Invasion of Canada

Entry updated 8 September 2025. Tagged: Theme.

Homo sapiens first arrived in what became the Americas 25,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers first crossed the land bridge between Asia and Alaska. From that moment North and South America, galore with vying civilizations, abuzz with Invasions and Wars, have been increasingly defined by human concerns. Before the invention of writing much of this intercourse passed without being laid down as scripture, which is no reason to think a Pastoral quietude ever reigned, or that civilizations did not flourish before written-down myths of origin. It was a full world, though ever since the first state-sanctioned irruptions of Europeans in 1492, genocidal invasions of the previously-owned territories of the Americas North and South have been proudly sanctioned by iterations of what came to be known as the doctrine of Terra nullius, which is to say "land belonging to no one", a late nineteenth-century tag applied in hindsight to justify the habit of defining territories not yet conquered by Europeans as empty (see Imperialism). The invasions clocked in this entry are haunted by this history and that tag, though the invasions described here are of course imagined. Historical attempts to invade Canada, all mounted by the United States of America against its neighbour, have all failed.

"Canada" – an early nickname for what then was a loose congeries of territories – did not properly exist before 1775. In that year a failed excursion against Quebec City was funded by a nation which did not until 1776 begin to call itself the "United States of America": not so much the name of a country as a proclamation of Manifest Destiny avant la lettre. The War of 1812, also waged in large part to add Canadian territory to the States, also ended without any American gains. A history of the conflict from a Canadian perspective is provided in The Invasion of Canada 1812-1813 (1980) by Pierre Berton (1920-2004). It was the first actual war America lost, though it would not be the last, which did not deter John Quincy Adams (1767-1829) from claiming America's "proper domain to be the continent of North America", as quoted by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr in "The American Empire?: Not So Fast" (Spring 2005 World Policy Journal), a piece which also invokes similarly imperial assertions by representative nineteenth century figures, including Adams's grandson Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Sumner, Walt Whitman. A discursive portion of Louis Donatti's The Orphan of Novogorod (1841), suggesting that the British military adopt something like guerrilla warfare in the future defense of Canada, expectedly catches an air of apprehension; a bi-centenary Canadian perspective on the experience of fighting off invaders is given in the nonfantastic A Call to Battle: War of 1812 (2012) by Gillian Chan (1954-    ). If Canadians were to retain their independence, Canada might remain "unstoried, artless, unenhanced", as Robert Frost (1874-1963) described the not-yet-annexed portions of North America (which is to say Terra nullius) in "The Gift Outright" (Spring 1942 Virginia Quarterly Review).

The next crisis, a threatened invasion of British Columbia in 1844 under the slogan "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!", ended in a negotiated stalemate, with the 49th parallel, as had been initially agreed in the Treaty of 1818, becoming the boundary; many Americans resented this as a defeat, and treated their resentment as inherent grounds for voiding the treaty. It was at this point that the slogan "Manifest Destiny" was coined. In an influential essay, "Annexation" (27 December 1845 New York Morning News), John L O'Sullivan (1813-1895) provides the clearest rendering of a principle which has explicitly or implicitly underwritten American/Canadian disputes in fact or fiction for almost two centuries, and which helps to understand the ideological triumphalism of much American Space Opera, before it began to darken around 1990 (see also Westerns). As O'Sullivan put it in 1845, the American claim to the whole of "Oregon", a term which also described much of British Columbia, was a just assertion of

Manifest Destiny is a doctrine never officially promulgated, or denied; but the supineness of Canada when invaded in sf tales written by Americans may reflect a tacit assumption that any nation affected should be expected to treat it as natural law; certainly the unification of the "Northern and Southern Kanadaw continents", as referenced in Edgar Allan Poe's Ruins and Futurity tale "Mellonta Tauta" (February 1849 Godey's Lady's Book), is taken for granted, with the "Amriccans" remaining dominant.

This supineness may also seem more plausible when it is kept in mind that the first Near Future Invasion-of-Canada novels – unlike the roughly contemporary Battle of Dorking tales designed to impart dreadful warnings about the threat of Future Wars – are told from the perspective of the invaders; and that like most narratives told from the winner's viewpoint, they cancel the loser. They include Samuel Rockwell Reed's The War of 1886, between the United States and Great Britain (1882); Samuel Barton's The Battle of the Swash and the Capture of Canada (1888), to which W C H Lawrence's The Story of '92: A Grandfather's Tale, Told in 1932 (1889) may be a deliberate riposte (it is the first invasion tale to be written by a Canadian, and exceptional in that the invasion fails); Frank R Stockton's The Great War Syndicate (1889); Alvarado M Fuller's A.D. 2000 (1890); Captain Anson's The Great Anglo-American War of 1900 (1896 chap); Charles Felton Pidgin's The Climax: Or, What Might Have Been: A Romance of the Great Republic (1902); Jack London's The Iron Heel (1908), where a not-quite-invaded sidebar Canada has become an oligarchical client state; Patrick Quinn Tangent's The New Columbia; Or, the Reunited States (1909). These nineteenth-century examples tend (plausibly) to anticipate British ineptitude or quiescence in any dealings with the United States on behalf of its then colony, leaving it (to repeat the term) supine. Though the huge treasure house of Dime-Novel SF tales has not yet been plumbed, it may be a just surmise that Canada is invaded to similar effect in yarns published in this format. Individual Canadians themselves, in Jules Verne's anti-American Satire The Self-Propelled Island (1895), are seen but not heard; in a tale like Allan McIvor's The Overlord: The Story of the Peons of Canada (1904), they are mentioned from a contemptuous distance.

