Earth in Science Fiction - Earth As Presented in Various Works

Earth As Presented in Various Works

• In the H. G. Wells story The War of the Worlds, perhaps the first depiction of an alien invasion in fiction, Earth is simply a neighboring planet of the inhabitants of Mars. With their world coming into its end, they target the younger and richer Earth for migration. This plot is repeated with varying degrees of differences in many of its adaptations, but Earth's place largely remains the same. The notable exception is in the War of the Worlds TV series, where the aliens look to Earth for more specific reasons, as it features many of their old world's characteristics (such as both being the third planet in their respective systems, the number 3 playing a large role in their beliefs).
• In the anime series Cowboy Bebop, Earth has become a backwater wasteland after a horrific accident caused one of the jumpgates that humans used to travel the solar system to explode, destroying part of the Moon and causing the destroyed bits to rain down on the earth.
• The Gundam anime often depicts a war between the Earth against the space colonies established by humans in outer space.
• In C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, Earth (known as Thulcandra) is part of the Field of Arbol: and is the subject of an interplanetary blockade — hence its name, the Silent Planet.
• In Sailor Moon, Tuxedo Mask protects Earth and holds the Golden Crystal.
• In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Earth has been united into a single geopolitical entity, The World State.
• In David Weber's Honorverse, Earth is the capital planet of the Solarian League, the largest and wealthiest political institution ever created by man. Prior to the League's creation, a large portion of humanity departed for other planets and solar systems in what came to be known as the Diaspora, leaving those who remained to rebuild from the effects of pollution, resource exhaustion, and the cataclysmic Final War. They did so, and Earth once again became the political, economic, and cultural center of humanity.
• The Earth also plays a major part in the Doctor Who universe. It is where humans come from and expand out of to create numerous Empires, being invaded by many different aliens through all of its history. Having a weather control station on the moon by 2070, by the year 200,000, the Earth is in the middle of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. By the year 5,000,000,000, humanity is spread all across the stars and has fully integrated themselves with the rest of the universe. Shortly after the destruction of Earth, Humanity regroups and colonized a new planet, naming it New Earth. Humans go to live on to the end of the Universe.
• In Warhammer 40,000 Earth, known as Terra (Latin for Earth), is the home world of Humanity and the capital of the Imperium of Man. It is the site of the Golden Throne, where the God-Emperor resides. Its soil is utterly barren and its atmosphere is a fog of pollution. Massive, labyrinthine edifices sprawl across the vast majority of the surface. Its oceans have long ago boiled away. Many mountain ranges have been leveled, perhaps all but the Himalayas, due to the laboratories said to be underneath and the Astronomican that lays within them. Beneath hundreds of layers of urban accretion, catacombs hold older cultures, completely different from the surface ones. A poor civilization lives and dies, without ever seeing the surface. A square meter of land on Terra costs more than a palace on any Hive World; only the most wealthy can even afford to own a small section of land.
• In the Noon Universe, Earth is a Utopian world of immense power and the initial home planet of all humans scattered over the Universe.
• In the alternate future universe of The Longest Journey, Earth has been divided into two twin worlds — technology-driven Stark, the world as we know it, and the magic world of Arcadia for over 13 millennia.
• In Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World, The Stainless Steel Rat travels to Earth, 1975, and then to Napoleonic France, to stop a madman known as He from destroying the timeline. The Rat and his contemporaries in the series show confusion over the name of the world, hedging by calling it either "Earth" or "Dirt".
• In the animated television series Exosquad, Earth is the center of the Homeworlds, the core of both Human and Neosapien Empires (at different times).
• In the Alien series of films, Earth is depicted as being the center of an interstellar commercial empire effectively run by the soulless megacorporation "Weyland-Yutani". Nothing is seen of the planet itself with the exception of several shots of the planet from orbit, which appear to show it in a similar state to the present. In the fourth installment of the series, Alien Resurrection, Earth is the emergency destination to which Military vessels automatically direct themselves. By the time of Resurrection, Earth is part of an entity known as the "United Systems". One of the film's characters, Jonas (portrayed by Ron Perlman) remarks "Earth ... what a shithole," upon learning where the ship is going.
• The television series Andromeda differs from the usual portrayal of Earth as a dominant power in galactic civilization. The series' Systems Commonwealth was founded thousands of years in the past by the Vedran species in the Andromeda Galaxy, with Earth joining in the 22nd century. Humans go on to become a major player in the Commonwealth, but Earth itself has no special importance (although the final two episodes of the series retcon this). Following the fall of the Commonwealth, Earth becomes one of many Nietzschean slave worlds.
