I have not read The Invasion, but what you wrote reminded me of this article.
http://www.ornl.gov/TechResources/Human_Genome/archive/methanoc.htmlFrom the Discovery web site from 1998.
Life at the Edge
If you woke up one morning to hear the perky host of The Today Show telling you that all our industries, appliances and computers were being attacked by metal-eating aliens, and that these creatures couldn't be killed by doses of radiation millions of times greater than would kill a human, you'd be pretty scared, right? Yet such creatures are already quite common right here on Earth and provide models for possible life forms on other worlds. These creatures are members of the Archaea: primitive, bacteria-like organisms.
In 1996, J. Craig Venter's team at the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md., learned more about the microbe that can live at freezing temperatures, eat metal and tolerate huge doses of radiation with apparent gusto. After sequencing its complete genetic structure, which includes 1,738 genes, they discovered that two-thirds of its genes didn't look like anything scientists had ever seen before. Some of the genes are similar to those of humans, while others resemble genes of bacteria.
A member of the plentiful but perplexing class of one-celled organisms called Archaea, the microbe's genes prove the creature belongs to a third branch of life, totally different from Earth's two other known branches -- bacteria and blue-green algae on one branch, and all the members of the plant and animal kingdoms on the other.
The microbe called Methanococcus jannaschii normally lives in volcanic vents 2 miles under the Pacific, where water pressure is hundreds of times greater than at sea level. It thrives in total darkness at the lethal temperature of 185 degrees, and, like many bacteria, oxygen kills it instantly. It subsists entirely on carbon dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen.
The gene sequence of one of these creatures suggests that it shares a common evolutionary ancestor with bacteria. Because the earliest indications of life on Earth have been 3.6-billion-year-old fossils of bacteria from Western Australia and 3.85-billion-year-old sediments from eastern Greenland, the unknown ancestors of the Archaea must have been alive even earlier -- perhaps as far back as 4 billion years ago, when Earth and the solar system's planets were very young. Some scientists suggest that hypothetical fossils found on Mars could be one-celled Archaea.