") is a Science Fiction short story by A.E. van Vogt, published in 1948.The Alien Invasion of Earth has been put on hold: when the Ganae invaders arrive, they find humanity dead in its home. After studying human relics, they discover that although humans were obviously more advanced than themselves, they were all wiped out almost overnight by something. Intrigued, they pick up a number of human remains from different eras and resurrect them for interrogation. The first one is an Egyptian pharaoh; the second is a drunken driver from the 20th century. The third is a man from around 4000 CE, whom they dub "The Monster" after he very nearly wipes all of them out with telepathic control over his era's machinery before they manage to nuke him. However, they still need to discover the reasons for humanity's extinction, so they decide to resurrect someone who actually witnessed it...
Summarized here; full text here
This story provides examples of:
- Alien Invasion: Let's just say that it gets subverted.
- It is also said that the Ganae have invaded and massacred countless planets across the galaxy before.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: The 4th human can completely analyze and understand alien technology just by looking it, along with understanding their entire genocidal racial history just with a moment of telepathy.
- The 3rd human demonstrates this trope to a lesser extent, whose flashes of insight terrify the Ganae into killing him before they finish their interrogation.
- Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Valiantly attempted, but ultimately subverted as the human had only manipulated the Ganae into believing this trope was in play... right before they realize that their irrevocable Heroic Sacrifice was pointless.
- Bond Villain Stupidity: Inverted in the case of the Ganae, who have zero interest in interrogation and parlay beyond the bare minimum. And unusually for subversions of this trope, their hastiness is trying to kill their nemesis while they think they have the advantage, rather than toy with or question him leads directly to their deaths. See: Mugging the Monster.
- The Chessmaster: The fourth resurrectee plays the Ganae for utter fools while looking utterly bored.
- Cosmic Horror Story: Done from the perspective of the Evil Colonialist aliens rather than Puny Earthlings for a change. The otherwise invincible Ganae, possessing not only advanced spacefaring technology but two inventions even the Sufficiently Advanced Human didn't have, are found to be completely helpless against the Last of His Kind of a Superior Species who the Ganae have accidentally introduced technology to. Technology which would let them revive billions of his kind and lead the human straight to the core of their genocidal empire.
- Crazy-Prepared: Attempted by the Ganae but subverted, largely out of a racial Genre Blindness towards technology that didn't follow their path. They are very good at contingency plans, but a Lack of Empathy causes them to misread the human's intent and capability.
- Curiosity Is a Crapshoot: One of those cases where a measured, modest curiosity led to more disaster than complete apathy or naive curiosity. Had the Ganae either not cared about the fate of humanity or had taken more time to complete their investigations of Earth's history, they would have either colonized the planet or avoided danger altogether.
- Entitled Bastard: The Ganae feel so entitled to breed and expand however they want that even the constant threat of Genocide Backfire ends with frequent Ignored Epiphanies. A suggestion that they will be made to forcefully control their expansion has them overreact to the Implied Death Threat to the point where they stop being Dirty Cowards and double down on their Absolute Xenophobe tendencies. Turns out that this trope was intentionally an Exploited Trope by the human, who chose just the right words to trigger a suicidal This Is Unforgivable! reaction.
- Evil Colonialist: The Ganae don't quite fit this trope, being aliens with more interest in extermination than enslavement, but the (and denialism when they get shown their inferiority)? The eternal, crippling fear of a retroactive Genocide Backfire? Replacing a healthy fear with racist belligerence the instant they get the upper hand? Yeah, they otherwise totally fit.
- Fatal Flaw: The Ganae's Fatal Flaw is Gluttony, specifically a gluttony for other inhabited planets thanks to their relentless hostility at the very idea of controlling their population growth. Just the suggestion that they were going to be made to control their appetites was enough for Enash, the Only Sane Man, to physically attack the human despite Enash knowing that he was invincible!
- Genocide Backfire: Done indirectly. While the Ganae have no direct quarrel with the human, they live in complete fear of 3rd-party retaliation for past genocides — which the human obliquely referred to. Though, even when the human still tried to open negotiation with them their Overpopulation Crisis compelled them to take a (suicidally) belligerent stance to their ongoing genocides. This leads to their death.
