> A year before Robin Cook’s Invasion (1997)—in which an alien force activated a latent biological virus in humans—and almost a decade before Liu Cixin’s The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (2008–10)—in which humanity’s scientific progress was curtailed by an alien supercomputer’s “sophon-lock”—Jayant Vishnu Narlikar’s Virus (1996) painted a similar scenario. In his novel, a cybervirus broadcast by an advanced, extraterrestrial species invaded Earth and froze its digital infrastructure: a prelude to an alien invasion. The novel, first published in Marathi, recounts how vast radio arrays on Earth intercept a seemingly innocuous message from an unknown planet orbiting Barnard’s Star. The radio signal, sent six years ago, coalesces into a cybervirus that has the potential to cause a complete digital meltdown and lead humanity into an age of chaos—an alien First Strike to prevent humanity from evolving further.