Books Five Books Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans Yelling “Get off my lawn!” on an interplanetary scale… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on July 9, 2025 The Delikon cover art by Sharron Vintson Comment 0 Share New Share The Delikon cover art by Sharron Vintson Graciously informing other people standing on one’s own lawn that their presence on said lawn is unwelcome and that they should find a different lawn on which to stand is fine. But it’s alarming when some officious busybody offers uninvited observations regarding the lawn on which one happens to be currently standing. It’s especially alarming when vastly powerful aliens turn out to be the ones complaining (and assuming ownership of all lawns within their reach). Their lawn observations may well be backed up with a prodigious capacity for lethal damage. Let us consider five classic SF works about lawn-complaining aliens. The Star Fox by Poul Anderson (1964) A million years of civilization provided the Aleriona with a keen sense of propriety. Upstart humans were clearly an affront. For some reason, humans did not understand this obvious fact. Therefore, humans would have to go. As humanity could, if pushed, offer formidable resistance, an all-out attack is ill-advised. However, a brush with global thermonuclear war has left Earth hesitant to resort to force. The Aleriona plan a campaign of judiciously scaled attacks, framed as unfortunate mistakes. This will incrementally eliminate the upstarts without provoking all-out war—or it would have, if navy veteran turned magnate Gunnar Heim did not turn privateer. I was intrigued by the book’s explanation as to why, in a galaxy full of advanced civilizations, Earth was not colonized back in the Devonian. First, the Milky Way is very big and stars can be overlooked. Second, settling alien worlds with their own indigenous biochemistries is hard. In fact, most civilizations don’t bother. That humans chose to expand and colonize beyond their own planet is what pissed off the Aleriona. The Turning Place by Jean E. Karl (1976) The Clordians enjoy a slight head start over Terrans. By the time the humans reached the stars, the Clordians had already planted colonies. Still, if they tried, the humans might catch up with the Clordians. Out of an excess of prudence, the Clordians exterminate almost every living thing on Earth. The sweep accomplishes its immediate goal. The cost is to force the handful of survivors to develop along lines Clord could not foresee. Rather than eliminating a rival, the Clordians create something far more alarming: a civilization against which Clord is essentially irrelevant. Is it wrong that my reaction to an indiscriminate disintegration of most of the life on a planet is to object that the dandelions, hummingbirds, banana slugs, and what have you are all innocent bystanders? Surely, it should be possible to fine-tune the disintegrators to target one species. The Delikon by H.M. Hoover (1977) The long-lived, conservative Delikon found mayfly humans intolerable. Contact was followed by a one-sided war the humans had no hope of winning. Humans survived only because it was never the Delikon intention to exterminate humans, only contain them. The Delikon invested millennia trying to harmonize Earth with Delikon standards. Varina is a comparative newcomer to the effort, having arrived twenty-odd decades earlier. Her tour of duty is coming to an end… as is humanity’s patience with their alien overlords. Thus, the sudden, unexpected rebellion. The Delikon also serves as an example of a book where kids are used as frontline staff. Adult Delikon cannot abide contact with ephemeral humans. They delegate the task of managing them to Delikon youths, who still have the cognitive flexibility to deal with a species with the attention span of a Golden Retriever.  Earth Ship and Star Song by Ethan I. Shedley (1979) Left unchecked, runaway greenhouse effects will kill everyone on Earth. Every apparent means of mitigating rampant climate change has second-order effects that will accelerate global extinction. In short, Earth is doomed and so is everyone on it. Escape is crucial and for that, Earth needs a star drive. Calibrating the star drive needed to flee Earth required sacrificing a whole stellar system. Unluckily for Earth, Alpha Centauri was inhabited by telepaths. The telepaths could not escape—but they could broadcast their murder and the identity of their murderers across the Milky Way. In so doing, the slain spark an anti-human vendetta that spans millennia. In the aliens’ defense, annihilating an inhabited solar system is a dick move. The humans might counter that desperation forced their lack of due diligence, but the reason the humans were in dire straits in the first place was because of their own inability to manage an advanced civilization without destroying the planet it was on. Ambassador of Progress by Walter Jon Williams (1984) Igara has taken upon itself the duty of modernizing the other human worlds that survived the collapse of humanity’s first starfaring age. Their ambassadors arrive on Demro just as the city-states Arrandal and Neda-Calacas prepare for war. Igaran pleas of neutrality are met with violence, leaving survivor Fiona with a pressing problem: is vengeance more important than the survival of the human species? The Igarans are not motivated by charity. The first starfaring age ended in catastrophe, thanks to side effects of the FTL drive then in use. The effects echoed across the Milky Way. Determined to prevent a repeat, an alien armada set out to exterminate humanity… but as the side effects of FTL limit the armada to sublight speeds, humans have millennia to prepare. As was the case with the Shedley novel, readers must concede that the irate aliens have a point. Causing a galaxy-wide apocalypse because one did not sufficiently foresee the consequences of the technology one lavishly deployed deserves a firmly worded letter of rebuke, at the very least. “GET OFF MY LAWN,” expressed in various alien tongues, meaningful chromatophore flickering, informative tentacle waving, and psychic emanations, is the prelude to many an exciting SF story. Feel free to offer your favourite examples. Don’t be shy! Nobody wants to hear crickets![end-mark] The post Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans appeared first on Reactor.