition going to be vastly superior in all aspects to one that has not discovered it.
I can even deal with the concept of aliens being rather wimpy in all respects compared to humans. Series like Alan Dean Foster's "The Damned" and David Drake/David Weber's "Ranks Of Bronze", and "The Excalibur Option" (I think I have the latter title right) explored this concept. Rather than humanity's romance with the superhuman being true, aliens turn out to be much more fragile than we are, think slower on average, and don't have any kind of mind blowing psionic powers or anything. They have however been around longer and had more time to develop their tech so they have that edge, but wind up needing humanity becaus of our inherant abillities, while also being scared of them as well as the explosive rate at which we are innovating (or whatever).
The thing is that "Signs" was nothing that deep or well thought out. The Aliens show up and despite these mysterious warnings from wherever (I don't think that bit was ever really explained adequetly) we aren't prepared since we didn't take it seriously. These aliens are apparently strong enough where they are able to terrorize the entire population, the military did okay if I remember correctly, but wasn't exactly able to drive them off. They eventually wound up losing in a variation of "War Of The Worlds" because the enviroment is simply a lot more hostile than they expected (and I mean, I can deal with that explanation, plenty of good science fiction has dealt with humans having the same problem and having to back off and come back better prepared). The big issue is that with all of the damage these aliens were doing globally, they can't deal with hicks using strategies like "we're going to hide in the basement, lock the door, and plug up the cracks Nyah, nyah, nyah", and some dude is going to beat one of these things which is presumably a warrior on the vanguard of what was a fairly successful invasion using an improvised club. I mean even winning a fight with an alien using a club is fine, but he wasn't exactly some he-man, or action hero or something, he was a bloody hick... it wasn't even especially epic, I mean when you get down to it, it was kind of sad. If these guys blew chips that bad, how did they ever get that far? I mean I know the alien got chopped with a knife before that, but even that was in the catagory of "WTF" given that it was in the process of failing to deal with a bunch of civilians hiding in a perfectly normal house. The army, or heck even the police, should have made complete mince meat out of these dudes going by what we saw. They were just that pathetic.
