Earth invaded

The Alien Invasion was unexpected and devastating, with their protective force-shields, the K'Thraa stormtroopers seem invincible and it looks as if earth is doomed. But by a miracle of chance First Sergeant Hood finds a flaw in the K'Thraa armour, a way in which he and his tiny army may be able to fight back.
But is it really possible for such a small band of soldiers with their primitive weapons to defeat the sophisticated aliens? with Hood in charge, there is a chance.

Earth Invaded is the first book of the Hood's Army trilogy, published in 1986 by HarperCollins under the Armada imprint, and it runs to a brisk 160 pages of paperback. The author credited on the cover, Nathan Elliott, is a pseudonym for the British science fiction writer Christopher Evans, who used the name for his work in the young-adult market. The other two books in the trilogy, Slaveworld and The Liberators, both followed the same year, the kind of rapid release schedule that tells you something about who these books were aimed at and how publishers thought about middle-grade SF in the mid-1980s. They are aimed squarely at younger readers, they move at the pace of a Saturday morning cartoon, and they are not in the slightest concerned with being subtle.

I should declare a personal interest. Earth Invaded came to me as a Christmas present when I was twelve, along with The Liberators, the closing volume of the trilogy, in the same handover. I never had Slaveworld, the middle book, which means I have always known the beginning and the end of the K'Thraa story without ever quite knowing how the middle of it joined up. I cannot pretend my view of these books is unaffected by that. There are titles in everyone's reading life that are stitched into the circumstances in which they were read, and for me these are two of them; First Sergeant Hood's tiny resistance army is knotted together in my memory with the particular feel of being twelve, on holiday, with two new paperbacks and nothing in particular to do, in a way that no fair-minded critic should pretend is reproducible.

What I can say more objectively is that the book itself is perfectly engineered for its audience. It is short enough to finish in a sitting if the mood takes you. It does not ask you to work very hard on the prose, and it gets to the action quickly and stays there. Hood is the kind of heroic sergeant figure that any child in 1986 would have recognised from the toys, the cartoons and the films of the period, and the K'Thraa, with their force shields and their stormtrooper aesthetic, sit in the same broad register; you can see the lineage running back through Star Wars and Flash Gordon and forward through any number of similar invasion fantasies aimed at the same audience. There is also a robot, AMOS, who has just enough personality of his own to lift the book a notch above its peers. None of this is high literature. It does not pretend to be, and that is much of the point.

As an adult, rereading it (or thinking about it with adult eyes), you notice the things you would expect to notice; the cardboard characters, the briskly resolved plot, the action-hero machismo, the way the K'Thraa get to be sinister without ever having to be coherent as a culture. One Goodreads reviewer summed the series up as recalling "the action machismo of Flash Gordon with touches of Robin Hood", which is fair enough and gets at most of the criticisms in a single line. But criticisms of a book aimed at a young teen reader for not being Lord of the Flies are not really criticisms; they are category errors. Earth Invaded is doing exactly what it set out to do, with exactly the audience it set out to do it with, and it does it well.

For most readers picking it up now, the trilogy is a curiosity, a small example of mid-1980s British YA science fiction in the era of Armada paperbacks. For readers of the right age at the right time, it is rather more than that. I would gently recommend it to any parent with a child of about nine to twelve who has shown the first flickers of an interest in science fiction and might enjoy something light, fast, and entirely uninterested in being literary. It will not, I think, be the book that turns them into a lifelong reader. But it might be the one they remember reading, in a particular place, at a particular time, and that is no small thing for a book to do.