• In the video game universe of Halo, Earth is the center of all human government, military and technology. Earth and its colonies are governed by the UNSC, or the United Nations Space Command. During the Human–Covenant War, the Cole Protocol was implemented, stating that ships must self-destruct rather than let the Covenant find the location of Earth. Furthermore, any ship heading to Earth must take several random slipspace jumps rather than head straight for it. In October 2552, Earth was attacked by the Covenant and successfully defended by the UNSC Military, only to have the Covenant come back a few days later with more firepower.
• In the StarCraft series, Earth is ruled by a fascistic government called the United Earth Directorate. When the UED becomes aware of the presence of aliens hostile to humanity in the far away Koprulu Sector, it sends a large expeditionary force to defeat the aliens, conquer the sector, and reintegrate the banished human colonists who reside there into its political fold. The Directorate's initial progress in the sector was promising, as it managed to invade and conquer the main planets of both the Terran Dominion and the bizarre alien Zerg, in the process kidnapping the Zerg Overmind and using it to control most of the Zerg swarms. The rogue Zerg leader Kerrigan waged a clever and highly successful war to rid the sector of the Earth's control, aided in part by temporary Terran and Protoss allies. The end result for Earth's forces was a crushing defeat which amounted to the loss of all ships in the Koprulu Sector. As of the events of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, there remain a few isolated pockets of UED fleet survivors scattered throughout the Koprulu sector. It is unclear if the UED is planning to return to the war-torn area.
• In author Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy, Earth is the heart of an economical empire, its biosphere wrecked by global warming to such an extent that any unfortified structure would be torn apart in a matter of days by colossal, super-sized versions of modern tropical hurricanes. The entire sprawling human population is forced to live in arcologies protected against the so-called "Armada Storms". Whilst Earth represents a significant political and industrial power base, it is nonetheless an independent state and interestingly not the head of the series' Confederation. Physically, Earth is dominated by massive Arcologies that cover most of the major urban centers of our time, including London, New York and Johannesburg. There are also several equatorial space elevators that allow for transit into orbit, where the planet is surrounded by an O'Neill Halo, a collection of captured asteroids providing habitation and raw materials as well as docking and strategic defense units. Earth is sometimes referred to as "The fortress world" due to the enormous fleet of space warship's surrounding it in order to protect the vital industrial facilities of the O'Neill Halo.
• In the Metroid series, Samus's birthplace K-2L was a colony of Earth. However at the formation of the Galactic Federation, in the year 2000 C.C. (Cosmic Calendar), it can be assumed that Earths resources were absorbed into the federation.
• In the Wing Commander universe, Earth is the capital of the Terran Confederation, which spends much of the time period covered in the published media (from the middle to the end of the 27th century) locked in an interstellar war with the Kilrathi Empire. The Confederation was founded in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Economic Consortium.
• In the Perry Rhodan series, Earth is much as in the real world until Rhodan, that Earth's first man on the moon, discovers a wrecked starship from the ancient Arkonide Empire. Using the technology and the help of the surviving Arkonides, Rhodan forces the Earth to unite under his leadership, and begins to explore the galaxy while carefully concealing the location of Earth from enemies such as the Arkonide Empire. Later in the series, Earth under the now-immortal Rhodan becomes a major player in the universe, establishing a benevolent empire. During an invasion of the Milkyway by the Laren, Earth and the Moon with its 20 billion inhabitants are supposed to be teleported to a different system, but accidentally end up in the bridge between two collided galaxies (called Maelstrom of Stars) and moved into orbit about a star. 120 years later the system falls into a giant energy vortex and is again transported to another galaxy, and most of the humans in it become part of the superintelligence IT. Another five years later, IT transports Earth and Moon back into the Solar System, and they are repopulated.
• In the anime and manga series Trigun it is revealed that through constant pollution and humanity living beyond its means that the Earth had to be evacuated after becoming uninhabitable. The humans fled in cryogenic suspension with only a small skeleton crew operating their fleet called Project Seeds to search for a new homeworld. Upon crashing on the planet Gunsmoke, any advanced technology from the days of Earth is referred to as lost technology.