- Genre Blindness: Had the Ganae any knowledge of Earth literature, they wouldn't have been so bamboozled by the human's display of classic superpowers such as teleportation, telepathy, immunity to attacks, etc.. That said, some of the powers the human displays such fine control over nuclear physics to the extent of stopping atomic bombs from detonating on the other side of the planet would even stretch a human nerd's imagination.
- Humanity's Wake: The Driving Question of the story is "What wiped out a civilization as advanced as humanity?" The answer is "nucleonic storm" that was so huge and sudden that humans didn't manage to teleport out in time.
- Humanity Is Superior: Humans are obviously the most advanced race Ganae have ever encountered (and lived to tell), which makes their extinction ever more puzzling to them.
- Humans Are Cthulhu: How the Ganae start viewing humanity after certain events.
- The third human, who isn't even the most advanced of his kind, demonstrates the use of a technology unknown to the Ganae after they order his execution. While they did have to drop a nuke on him (and destroy the museum) the Ganae made no effort to go to one of the other earth museums to research this highly advanced technology or the race's capabilities, instead trusting in energy shields that were just barely sufficient. Which led to:
- The third resurrected human had already frightened the Ganae enough by how thoroughly humans of his era mastered psychic and nuclear powers compared to their kind, yet they decided to take a risk on an even more advanced version while doing nothing but using a stronger energy screen and rigging the Reconstructor to detonate remotely.
- When the fourth human initially disappeared from their energy screens, the Ganae thought that he was hiding rather than teleporting. While they weren't aware of this ability beforehand, they forget about it even when their plans hinged on him not being able to do this.
- Their plan to retaliate and bomb earth to pieces to make resurrecting the other human skeletons impossible hinges on two shaky assumptions.
- The first is they would be able to overwhelm his psychic powers with thousands of ships — plausible, except for how he was able to stop an atomic bomb from exploding 'on the other side of the world'.
- The second is that the human wouldn't be able to recreate their Reconstructor in less than a year's time for the fleet to arrive before he could resurrect enough humans. They put the timeline at two years, max, even though he was shown to be vastly more technologically capable than them and most of planet earth's infrastructure was still intact.
- Not that it would've changed anything at this point, but Enash, having intentionally discarded his Only Sane Man hat out of racial pride at this point, attacks the godlike human out of outrage at being told that his kind would made to stop this cycle of overbreeding and planetary invasion. The extra-stupid part came into play when the human teleported them back to their spaceship and it didn't cause an alteration of their plans.
- As mentioned in Crazy-Prepared, the Ganae's plans hinged on the presumed indestructability of their and their fleets' spaceships and that the human only let them go because he couldn't destroy their craft. Even if he couldn't directly blow up the ship, there were still so many ways for him to stop them: stop their fuel from igniting, disable their control panels, or even just kill them them.
- The reason why it didn't occur to them that they were being manipulated into returning to their homeworld — and later into committing suicide — was because the Ganae had such a Lack of Empathy towards other species that they assumed that the only reason they were alive was because the human couldn't kill him. After all, it's what they would've done in his shoes!
- The Ganae planned their Heroic Sacrifice on the presumption that the human couldn't understand their language without the Universal Translator. Even though they knew he was able to directly read all of their memories.
- Going back to the teleportation, it didn't occur to the Ganae until the very end of the story that the human had already gotten what he wanted and just wanted to turn their Heroic Sacrifice into a Stupid Sacrifice.
- Immortal Procreation Clause: The Ganae note that there are no child skeletons on Earth, and conclude the humans must have solved the problem of aging.
- La Résistance: It is mentioned that two of the planets conquered by the Ganae still have areas held by natives, because destroying them isn't considered worth it.
- Mugging the Monster
- Nuke 'em: Works as the last resort against the third resurrectee. The fourth just prevents the nukes from detonating.
- Only Sane Man: Enash fulfills this role in the story, seeing danger where the others won't but goes along with it anyway.
- Rousseau Was Right: It is strongly implied that humanity was at peace and generally Crystal Spires and Togas at the time of its sudden extinction.
- Take a Third Option: Confronted by the possibility of either bringing the human to their planet or giving away its location via transmission, the Ganae decide to commit a Heroic Sacrifice. Suckers.