This first surge of Invasion-of-Canada tales paces an increasing American dominance over North and South America during the late nineteenth-century, peaking with the Spanish-American War of 1898; that victory, which enabled the ingestion of Cuba, Puerto Rico and The Philippines, may have in real life left the conqueror temporarily replete. Certainly the flow of invasion tales dried up, perhaps because – in the fading of an immediate threat – the format lacked much appeal. Their paucity through much of the twentieth century also reflects the energizing effect on the Western imagination of the two World Wars that have so deeply and continuously shadowed the tales we tell to cope with increasingly graphic expectations of planetary disaster. Within the limited remit of this encyclopedia, World War One is understood through its shaping of the Scientific Romance take on the future, just as World War Two is seen as giving American authors of Genre SF a theatre to create the future from. The world was becoming a tale to tell. As far as Canada was concerned during these years, with only a few Ruritanian narcissisms to distinguish its sidekick episteme from the mesmeric attraction of America across the borderline, there seemed to be little of interest for authors of Fantastika; the few Canadians who wrote sf tended to find nothing to say about themselves. A novel like George Borodin's Spurious Sun (1948) is an exception; but Borodin wrote from the UK.

As the century advanced, however, it became increasingly clear that Canada, as a vast repository of natural resources exported costlessly to America for profit along an undefendable 5,000-mile-long frontier, might become willy-nilly a planetary player. And soon enough, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, as the effects of Climate Change began to intensify, and melting ice unveiled a Northwest Passage of great strategic and commercial importance, Canada's soft-belly northlands have threatened to become a bone of Realpolitik competition for Lebensraum amongst the mighty powers of the Earth, just as the vast plains of Poland had been for centuries. It should perhaps have been self-evident for many decades that America and Russia and China might plausibly attempt to partition Canada into subject provinces, and quarrel over the division of spoils (see Imperialism); but Arthur Hailey's In High Places (1962) seems, extraordinarily, to be the first Canadian sf novel which, by concerning itself with a possible American invasion, recognizes that Canada might become such a prize. It had relatively little impact.

The second wave of Invasion-of-Canada novels, written by and peopled with Canadians, was not genuinely instigated until a few years later, with Bruce Powe's The Killing Ground (1968) and Richard H Rohmer's Ultimatum (1973) and Exxoneration (1974), which (certainly in retrospect) have been seen as wake-up calls. Though melodramatic plots foregrounding Politics, which can divert attention from real issues, may be common in these tales, a sense of Canada's economic fragility – and of its almost certain inability to stave off a military intervention along a 5,000-mile frontier – does increasingly haunt the field. Further examples, not all by Canadians, include Fritz Leiber's A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969), Ian Adams's The Trudeau Papers (1971), R J Chick Childerhose's The Man Who Wanted to Save Canada: A Prophetic Novel (1975), Patrick MacFadden's Your Place or Mine?: An Entertainment (1978) with Robert Chodos and Rae Murphy, Gordon Pape and Tony Aspler's Chain Reaction (1978), Charles McCarry's The Better Angels (1979), William Overgard's The Divide (1980), David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), Mark Tushingham's Vision of Hell sequence beginning with Hotter Than Hell (2005), Harold R Johnson's The Cast Stone (2011), Tom Omstead's The Red Wing Sings (2011), USNA:The United States of North America (2012) (a Graphic Novel by various hands), Faultline 49 (2012) by Joseph MacKinnon writing as David Danson, Robert J Sawyer's Quantum Night (2016), Chris Beckett's America City (2017). Of Harry Turtledove's many Alternate History series, the Southern Vision multi-volume sequence, primarily in the Southern Vision: The Great War sub-series beginning with The Great War: American Front (1998), treats an invasion of Canada at considerable length, though sidebar to the main flow of his work. And, set two centuries hence, Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock; A Story of 22nd Century America (2009) treats the Invasion of Canada as a fait accompli.

Throughout these tales of dreadful warning, and in others not here listed, a Canadian military victory is seen as unlikely, though resistance may not be useless (see Military SF; Survivalist Fiction). So it may be of some aesthetic comfort (if only that) to contemplate some new incarnation of the Canadian Hero, as in Brian K Vaughan's We Stand on Guard (graph 2016), setting guerrilla ambushes against all invaders: poster-friendly, chisel-chinned, hope dawning. [JC]

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