• In Phillip Reeves's Mortal Engines Quartet (known as the Hungry City Chronicles in the US), Earth has been ravaged by a conflict known as the Sixty Minute War, which was soon followed by earthquakes, volcano eruptions and a brief ice age, leaving Earth forever changed. Europe is known as the "Great Hunting Ground" as where most Traction Cities are found, North America is known as the "Dead Continent" and South America's isthmus has been cut off due to 'Slow Bombs'.
• In Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos series, Old Earth is believed to have been destroyed by The Big Mistake of '08 (in which a miniature black hole was dropped into it), but later shown to have been spirited away by 'other' beings of godlike abilities and consciousness.
• In the original Planet of the Apes film, astronauts attempt to leave the Solar System for the first time, aiming for Alpha Centauri. However, unexplained phenomena cause their small vessel to change course while the crew is in cryostasis. They wake upon landing on an inhabitable but harsh planet that they later learn is a future Earth, dominated by sapient apes. However, in the original Pierre Boulle novel and the 2001 film, both of the same name, the astronauts find civilizations of apes on another planet, but suffer a rude shock upon returning to Earth, finding it besieged by apes.
• In the Half-Life series of first-person shooters, a modern day research facility opens a portal storm between Earth and the border world Xen. The portal storm floods the planet with aliens from that world, and is kept open by a creature named Nihilanth. A scientist named Gordon Freeman manages to reach the creature and take it down, unknowingly freeing one of the races that traveled to Earth by the portal storms. The portal storm awakes the Combine Empire, which then manages to conquer Earth in just seven hours, after its military had been crippled by beings from Xen. Two decades after the Black Mesa incident, Gordon Freeman succeeds in cutting Earth off of the Combine Empire and a device that suppressed human reproduction, leading to a renewed fight between the native population and the trapped Combine forces.
• In the massively multiplayer online game Tabula Rasa, Earth is shown in the near future as having been attacked by a force known as the Bane. Hopelessly outmatched, its revealed that Earth's various governments haven't been caught completely off guard and rather than mount a suicidal defense, have chosen to abandon the planet using wormhole portals built using alien technology to evacuate as many people as they could to other planets so the human race can regroup and launch a counterattack at the Bane. The ultimate fate of Earth, and those that were left behind, is unknown, with some thinking it may well be gone forever.
• In the video game Xenosaga, the Earth has been abandoned by humanity for at least 4,000 years, because the Earth has disappeared altogether from physical space. Humans refer to the planet as "Lost Jerusalem".
• In the video game FreeSpace Earth serves as the capital of the Galactic Terran Alliance. During the war against the Shivans, a last-ditch attack in subspace saves the planet from destruction, but at the cost of collapsing the FTL node that allows access to the system. By the end of FreeSpace 2, Earth is still sealed off and has had no contact with the outside systems for 32 years, but the Alliance is hopeful they have found a way to restore travel to the Sol system.
• In the AT-43 universe, Earth, known as "Sol III" was the home planet of the humans who became the Therian faction. In this future, Earth was destroyed (after the Therians recklessly used up its resources) and the debris was used to form a Dyson sphere around the Sun.
• In Little Fuzzy, Earth is referred to as Terra, and is the center of a multi-planetary system, spanning many galaxies most likely.
• In the Funky Koval comic series, most events take place on 2080's Earth which is very similar to our own. However it is rather ruled by global corporations (Stellar Fox Syndicate is notable example) than political bodies like UN. Earth is also on the verge of wide galactic explorations with possess ion of subspace flight technology and maintain contact with at least two alien species: The Droll and Ancusans.
• In the Sailor Moon manga, Mamoru Chiba is the representative of Earth taking the place of a Sailor Soldier and becoming Tuxedo Kamen. (Tuxedo Mask)
• In the Mass Effect series of video games, Earth is the industrial, economic and cultural capital of the human Systems Alliance; however, the military and political capital is at Arcturus, 36 light years from Earth. As of 2183, when the game is set, Earth is looked upon as a near Utopian world, for it has been mentioned that Earth has reached a "New Golden Age". However, there is still violent weather due to environmental damages of the 21st century. But since developing faster-than-light travel among other advanced technologies, there have been significant improvements to the state of the planet. The Systems Alliance itself is regarded as a sleeping giant, and humanity has quickly established itself as one of the most important and powerful races in the galaxy.
• In his work A Journey to the Center of the Earth, French author Jules Verne presented the concept of a hollow center of the planet inhabited by prehistoric beings. The secrets of this region were explored by a group of travelers from the surface.