Encounter (Volumes) by Joshua Pierre
This series has multiple volumes focusing on an alien race’s ambition to takeover our planet starting from hijacking a space ship to crash landing in a small town to overcoming a quarantine to walking amongst people without anyone realizing how quickly their species is spreading against us. Sort of reminds me a little bit of John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ but there is no mind control and these aliens are not trying to cohabitate with us whatsoever. This is a futuristic story for the book universe or could even serves as an event that was overcome a long time ago.
Encounter: Isolation.- takes references from Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ and the video game based on the same franchise where a crew of astronauts who come across an unidentified asteroid that happens to be a broken down alien ship and they attempt to board it. By doing so, they come in contact with a group of aliens that begin revealing themselves slowly but surely after boarding the human ship and beginning a takeover. Without getting into too much detail, this story is the origin of where the aliens first encountered us, but not necessarily the first story worth telling. It’s a bottle story that doesn’t necessarily serve the story wholly unless people want to just know how the aliens crash landed on Earth.
Encounter: Contact - this is when the aliens have crash landed in a small town that is about 25 miles outside a small city. When a hunting party comes across the crash site they are slowly picked off one by one in the woods and then used to infiltrate the town and begin taking everyone down one by one. A few survivors make it but those who are “under influence” are hard to spot (the only way to know is to cut them and see black sludge like blood) and someone is actually already taken over.
Encounter: Quarantine - this is the first story that I came up with in regards to the series where two men go out into the middle of nowhere for a few weeks to help put up power lines and when they return home they come to find out that the city they lived in has been completely quarantined. Unwilling to not try to save their families, they sneak into the city through an unguarded section of the quarantine and start heading towards their homes. At the same time, the military has sent in a group of black ops agents to set up a communication network (the city has gone dark) and gather information on the invaders, they come across the two men who snuck in. They end up teaming up together (because the locals know the route through the city) and start heading deeper into the territory. They eventually make contact with those who are “under influence,” actual aliens, and the resistance of survivors who are battling against the invaders. This becomes a mission that looks less likely of survival the further they get into the city, which eventually reveals to the audience as the mission that made the invasion global.
Encounter: Annihilation - this is the story that focuses on a minimal amount of survivors that reflect and deal with that fact that most of the country is destroyed or taken over by the enemies. This is the story that births the revolution that will come from a survival clan that begins finding new and experimental ways to outsmart the invaders and destroy the new infrastructure developed by the alien society. This is also the closest we get to following alien characters, mainly a hunter who is charge of capturing any surviving humans.
Encounter: Revolution - with an actual faction and city that exists with humans, this is the base where the people start expanding their domain against the aliens and begin the revolution that leads to the people eventually taking the planet back.
With this story, I contemplate whether multiple screenplays or an actual television show would be better to develop the story on screen in the best way possible. When I begin writing this story it will figure itself out through the proper medium.