Earth Invasion

Earth Invasion is a science fiction novel by the online author Obsidian Sacred Stone, regarded as a sequel to his earlier work The Distance of the Sun set four hundred years later. The complete work is about 1.54 million characters; it began serialization on Chuangshi Chinese Network in 2014 and is complete. The novel borrows the civilization-scale framework proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson: what happens when an interstellar society on the verge of a Type II civilization and a planet still in the age of the steam revolution are connected by the universe, as if as a joke, through a natural wormhole? The story unfolds from the twenty-fifth century. Zhang Mai, a third-year student at the North China University of Technology's Space Branch, completes a zero-gravity internship in a windmill-shaped giant space satellite city and prepares to return home; he is skilled at piloting civilian engineering machinery, what the book calls "radishes" (humanoid work machines). An accident draws him into an armed attack and carries him to Assyria, an Earth-like planet on the other side of the wormhole. There a civilization similar to but not of the same race as Earth humans is in turmoil, amid dynastic change and clashing colonial powers. Zhang Mai is thus drawn into the maelstrom of interstellar colonial expansion: the Earth side is not simply the invaded victim; humanity itself is an "invader" arriving with technology and capital; and behind the various factions, old dynastic clans, and alien civilizational enigmas lies an even higher-level scheme. The novel's core theme is the developmental choices of a post-human civilization, discussing how to weigh expansion, colonization, and morality under an overwhelming civilizational gap; readers have called it a "niche but acclaimed" work in hardcore interstellar war fiction.